Southern Gothic Satan

He holds your fate in the palm of his hand...

Beware of a tall dark stranger
If he comes ridin' into your town
A tall dark stranger is danger (danger)
So don't let no stranger hang around

— Buck Owens, "Tall Dark Stranger"

Who's that tall dark stranger coming to town? It's Satan! Well, not the traditional Christian Satan, but an American Gothic concept that's half the European character of Mythology and Religion, who shows up in town to gamble for your soul over a game of tallywhackers, and half the First Nations concept of the Wendigo, a monster created or summoned by a community's greed, cruelty, or other evil. While the archetype originally took shape in the Deep South, this sinister stranger out to bring out the worst in people can appear anywhere.

When a town is pretty on the surface but hides bad deeds underneath, in comes this mysterious character to reveal their sins and punish those who have committed them. He (or she) generally does not directly punish, though. Instead, they work on the townsfolk's worst impulses, until they reveal their corrupt nature and destroy themselves.

Sub-Trope of Satanic Archetype. Contrast with the The Corrupter, who changes someone from innocent to evil, while this character stirs up the existing-but-concealed evil in people, then often walks away once everything is wrecked and on fire. Often a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane character who is implied to be Satan, or sometimes a Came Back Wrong version of someone the town wronged in the past. Examples will often have Names to Run Away from Really Fast — or some variation of "Louis Cypher".

Often a Badass in a Nice Suit, a Southern Gentleman, and/or and a Man of Wealth and Taste. May sometimes be Tall, Dark, and Handsome, but often has a Red Right Hand or some other creepy attribute. May present himself as The Drifter or the proprietor of The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday. A common element of Southern Gothic fiction, hence the name.

Warning: Being as the identity or presence of this character can sometimes act as The Reveal, beware of unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned.

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Examples

Anime And Manga

• The Laughing Salesman: Mogurou Fukuzou is a rare anime version of this trope. He's a squat, stout man wearing a business suit and an unchanging Cheshire Cat Grin that offers to "fill the empty soul" of his customers by offering products or services tailor-made for their problems. All for free... but for a price. If - or rather, when - his customers break the very specific rule he asks them to follow, they are invariably cursed to suffer some twisted, ironic punishment. One that ends in divorce, injury, misery, insanity or outright death. He has almost unlimited resources at his disposal, an omnipotent knowledge of his clients' lives and whereabouts, and a twisted, almost sadistic sense of humor. While his true nature and origins are never explained, what is certain is that he is a Humanoid Abomination of some kind.
• ×××HOLiC: Yuuko the witch is a more benign version of this trope. Having a mysterious little shop that's implicitly Invisible to Normals (customers notwithstanding), she offers tempting bargains to her customers at fair - if high - prices. Many of these end up going south for said customers, leading to either a Karmic Death or an Ironic Hell (or at least a Cool and Unusual Punishment). Unlike many other examples on this page, however, Yuuko isn't malevolent - while a bit of a troll to her friends, she usually explains both the properties of the objects she sells and the price to be paid; the problems typically come from the customer's either ignoring her warnings due to Hubris or Suicidal Overconfidence or because of some unexpected complication no one predicted. It also happens - rarely - that neither the price nor the item end up harming the customer, leaving them satisfied.

Comic Books

• Diablo (Chile) has the "Lord of Entropia", a Man of Wealth and Taste who's dressed as a man in black and he was the one who made An Offer You Can't Refuse to Alex and so becoming in the Anti-Hero Diablo. Also counts for Vardan, The Dragon of Lord of Entropia, who dresses as him but he's a Long-Haired Pretty Boy instead.
• The Zombie Priest from The Goon originally is this archetype, rolling into town from parts unknown, trying to destroy it with voodoo and Satanic magic, he doesn't even have a name, flashbacks show he's done this to many towns in the past. But eventually enough time passes thanks to his stalemate with the Goon that the Zombie Priest's character gets some depth, and he turns into more of a Diabolical Mastermind.
• The Crooked Man, from the Hellboy story of the same name, doesn't have a Red Right Hand so much as a Red Right Everything, but he checks a lot of the boxes of this archetype. (He's also explicitly described as a mere servant of the big guy himself, but by the time Hellboy gets involved, it's not clear how much of him is human anymore, and how much is an extension of his master.)

