The first and most theologically sophisticated tradition is the fallen angel motif that stretches back into pre-Christian Jewish antecedents. Sayers isolates the "dark angelic melancholy" as the primary quality in this tradition which gives Mephistopheles in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost their nearly tragic splendor that arises from their recognizing the loss of proximity to the Creator.

The second tradition is rooted in a kind of Manichean vision of a dark force pervading the cosmos, a vision of evil in which the Devil appears more as a spirit of negative energy set counterpoised with the positive energy of God. The cosmos is dualistic in this vision, with God and the Devil balanced. Instead of being a fallen angel who simultaneously longs for the splendor of what was and who also hates the splendor of God and heaven, seeking to destroy it by corrupting human beings (the Marlovian and orthodox image), devils—or the Devil—are but instantiations of this negative energy. Devils or demons are thus interchangeable, merely variable images of one pervasive and apparently necessary part of reality, thereby rendering distinctions between Lucifer and his minions, like Mephistopheles, unnecessary. Though one can detect elements of this dualism in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim demonologies, this second tradition is more Gnostic, a bit uncomfortable with the intense monotheism of these three Western religions in their orthodox forms. Sayers claims that the more Manichean Mephistopheles of Goethe's Faust is the literary version that has most influence in the subsequent tradition in contrast to Marlowe’s more traditional depiction of evil.

The third manifestation of the Devil, according to Sayers, is the one that grew from pre-Christian folklore, that pervades much of Medieval literature, and that continually pops up in the literature of post-Christian culture. This devil is the prankster, a trickster figure who engages in nefarious horseplay and whom the audience of Medieval theater expected to see at some point for comedic effects. Sayers argues that by the end of Part II of Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles has transformed into this kind of buffoonish figure. The puppet plays that grew out of Marlowe's Faustus perpetuated this comedic aspect of the Devil through the Reformation, and it tenaciously hangs on in film today.

In American film, the Faust tradition mostly gravitates toward the third category, the Devil as buffoon, with number two—Devil as necessary cosmic force—appearing nearly as often, sometimes combining with the third category. American cinema has done poorly with the first category, in which the Faust figure is tragic and damned, and also in which the Devil is portrayed as a created being subordinate to God and whose motivation is destruction of humans simply because they belong to God.