The satanic panic that never goes away

A LOOK BACK

New movies and TV shows are revisiting a “weird corner” of the ‘80s, and offering lessons for today. RICARDO TOMÁS — THE NEW YORK TIMES

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By Alexis Soloski

The New York Times

Five years ago, television writer Matthew Scott Kane sold “Hysteria!” a scripted drama that takes place in the late 1980s. The series was inspired in part by the tumult of misinformation he found online and in the media of the late 2010s. Shows like these take time to make, and Kane worried the idea would pass its best-by date.

“I kept thinking, man, I don’t know if this is going to feel relevant,” he said in a recent interview.

“Hysteria!” which premiered Oct. 18 on Peacock, is set in a small Michigan town in the grip of the so-called satanic panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, an episode of mass hysteria which imagined that a cross-country network of satanic cults was engaged in ritual abuse, animal sacrifice and infanticide.

In the pilot, a high school football star is discovered dead. Suspicion turns to several of his classmates, members of a heavy metal band that exploits satanic imagery.

The aesthetics of “Hysteria!” — the wallpaper, the jeans, the popular music — are distinctly ‘80s. But the impulse to displace social anxieties onto perceived groups of outsiders is as American as apple pie. And in a culture of heightened political rhetoric and pervasive misinformation, as apparent now as it was five years ago, the distance between the satanic panic and current conspiracy theories — QAnon, say, or the supposed grooming of children by queer people — is a short one, barely the length of a suburban lawn.

Recent works of fiction — “Hysteria!”; the novel “Rainbow Black”; the fourth season of “Stranger Things”; the film “Late Night With the Devil” — all treat the satanic panic as a discrete historical event. But they also suggest how the panic’s concerns resonate in the present. As it turns out, Americans are still panicking. We may always be panicking.

“Even if the part that’s visible goes away, those ideas are still out there and the believers are still there,” said Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science at the University of Miami and an expert on conspiracy theories.

The satanic panic of the 1980s has its specific roots in the rise of the Christian right as a powerful political coalition in the 1970s, a backlash to the progressive movements of the 1960s and 1970s that afforded greater rights and freedoms to women, minorities and queer people.

“I see the satanic panic as hard-wired into the general conservative backlash of the Reagan years,” said W. Scott Poole, a professor of history at the College of Charleston and the author of “Satan in America: The Devil We Know.”

Culturally, that backlash first manifested in the outcry around the religious-inflected horror films of the 1970s (“The Exorcist,” “The Omen”), alarm over heavy metal music and the release of now discredited memoirs such as “The Satan Seller,” by a purportedly reformed occultist.

The 1980 publication of “Michelle Remembers” was a crucial inflection point. A memoir written by a Canadian woman, Michelle Smith, and her psychiatrist and eventual husband, Lawrence Pazder, the book describes Smith’s abuse as a young child at the hands of a cult. This abuse was discovered during psychiatric sessions, in which Pazder ostensibly unearthed long buried memories.

Heavily publicized, the memoir encouraged other mental health professionals to recover memories in their own patients. It also stoked fears around satanism, which led in the coming years to myriad accusations of ritual abuse. Many of them were directed against day care providers, as in the case prosecuted by the Los Angeles district attorney against teachers and administrators at the McMartin Preschool in the mid ‘80s.

The satanic panic, some 30 years removed, may feel like an inoffensive way to explore the dangers of conspiratorial thinking. Kane, who is too young to remember much from the era, described it as “this weird corner of the 1980s that we were eager to grab.” His first personal experience of a moral panic came about a decade later, following the Columbine school shooting: His mother barred him from the music and movies the shooters had consumed. But Kane would never set a show in that cultural moment.

“That felt so much more severe, and the stakes were much more grounded in reality,” he said.

With its uproar over Black Sabbath and “The Smurfs,” the satanic panic seemed like more fun, Kane said, though only if judiciously edited.

But even the more anodyne aspects of the satanic panic now seem tragic: that Americans turned on each other, that fear infected daily life, that the ordinary enthusiasms of youth culture were treated as dangerous and menacing. And the failure to learn the lessons of the satanic panic, works like “Hysteria!” and “Rainbow Black” suggest, is tragic, too.

Though they are not intentionally didactic, these recent fictions offer genre-inflected crash courses in mass hysteria: “My hope with the book was that people would have a wild ride,” Thrash said of her novel. “But after reading it, they might also be able to identify hysteria as it’s happening.”

Perhaps that’s too much to hope. “It’s just no fun to find out that this stuff is not true,” Poole said. “We want this to be about a demon, a group of satanists. It’s way less exciting to talk about moral panics.”