Film — Live-Action

• The trope-naming Louis Cypher from Angel Heart is well-dressed, urbane, polite, and considers self-damning souls to be the most fun to collect.
• Inverted in Chocolat. Vianne uses her Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane chocolate powers to draw out the good in the townsfolk — their passions, love for life and each other, et cetera.
• Dogville: A twist on the concept in that Grace is far more Jesus than Satan, but her vulnerability still reveals the worst of the townfolk's natures, and by the end of it she decides that yes, everything in the town (except the dog) needs to be dead and/or on fire.
• The Dressmaker: Tilly comes back to the town that tormented her as a child and unjustly blamed her for murder. With her inhuman sewing abilities and bag containing infinite material and shoes, she dresses up the town in couture, and by the end of it multiple people are dead, arrested, in asylums, or otherwise ruined, the townsfolk are humiliated in the local play competition, and Tilly has burned the town down.
• High Plains Drifter: The Stranger is the maybe-brother-maybe-ghost of the Marshal who the town whipped to death in order to keep their secret gold. He's back to take advantage of the townsfolk's cowardice and greed by painting the town red, renaming the town Hell, and inflaming their quarrel with the outlaws until everyone's dead and everything's on fire.
• Linguere Ramatou from Hyenas is an old woman with a gold artificial leg and hand who returns to her impoverished home village of Colobane, which banished her at 17 for bearing a child out of wedlock. Now "as rich as the World Bank", Linguere offers to bestow a fortune upon Colobane in exchange for the murder of the village shopkeeper, the man who impregnated and abandoned her many years ago. Zig-zagged in that only one person dies, and the town gets improved rather than burned down, but even though the town is fancier with all the money Linguere gave them, the townspeople's enjoyment is tainted with the knowledge of what they did to gain the money. The film is an African Setting Update of the play The Visit, described in the theatre section.
• The Intruder: Adam Cramer is a mundane example — a charming, zealously patriotic cross-burner who comes to the fictional Southern town of Caxton intending to help its residents fight school desegregation, amplifying the townsfolk's already-present racism to a peak of violent white supremacism.
• The spooky yet charismatic Sinister Minister-cum-Serial Killer Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter has strong shades of this trope. Everything from his LOVE and HATE Knuckle Tattoos to his seemingly constant wakefulness ("Don't he never sleep?" asks one of the children who he's hunting) gives him a menacing quality that feels more supernatural than human, even as he successfully charms all but the most perceptive characters into doing his bidding.

