I Genuinely Hated "Satanic Panic"

In the United States, it’s no picnic being a member of a minority religious community.

The US extends an enormous amount of privilege to Christians (especially White Evangelical ones). On the best of days, this ensures a level of political and legal insulation for Christians that is perpetually denied to Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, and members of the eclectic and scattered communities of witches, pagans, heathens, and other freethinkers. This, despite repeated malfeasance on the part of majority faiths and structures of hierarchy; this, despite the fact that fear of “the other” in America so often blinds communities to the wolves in their midst.

On a bad day, you crack open a rancid little movie like Satanic Panic, the 2019 horror-comedy Fangoria production written by Grady Hendrix and Ted Geoghegan (and directed by Geoghegan as well). It breaks my tiny, withered heart to confirm that, yes, I mean that Grady Hendrix, the talented horror novelist (and author of Horrorstör, a personal favorite that I reviewed at Madness Heart Press). Indeed, for all of Satanic Panic’s many faults – and we’ll get to them in a moment – the quality of the writing is not one of them. It’s a movie rife with moments that are funny and insightful, especially when skewering the foibles of the super-wealthy. In the film these range from an overabundance of superficial cheer to a hilariously dim understanding of handgun safety.

Nor, frankly, does it appear to have been shallowly researched. At one point, a character prays to “Baphomet, the three-headed God of the Templars.” Now, if this caused your ears to perk up a bit, you’ve probably spent time trolling the same dark conspiracy cesspools on the Internet that I have. It’s a very specific (and slanderous) misinterpretation of the creed of the Knights Templar that has become common currency among OMG-World-Government, New-World-Order types, alt-right freaks, and flat-earth psychopaths. It and many other signifiers of “the dark occult” in Satanic Panic are not so much fresh inventions, or lazy, often-used clichés as they are very weird, very underground, and very particular misinterpretations of same.

 
Let’s start with the film’s basic premise, shall we? A sinister cabal of Satanists have sacrificed their immortal souls to the Powers of Hell in exchange for worldly power, wealth, beauty, and success. Sound familiar? If it does, it may be because such cabals are a recurring trope in Christian mythology dating back to at least the third century AD, if not before. Horrible stories of sinister conspiracies – involving child sacrifice, child-eating, incest, and the like – were actually told about Christians before they were told by them, as is documented in Dr. Candida Moss’ excellent history The Myth of Persecution.

Helen Ukpabio, founder and head of Evangelical franchise Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries and modern-day witch hunter

Wild stories of Christians beset by a conspiracy of darkness have spread and changed. For example, right now African Pentecostalism is the white-hot molten core of such hateful and extremely dangerous nonsense. Central and South America are beset by such imported poison as well.

European paranoia crested in Southern Germany in the 17th century. The most recent upsurge in the US happened in the 1980s and 1990s in a series of moral panics and false accusations that came to be known as “the Satanic Panic.”

Despite “cult cops” harassing every teen with a copy of The Satanic Bible, despite the vanishingly-rare incidence of events like the Ricky Kasso affair, no such conspiracy of Satanists was ever uncovered. Ever. Not one shred of evidence, not one verifiable whisper of a Satanic cabal of any kind – let alone one that preys on children. Can the Catholic Church make such a claim? How about the uber-Christian organization the Boy Scouts of America?

Such toxic fantasies come from somewhere – like the worlds of film and TV, for example. It would be one thing if Satanic Panic’s title were a reference to a quaint and bygone moral panic, one in which America had learned its lesson about religious bigotry and the terrible cost of belief in supernatural conspiracies. However, we are a nation currently (in 2021!) being torn apart by grotesque conspiracy theories in which Satanic cabals drink the blood of children and commune with the Devil.

These freaks aren’t just gibbering at one another on message boards anymore; they are shooting up pizza parlors, committing kidnappings, and running for Congress. They are QAnon – and they are growing. Bullshit Satanic-conspiracy movies like Satanic Panic are more grist for the mill for people who have already demonstrated an extremely dangerous propensity to mix up fantasy and reality.

Let me put my cards on the table, if they weren’t there already: I am a Satanist. Not the campy, red-robe-wearing, Devil-worshipping kind (those folks, while fun, are pretty thin on the ground). No, I’m a real Satanist, and we are a real religion. We have – believe it or not, respect them or not – sincerely held religious beliefs, easily found online. None of them involve human or animal sacrifice. The “other” Satanic church, the Church of Satan, is similarly real, and similarly has an easily-Googled set of beliefs. None of those beliefs or practices include human or animal sacrifice either, strangely enough. Now, I am not naïve enough to think that the very words “Satan” and “Satanist” are not inevitably going to summon sinister connotations. As is well-described in books like Speak of the Devil and The Invention of Satanism, the development of the religion of Satanism has always involved a playful give-and-take with pop culture mainstays like horror movies and heavy metal.

To some extent, the Devil should make appearances in horror movies. However, as I pointed out in ‘Lip Gloss and the Inverted Cross,’ my review of the first season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, not all portrayals of Satanism are created equal. In the case of Sabrina, the show went out of its way to misrepresent and antagonize the Satanic Temple (my own religion). In the case of Satanic Panic, it’s even worse. The film seems designed to play on the same horseshit conspiracy theory “Satanism” that currently fuels the weird, incandescent gutter-flame of the QAnon cult. In fact, this may be one of the most Q-compatible films that I’ve ever seen. This is particularly galling given that by his own account Hendrix is aware of – and, to his credit, quite disparaging of – these theories and their increasing permeation of our political reality.

I expected better from Grady Hendrix. What I got amounted to a slanderous 80-minute caricature. No minority religion enjoys being repeatedly bashed in the face with stereotypes that have already led to violence. Satanic Panic was a film that saw me (or, rather, a cartoonish version of me), and hated me. I genuinely hated it back.