Creating quite the stir around SxSW this year with a LOT of good reactions from people we have spoken to in lines and in seats waiting for shows to start, our Anna Hanks gives us a reaction for SATAN WANTS YOU from SxSW Film & TV this year.
ABOUT: Satan Wants You tells the untold story of how the Satanic Panic of the 1980s was ignited by Michelle Remembers, a lurid memoir by psychiatrist Larry Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith. Supported by the Catholic Church, the bestselling book relied on recovered-memory therapy to uncover Michelle’s childhood abduction by baby-stealing Satanists. Amplified by law enforcement and America’s Daytime TV boom, satanic rumors spread through panic-stricken communities across the world, leaving a wave of destruction and wrongful convictions in their wake. This film digs deep into the roots of moral panics and cult conspiracies, showing how these events still affect and distort our reality today.
ANNA’S REACTION: As someone who lived through the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s in America, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the topic. I was very, very wrong. It turns out that I was only aware of the symptoms of the “Satanic Panic” not the root cause that led to warnings about heavy metal music and the danger to your immortal soul posed by the board game DUNGEONS & DRAGONS.
This fascinating new documentary explores how the entire movement was grew out of the memoir “Michelle Remembers,” a shocking tale of formerly supressed memories of abuse, torture and animal sacrifice by a Satanic Cult, authored by Canadian psychiatrist Larry Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith.
Amazingly, this film includes some of the actual audio from the original therapy sessions, as well as interviews with multiple sources who were involved in the events of the era. You might think you already know the story of the Satanic Panic, but this documentary explores the reasons why and how the Satanic Panic became such a dominant cultural force in the 1980s.
This film and many others like it will be showing at South By Southwest taking place March 10-19. For more information point your browser to www.sxsw.com!