Literature

• Blood Meridian: Judge Holden. Full stop. A corpulent, hairless giant of a man without any morals, any positive traits or even a hint as to his origins. He's an educated, omnipresent and possibly omnipotent figure that preaches the futility of life, morality and purpose while committing the most disgusting acts of sex and violence imaginable - either to prove a point or just because he can. It's never made clear if Judge Holden is Death, Satan or some other type of Humanoid Abomination. What is certain is that he is pure goddamn evil.
• In the Cthulhu Mythos, as the messenger of the Outer Gods, Nyarlathotep is unusual for commonly taking human form, typically handsome and well-dressed, often insinuating himself into communities to foster cults who practice profane rites and human sacrifice, and eventually succumb to madness. In the Lovecraft story that bears his name, he travels across the world as a kind of showman, showing off wonders of science far beyond modern humanity — and secrets that fill entire cities with screaming nightmares each night. When the skeptical narrator and his friends decide to heckle the man, he drives them out... then somehow sends them hurtling across space, screaming in terror at visions of other worlds and the colossal true forms of the other gods. The story then ends: in true Cosmic Horror Story fashion, Nyarlathotep was no fraud, the Outer Gods are real, and skepticism is no protection against them.
• In "Enter the Fanatic, Stage Center" by Harlan Ellison, a man with a beard comes to Prince, a town where nobody wears a beard. The stranger is an artist, and opens an art gallery where he shows his paintings in the shop window. These paintings reveal the dark secrets of the members of the community—this guy is an adulterer, that guy is biracial ("half-Negro,") these women are lesbians, the town beggar is secretly rich, that guy is impotent and leaves his wife unsatisfied, etc. These revelations lead to people losing their jobs, marriages collapsing, and violence, wrecking the previously orderly community. When somebody confronts the painter, the town wrecker says that he is the son of a German couple murdered by a mob during the war in a fit of anti-German hysteria. But then admits that is a lie. It is hinted that this bearded troublemaker is the Devil or a servant of Satan, but he also says "I am quite as human as you." The painter then murders his interlocutor, and then he leaves town, apparently to go destabilize some other town.
• Fludd: On a dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd arrives in a dismal northern English village wrapped in a black cloak and carrying a black bag. “I’ve come to transform you,” he says. “Transformation is my business." Secrets are revealed, comeuppance is served, and Fludd's magic bottle of whiskey stays full, no matter how much he pours from it.
• Subverted, parodied, zigzagged, and even played for heroics in Horns: Ig Perrish is a once-promising young man accused of the brutal rape/murder of his girlfriend, and is innocent but has no way to prove it. One morning he wakes up to find a pair of horns growing from his forehead and everyone he meets confesses their darkest sins and impulses to him. Ig returns to his hometown and uses his power to hunt the real killer, stirring up a vipers' nest of sin, which ironically improves some peoples' lives, and also evolves slowly into the red-skinned, bearded tempter we all know and love. In the end he's quite happy to ascend to the throne of Hell itself, with his dead girlfriend at his side and everything on fire.
• Jack Reacher: In many of the novels, there is a Town with a Dark Secret and Jack, with his almost supernatural size, strength, fighting skills, and detective ability just happens to wander through and, upon receiving some sort of threat or attack by a town member, decides to stick around to find out just what's going on and bring everyone to justice.
• Mark Twain dabbled with this more than once: in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, a town famous for being "incorruptible" offends a passing stranger, and he gets revenge by leaving a huge reward for anyone who can claim it, which leads the entire town to begin lying and cheating in order to win the prize. A similar premise appears in The Mysterious Stranger, though the story is set in Renaissance-age Austria and plays more on Religious Horror.
• The Master and Margarita: Professor Woland is a richly-dressed Devil in Disguise who comes to Moscow to host the Satan's Grand Ball, and punishes sinners he happens to come across while at it.
• Needful Things: An example where the Tall Dark Stranger explicitly is the Devil or at least a demon. Leland Gaunt shows up in a shop that wasn't there before, and gives the townsfolk of Castle Rock special little things in exchange for pranks. The little pranks eventually set the townsfolk against each other till everything's dead and on fire.
• In Edgar Allan Poe's satirical short story "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" an elderly gentleman in a well-tailored suit takes the narrator's friend up on the titular rhetorical wager.
• Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes: Mr. Dark, the tattooed ringmaster, is one of the modern-day Trope Codifiers, and an acknowledged inspiration for Stephen King's Leland Gaunt. Mr. Dark rolls into town with his circus to offer people their heart's desire, but just ask the other circus folk how that turned out.
  Mr. Dark: Yes. We are the hungry ones. Your torments call us like dogs in the night. And we do feed, and feed well.
  Mr. Halloway: To stuff yourselves on other people's nightmares.
  Mr. Dark: And butter our plain bread with delicious pain. So, you do understand a little.
• In The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, James Harris is a corrupting presence in the Old Village, but all he does he does by taking advantage of longstanding issues there, particularly the authorities ignoring the black community, the husbands' misogyny and greed, and the community's obsession with keeping up appearances. As a vampire, he mostly preys upon the poor black kids in the Six Mile neighborhood because he knows nobody will investigate deaths in the ghetto, only going after Patricia's kids when she makes it personal for him, while his crimes in the Old Village amount to getting the community in on a development scheme that he intends to walk away from after stealing all their money. He also shares his name with a Recurring Character from much of Shirley Jackson's horror fiction, who goes back all the way to "Ballad of the Deamon Lover".
• Recurring Stephen King villain Randall Flagg — a quasi-immortal dimension-traveling, time-shifting mystery man also known as the Walkin' Dude, the Man in Black, the Ageless Stranger, Walter o'Dim, Marten Broadcloak, and many more, possibly including Needful Things' Leland Gaunt. Flagg first appeared in The Stand as a post-apocalyptic Evil Overlord based in Las Vegas, was pursued by Roland as the the Man in Black in The Gunslinger, and returned to his old name of Flagg in The Eyes of The Dragon.
• The Traveller in Black: Dressed in black, with many names but only one nature, the titular character travels from town to town, causing people's wishes to come true in ironically appropriate ways, leading to the downfall of the selfish and the proud.
• Yann Domino in Pierre Jakez-Hélias' tale Yann Domino and the Skull would fit up to a point - he uses the locals' fondness for cards to sow discord and ruin in the town. Subverted in that he is a human who apparently sold his soul. ( Yann Domino is the name he gives to himself in mockery of the clergy's efforts to replace cards with dominoes "with which it was difficult to lose your earthly possessions first and your soul afterwards"; his real name is not known )

