SATAN WANTS YOU: Hell on Earth

Satan Wants You tells the story of two people bound together by money, trauma, sex, fame, and, according to them at least, the Forces of Darkness. It’s the story of a book, Michelle Remembers, which the documentary calls “the patient zero of the Satanic Panic.” Unspooled like a true crime tale, Satan Wants You writes an origin story for this salacious, sensationalist phenomenon that appears almost unbelievable in hindsight, working to understand how, for most of the 1980s, everyone from Oprah to the FBI was willing to entertain the idea that millions of children a year were being sacrificed to Satan in the United States alone. 

Michelle Remembers exists in a hazy zone somewhere between torture porn and exposé, depicting what became known first on television and eventually in court filings as “satanic ritual abuse.” Written by a psychiatrist, Larry Pazder, and his patient, Michelle Smith, the book is largely made up of transcripts from countless hours of their excruciating therapy sessions as Michelle “uncovers” harrowing memories of what she believes to be sexual, emotional, and physical torture at the hands of a satanic cult who kills and eats babies. The filmmakers, Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor, assemble an impressive roster of interview subjects with intimate recollections of Michelle and Larry‘s strange relationship (the two married soon after the book’s publication) and its inordinate impact on the zeitgeist of its time–– from controversial discourses around “recovered memories” to the rise of the Evangelical right to metal music and tabloid culture–– arguing that this bizarre tract became a “checklist” for law enforcement investigating what another, similar “exposé” called “Satan’s Underground.”

In substance, the documentary itself nicely highlights the deep ambivalence of the stories being told. Was Michelle a victim of a predatory doctor? A mentally ill stalker who made up her story to get closer to a married man? A grieving mother? Satan’s child bride? Was Pazder in love, or was he simply taking advantage of a sick woman for profit? Did he believe her, or did he just watch Sibyl on TV and decide he could make the story more interesting? Interviews with experts and her and Pazder‘s families and friends explore these angles in an effort to illuminate to two lives lived in a grim media cyclone. The variety of subjects lends an impressive scope to the historical analysis at hand and effectively visualizes it: Hearing an FBI special agent describe his work on “thousands” of these cases, for example, or a High Priestess in the Church of Satan describe the threats the group received, puts a fine point on the subject. For those affected by the panic, they tell us, life became hell on earth whether the Devil was real or not.

The family’s perspectives prove less balanced however–– Pazder‘s first wife and their daughter are some of the most compelling subjects in the film, unfortunately undercutting the humanizing project at hand slightly through sheer relative screen time: They depict Michelle as a cartoon schemer, a vengeful prowler like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction while Michelle‘s sister, for her part, is more reticent to point fingers or offer any explanations, still clearly suffering from the trauma of inexplicable accusations that her shy, churchgoing mother was a cannibal and a sex trafficker. Nevertheless, each theory of the case is riveting enough on its own terms, and these mysteries help to animate the book itself as a third central character (the couple’s monstrous, bastard child) as the film traces its impact on high-profile events of the moment, for example, the infamous McMartin preschool case, for which Michelle and Larry were expert witnesses.

In style, the film occasionally falls prey to the salaciousness of the period in question. Flashes of shadowy, blood-soaked reenactments replete with devil masks and upside-down floating crucifixes punctuate the film, weakening its attempts to make the silly serious and the sensational sensitive. With a subject this inherently lurid, it’s probably hard to resist, but the deeply sourced and well-selected use of archival footage renders this choice particularly distracting. Its reenactments sometimes engage too much in the same gleeful pulpiness that the film aims to critique when it plays clips from “Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults.”

Still, Satan Wants You takes a canny look at a subject that can be hard to encapsulate, often reduced to just its gaudy surface and turned into a joke. Satanic Panic destroyed lives, tearing apart families and sending innocent people, mostly teachers, to prison for years. The film stresses that though in retrospect the outlandish claims that captivated our national and international consciousness for about a decade may appear silly–– exposés on metal music and goth culture as Gateways to Hell are easy to laugh off–– but were “deadly serious” for those caught in the crossfire. It also paints a poignant picture of the danger hyper-credulous media cycles can pose: Michelle Remembers would have been easy to debunk–– had anyone bothered to do so. 

Ultimately, the film presents Satanic Panic as the devil we all know, drawing parallels to QAnon and our current media landscape and turning the book into a different sort of cautionary tale than was originally intended. In this sense, Satanic Panic becomes its own form of repressed memory, a trauma bound to resurface and, like Michelle Remembers, wreak havoc if left unchecked. 

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