Writers and Directors: Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams
For a while, in the 1980s and early 90s, we believed that Satanic Ritual Abuse was endemic across the Western world. Stories circulated that babies would be sacrificed and then turned into candles. When the Devil appeared, he could only talk in rhyme while the Virgin Mary spoke only in French. It sounds so preposterous now that we can only laugh at our gullibility in believing this early version of ‘fake news’ pedalled by TV talk shows.
However, while this well-made documentary demonstrates how people were taken in by the best-selling book Michelle Remembers published in 1980, it also takes care to recognise the real victims of the conspiracy theory; not those who were abused by these imaginary cults, but those people who were prosecuted for supposedly carrying out the abuse in schools and nurseries. In America, one teacher went to prison for four years before she was released on appeal.
One of the catalysts for the Satanic Panic, as it was labelled, was Michelle Remembers, a memoir written by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. In sessions that involved hypnosis, Smith recalled that at the age of five, she was taken by her mother to a Satanic cult where she witnessed unspeakable horrors. She saw babies killed and animals slaughtered. She was held in a cage and spoke to the Devil. She would have died if it weren’t for the intercession of the Mother of God who called herself Ma Mère.
The book was a hit and Smith and Pazder embarked on a book tour across Canada and North America where the chat shows loved them and their sordid tales. More ‘victims’ came forward and police attended seminars on how to spot members of Satanic cults. The paranoia even reached Britain, most famously in Cleveland where 121 children were removed from their parents.
The fact that Smith and Pazder appeared on so many TV shows means that there is plenty of archive footage for us to watch. Smith seems credible, and perhaps she believes the abuse happened even if it didn’t but Pazder’s quiet measured manner hides something more sinister underneath. He died in 2004 and while Smith is still alive, she declined to take part in the documentary. But filmmakers Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams still have some useful talking heads in the cases of Smith’s sister Charyl and Pazder’s ex-wife and daughter. To hear from people so close to the phenomenon shows how easy it is for events to spiral out of control.
Of course, this panic is still with us today. The right-winged movement and conspiracy theory QAnon recently suggested that thousands of children are abused by a network of politicians every year. Bizarrely, the story once claimed that these children were trafficked from pizza restaurants, a detail that led to the media dubbing the incident as Pizzagate. While Satan Wants You suggests that Michelle Remembers was at the forefront of such fears, the documentary never discusses why people were, and are, so eager to believe these lurid tales.
Literary critic Elaine Showalter connects false memory syndrome to a form of hysteria as laid out in Hystories, her controversial book about modern-day hysterias published in 1997. The belief that one has been abused by a Satanic cult could be a symptom of a lack of agency, a probable cause of the hysteria epidemic during the fin de siècle. One chat show host in the documentary asks why it’s mainly women in their 30s who are claiming that they’ve been abused by Satanic cults. But again, this idea isn’t chased any further.
Instead, the entertaining film sticks mainly to history, but what a crazy history it is. This film isn’t just for Halloween but a warning to not believe everything we read.
Satan Wants You is screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2023.
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Satanic Panic