Live-Action TV

• Lorne from Fargo, season 1. He comes to the outwardly pretty town of Bemidji, Minnesota and its Minnesota Nice inhabitants, in order to up the murder count and encourage everyone's bad impulses. At one point, he even quips, during a Casual Danger Dialogue with a former cop-turned-diner-owner, that "I haven't had a pie this good since the garden of Eden." However, he's still a mortal man with a Devil Complex, and is eventually killed by one of his victims, in a manner drawing parallels to the animals to which he compares humanity.
• Nanno from Girl from Nowhere is a mysterious, clever girl who transfers to different schools, exposing the lies and misdeeds of the students and faculty at every turn. She doesn't seem to age and is generally implied to be something inhuman.
• The Twilight Zone:
  • "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" from The Twilight Zone (1959) is a sci-fi version. The Reveal shows that all the strange occurrences on the show were, in fact, the work of aliens like the townsfolk feared... but none of the townsfolk were themselves aliens. Instead, the real aliens were sitting outside of town watching from afar, opting to destroy humanity by turning its own paranoia against it and making them all kill each other for them.
  • The episode was remade for The Twilight Zone (2002), with the fear of aliens replaced by fear of terrorism, and the experiment now carried out by the Army. It's less of an example here, though, as the Army's goal isn't to get the town to destroy itself, but to see how it would react to a terrorist attack, and they are expressly disappointed in the results in a way that the aliens from the original weren't.

Music

• The song "Red Right Hand" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds from their album Let Love In could be said to be one of these. This character arrives in a storm and gives people their hearts' desires, but only as the prelude to some unspecified sinister plot. Slightly averted in that whatever misfortune comes to the people that deal with him, it's probably less a karmic punishment for their own misdeeds, and more just whatever it is that The Man wants to make happen.
  On a gathering storm comes
  A tall handsome man
  In a dusty black coat with
  A red right hand
  
  You're one microscopic cog
  In his catastrophic plan
  Designed and directed
  By his red right hand
• The "Man in the Long Black Coat" from the Bob Dylan song definitely has shades of this.
• The myth of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil to play blues calls on this image: Giving him great talent at the cost of an early death.

Theatre

• Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit has a naturalistic feminine version, in which a billionairess returns to the little town where she grew up... to offer the population a huge sum of money to kill the citizen who seduced, impregnated and dumped her when she was a teenager.

Video Games

• Fallout 3 has a variation with Mr. Burke. With his genteel manners and nice suit, he looks like he's going to be this for the post-apocalyptic frontier town of Megaton, but his idea of manipulation is to ask a stranger (the Player Character) to murder the local sheriff and set off the undetonated nuke in the middle of town square. Subtle he is not.

Web Animation

• The Backwater Gospel: The undertaker (with his black shadow wings) comes to town which makes the pious townfolk believe that someone will die. So they all kill each other in an attempt to not be the one the undertaker comes for, and so they all die.

Western Animation

• Little Dogs on the Prairie: Miss Kittey, in her first appearance, manages to be this unintentionally. Her only intention is to provide a touch of sophisticated European hairstyling and make her customers happy. Yet because the series's town is a simple one without such luxury, they quickly become addicted to changing styles and one-upping each other and bringing on ironic fates via pride and envy (it's a Christian toon) that nearly destroy the town before the status quo is restored. It's implied that this has happened before to the point that towns avoid her when they see her coming, and a bewildered Kittey has no idea why.

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