Satan wants your children, now as ever.
The new documentary Satan Wants You demonstrates how the Satanic Panic of the 1980s was kickstarted by a single book: Michelle Remembers, published in 1980 by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder.
Smith was Pazder’s patient, and the film tells their story through archival footage, long-forgotten daytime TV appearances, and, in the filmmakers’ greatest boon, the actual audio tapes of their intense sessions together. (At the Q&A they said they received them in the mail anonymously, so I do have questions about how they authenticated the tapes; nevertheless, they make for incredible listening.) Pazder used the discredited method of recovered-memory therapy to reveal Smith’s childhood experience of Satanic ritual abuse in Victoria, British Columbia, whereby her mother gave her up to a cult of Satanists who performed numerous horrific rituals on her for fourteen months. They did over 600 hours together, getting increasingly intimate, until eventually some kind of romantic relationship formed; the book was published, an insane media frenzy surrounded them, they married, the rest is history.
Well, almost. The film is at its best not as a chronicle of the Satanic Panic generally but of the impact this particular book had, not just on society, law enforcement, culture, and faith, but on the families involved and how they were irreparably ruptured. The two directors, Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams, are themselves at odds when it comes to whether or not Smith and Pazder wholly made the whole thing up or if one or both of them truly believed, and the film reflects this ambivalence, for we will almost certainly never know for sure (Pazder died in 2004, and Smith continues to live in Victoria in apparent isolation). However, the movie is unequivocal on the point that the families were torn apart — Pazder’s first wife, Smith’s daughter, and others reflect on how their actions blew everything up on the domestic level at the same time that they blew up on a societal one.
Still, as compelling as those stories are, what lingers for me is something the film only very briefly touches on: the cyclical nature of this phenomenon. We see brief glimpses of Pizzagate and Qanon, as a few talking heads question what it is about human nature that seems to replay these psychic undercurrents in different eras. Debbie Nathan, a journalist who covered the Panic and worked diligently to debunk the liars and frauds involved, has a stirring moment that the film breezes past when she wonders what the point of their work was because it seems to have changed nothing. It is happening again. How do you fight back against something like that?
There’s something particularly interesting about how a film like this is framed, marketed, and viewed. During the screening at the Fantasia Film Festival, people laughed throughout at the absurdity of the TV appearances made by Smith and Panzer, the unbelievable things that “experts” said on respected programs, the way that everyone seemed to treat all this seemingly obvious silliness so seriously. Don’t get me wrong, I laughed, too — the film is intentionally edited to elicit that response more often than not, and much of it is genuinely hilarious, from Oprah teasing an episode on Satanism with a cartoonish Devil drawing to bizarre game show appearances by Smith and Pazder at the height of their fame. It’s all a little insane.
Nevertheless, the film chooses to barely acknowledge how this dangerous psychology has been taken up once more by millions upon millions of people, not just QAnon believers but a much wider contingent of conspiracy-minded people in our everyday lives. Sound of Freedom is one of the most successful films of the year, a film that deliberately reuses the “save the children” ethos of the Satanic Panic and applies it anew to child sex trafficking in Colombia. This is likewise tied to the adrenochrome theory, which argues that a cabal of global Satanist elites traffic children to drain their blood and harvest their adrenochrome to stay young (obviously it’s pseudoscience). This is the 2020s version of the Satanic Panic, reappropriating certain elements while injecting new life into it with strands from numerous other theories, all of which is further goaded by an age of ever-increasing inequality and, yes, information overload.
At its core, Satan Wants You is a film about the different realities that people allow themselves to believe, with varying degrees of intentionality or awareness of what’s happening to them. There is the question of people like Smith and Pazder, and whether they simply made everything up for attention to tap into a cultural moment, but there is also the much thornier question of how an entire society let this dominate their culture for an entire decade or more. Many have attempted to understand it, from the concurrent rise of neoliberalism and Reagan-era values to the ongoing debate over Vatican 2 and how the devout yearned for the older age of faith. Whatever the case, and most likely it is the confluence of all these and many other factors, in some sense people simply wanted to believe. It was easy enough to lay the blame for any and all social, economic, cultural, and political ills at the feet of the Devil.
In this way, our situation today is the same yet quite different. It almost feels like a postmodern assemblage of empty signifiers, a remix of older fears and anxieties with higher stakes and a deeper disturbance to everyday life, even if it feels much more fractured to the rest of us and not as pervasive as the Panic was. Indeed, we all know about QAnon and these conspiracy theories, but we must remember that during the Panic, media and sociality were much different, and even if you didn’t actually believe in the Devil, it certainly seemed like something was going on with the children.
So yes, Jim Caviezel and the real man he plays in Sound of Freedom, Tim Ballard, believe in the adrenochrome theory, and talk about it in interviews, and the movie is making lots of money, and it’s all a part of a sizable community of just-asking-questions propagators like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Charle Kirk. Again, though, like the Panic, there is something funny about this, but also something incredibly dark. You don’t have to be an all-out believer, accusing movie theatres of trying to silence the film, to recognize that there is something off about the hierarchy of the world and how power is wielded and hoarded. There are real reasons for us all to question “the elite” and the deep inequality that they inflict on everyone else, and a theory about Satanists is at least coherent enough to be understood, regardless of if you truly think babies are being sacrificed.
The point is that it’s an explanation, that you feel like there is a reason for why your existence is miserable, and that you finally see the truth of it, and the details are not important. Indeed, when Daily Show hosts or whoever try to get gotcha moments on people at QAnon rallies or whatever, and the interviewees don’t have direct answers about how the babies are trafficked or some other detail, you may get a moment of satisfaction, but I promise you that person doesn’t care. This is the overwhelming sense of dread that Satan Wants You, perhaps inadvertently, left me with. We may laugh at them, in 1983 and in 2023, but the story lives on and does its work, and it does so like never before with social media platforms, engagement-based algorithms, and a horrifyingly ahistorical media culture. No amount of debunking or fact-checking will do a damn thing, and no one seems to know what else to do about it. Now that’s scary.
Ephemera
Something to watch as Meta/Facebook begins to block news content on their platforms in Canada in response/protest of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which, while undoubtedly very imperfect, at least intends to get online platforms to start striking deals with news publishers considering how much money their content makes the platforms. As scholar Dwayne Winseck told The Washington Post, this “scorched earth” move is a “little warning shot” by Meta (and Google, who plans to act similarly) to the rest of the world that they will go all the way if you try to fuck with them on regulatory grounds. To wit, they are much more cooperative to governments and organizations that give them seats at the table to help design regulation, and obviously do react kindly to attempts like this to strongarm them. We’ll see how this plays out.
If you’re boring like me, Adam Tooze had a good episode of his podcast about what the hell “Bidenomics” are: post-neoliberal? Pre-neoliberal? Something else?!?!
Albert Burneko on the passing of Paul Reubens: “Pee-wee Herman is just Pee-wee Herman, the person who is like this. It feels both right and like cheating to write this, but: What was funny about Pee-wee Herman was just, uh ... that it was very funny.”
Song Recommendation: “Drugs” by Doss