Satan Wants You (2023)
Directed & Written by Steve J. Adams & Sean Horlor
Featuring Sarah Marshall, Debbie Nathan, Blanche Barton, Charles Ennis, Ken Lanning, Elizabeth Loftus, Charyl Proby-Austman, & Jeffrey S. Victor.

Documentary / Crime / Mystery

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay
contains SPOILERS!
You’ve been warned.

In the 1980s, Satanic ritual abuse dominated headlines across North America when countless people started to recall apparently memories about having been abused at the hands of Satanic cults, often including their own parents. The new documentary Satan Wants You, currently playing at Fantasia 2023, is a cold, hard look at how the era of Satanic Panic unfolded and how it’s continued to affect American (and even the whole of Western) culture. The book Michelle Remembers, co-authored by Michelle Smith and Dr. Lawrence Pazder, was Satanic Panic’s “Patient Zero” and the documentary traces how the hysteria spread from the original wildfire Smith and Pazder lit—a fire that goes on burning 40 years later.

Satan Wants You is ultimately about how conspiracy theories of Satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s, which encompassed America and Canada, have led us to the current moment in Western history during which we’re plagued by QAnon and other madness that works off the same faulty logic as Satanic Panic. Every year, some group is deemed Satanic paedophiles while those who focus on these fabricated fears ignore all the real, verifiable pain of children abused by religious leaders and regular people, many times family members, all across the world. Satan Wants You doesn’t have any answers about how to cut out the root of the problem and disinfect Western culture from such evidence-less belief, though it does good work looking at how/why the Satanic ritual abuse myth caught on and spread like a virus.
Part of the documentary’s sustained focus is the “wildly unethical relationship” between Michelle and Pazder, which then effectively becomes the foundation, or at least part of the foundation for so much of the hysteria and its lingering effects for decades to come. We see Michelle’s desperation to be loved by Pazder, and at a certain point it reached an obsessive stalking extreme that terrified Pazder’s wife at the time, Marylyn. Not only that, the documentary shows clear evidence that contradicts Michelle’s own claims. It’s hard to really blame Michelle. She was partly a woman in love, obsessively trying to be in Pazder’s life, and partly a woman manipulated by a doctor who was looking for a case to make him rich.
It’s Pazder, in his position of power, that is most unsettling. The longer the documentary wears on, the more Michelle’s horrific dreams are shown to be the fodder Pazder used to ignite his stardom. Pazder created an entire phenomenon that swept across multiple nations from the dreams of one solitary woman, then reaped its vast financial benefits. Someone in the documentary remarks how Satanic Panic “went viral,” and this is in the pre-internet sense—the sense of disease and infection. Pazder and Michelle’s obsessions collided to concoct a poison that has forever infected Western society. Their legacy still exists in contemporary events like Pizzagate and the wider phenomenon of QAnon.

What’s perhaps most troubling, and very well done, is that Satan Wants You outlines the ways in which Satanic Panic not only gripped America (and Canada just as much, too) but worked its way into the bloodstream of Western society to the deepest levels. The intertwining of religion, psychiatry, and good old-fashioned American advertising helped construct an entire industry out of Satanic Panic, which created a lot of cash for a lot of people, not only Michelle and Pazder.
The documentary does a good job showing how Satanic Panic erupted through psychiatry and, via Pazder, its connection to the Catholic Church, then the media helped the infection spread to the public and, most harmfully, to the cops. We see how “Cops for Christ” were becoming a rank and file of their own within police departments during the 1980s. There was also a proliferation of training videos and programs, made by supposed ‘officials’ in Satanism and the occult, that taught cops how to have a better eye for rituals and ritualistic murder (etc). There were people who committed crimes getting harsher punishments because lawyers were linking them to Satanism. It’s one thing for Satanic Panic to grip the mind of citizens, it’s a whole other, much more dangerous thing for it to take hold of the institutions in our societies; when individuals are infected, it can be fixed, but it’s not so easy to remedy a country riddled with the disease of panic. While the documentary doesn’t mention it, Satanic Panic led to later events like the West Memphis Three case, a lot of which rested on bad law enforcement and its bias against people who listened to heavy metal, wore black clothing, and read books that the Christian community didn’t like—another spread of the perpetual infection born out of Satanic Panic, an infection that needs no evidence, only the fear of people willing to believe in fairy tales.
As producer Sarah Marshall says, Michelle Remembers “has helped shape the world we now live in, whose contents we have to have some understanding of if we‘re going to know how we got here.” The old adage that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it describes the current Western society we live in since the old fears and illogical thought processes of Satanic Panic have never really left us, nor will they ever. Though, as Satan Wants You touches on briefly, it reaches back even further than the 1980s.
America specifically has had a long history of Panics in various forms. Every so many decades a new hunt begins for people to mark as the evil that’s apparently rotting away the fabric of the United States. Once upon a time, it was witches. Much later it was communists. Then it was Satanists. And so the cycle goes. The scariest part about Satan Wants You is how it reveals the way we Westerners, as a whole, have learned nothing. Just how long we’re doomed to repeat theses cycles of panic, we’ll have to wait and see. Maybe some day truth and reason will grip the populist mind; not today, though.