SATAN WANTS YOU (Fantasia Fest 2023) – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
“I don’t know why people would believe such a stupid book”. It’s a simple line that passes with little fanfare, but for all the mic drops in Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor’s documentary Satan Wants You about the satanic panic that swept North America during the 80s and 90s, it’s the one that echoes the most profoundly after viewing. It’s a comment made by the long-suffering ex-wife of Dr Larry Pazder, co-author of the now notorious 1980 best-seller Michelle Remembers, a virtual textbook for psychologists, psychiatrists and law enforcement officials at the time in their pursuit of supposedly criminal satanic cults. Michelle Remembers was also a template for an avalanche of copycat claims of satanic ritual abuse that would follow in its wake. Today recognized as a kind of mass hysteria and moral panic powered predominantly by false memory syndrome, the book now has the dubious reputation of lying at the heart of the broadly discredited practice of recovered-memory therapy.
As the title of the book indicates, at the center of it all was Michelle Smith. The story is now the stuff of legend: after experiencing a miscarriage in the 1970s, Smith turned to her psychiatrist Pazder for support. What came out during their sessions was graphic and disturbing descriptions of lengthy childhood sexual, physical, emotional and “spiritual” abuse at the hand of a satanic cult. With their dramatic sessions all recorded on tape, Pazder had them transcribed, added his own commentary, and a culture-shifting blockbuster publishing event was born.
Containing a wealth of jaw-dropping archival material from television talk shows and news programs from the era that breathlessly reported on the “true” phenomenon of satanic ritual abuse, Satan Wants You also includes a number of fascinating interviews, the most moving of which come from people who were closely linked to Smith and Pazder themselves. It’s a tough watch in places; the extreme descriptions of abuse are at times harrowing, rendered perhaps even more disturbing by the fact that they are entirely made up, the deeply sick, dark fantasies of vulnerable people desperate for attention and validation.
The film is at its strongest, however, when it situates the historical satanic ritual abuse moral panic of the period in a longer historical context, drawing a direct line to eerily similar and equally hysterical present-day conspiracy theories like Qanon and Pizzagate. And somewhat tragically, it is this which makes Satan Wants You such a timely film today. Sadly still all too relevant, Satan Wants You is an unflinching examination of the endurance of certain fears, and the equally persistent way that those fears can be cynically mined for financial and political gain by a morally bankrupt few who should know better.
