The Satanic panic that never goes away

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. (Are those apples poisoned? Do they have razor blades inside?) 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.

From a contemporary vantage, aspects of the satanic panic seem silly. Were Americans really that upset over Dungeons & Dragons? Were heavy metal records really played backward in search of encoded lyrics? “It’s cute when you look back at it,” Matt Duffer, a creator of Stranger Things, said. “It can seem funny or amusing.”

It wasn’t funny at the time, though, Duffer added, just as conspiracies about transgender people or Haitian immigrants aren’t funny now. But revisiting this hair-sprayed, shoulder-padded past allows artists and audiences the space to reflect on a volatile present and a precarious future.

Backlash and fear

As with any moral panic, the parameters of the satanic panic are loose — hysteria doesn’t lend itself to strict start and end dates, and the American inclination to blame social upset on a demonic entity goes back at least as far as the Salem witch trials.

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. (Pazder’s dubious methods and Smith’s invented experiences are the subject of the recent documentary Satan Wants You.)

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.

Thousands of accusations were eventually made, hundreds of prosecutions initiated. Convicted on only the most tenuous evidence, dozens of people went to jail for years, even decades. The panic became a media phenomenon, with 60 Minutes, 20/20 and daytime talk show presenters all devoting episodes to the supposed problem of satanism.

There were skeptics within the justice system even then, and yet a significant share of mental health professionals, law enforcement officials and prosecutors believed in satanic ritual abuse, even as no material evidence was ever found. (While occult and pseudo-satanic groups, such as the Church of Satan, do exist, no member of any such group has ever been convicted of ritual abuse.)

Seen in the most generous light, these accusations were an attempt to take the sexual abuse of children seriously. But while most abused children are victimized by relatives or family friends, the high-profile cases centered on people outside the home, chiefly child care workers — in the 1980s, women entered the workforce in the greatest numbers since World War II. Perversely, a belief in ritual abuse may have functioned as a kind of reassurance, a reassertion of the sanctity of the nuclear family.

“It’s not people in your community or in your family who might be a danger to your child, it’s only people who are so outside of typical American life that they literally worship Satan,” said Sarah Marshall, the host of the podcast You’re Wrong About, who has dedicated several episodes to the satanic panic and is working on a book about it.

‘We want this to be about a demon’

Anxieties about traditional family structures have now been largely supplanted by concerns over immigration and a more expansive understanding of gender identity and expression. But many contemporary conspiracy theories — Pizzagate, Frazzledrip — share genetic material (cannibalism, secret tunnels, offenses against children) with their 1980s counterparts.

“I have not myself decided if it is a return of some of the themes of the satanic panic in our political culture and in our moral discourse, or if the satanic panic never entirely went away,” Poole said.

Earlier charges of ritual abuse were typically leveled against comparatively powerless people, a pointed contrast with 21st-century conspiracies such as QAnon that often target government officials or other members of a shadowy “elite.” But these too have historical antecedents — the Illuminati, say — and have reappeared in an era in which trust in institutions is low.

Recent works treat the ’80s panic with more and less sympathy. Rainbow Black, a novel by Maggie Thrash published earlier this year, views it as a social and legal travesty. The book follows its heroine from early adolescence, when her parents are falsely accused of ritual abuse, into adulthood. Thrash’s novel never entertains the possibility of demonic influence.

“The real life hysteria was so juicy and interesting that I really felt no need to present the devil as being real,” she said.

In Stranger Things, set mostly in a monster-ravaged Indiana in the 1980s, the demons have always been real. Matt and Ross Duffer, the show’s creators, introduced a satanic panic plot into the show’s fourth season. Cleverly, the show defends the games and music that inflamed the real-world panic: knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons and Metallica help the show’s young heroes defeat actual monsters.

Late Night With the Devil is a found-footage style horror movie that deftly reimagines the Faust legend. Set in the run-up to the panic, it begins from a place of skepticism. But disbelief is no protection when a live taping of a late-night show goes lethally, demonically awry. In that movie and other works about the era, demons are both a locus for horror and a convenience, a supernatural shorthand that explains away the harm, sometimes terrible, that seemingly ordinary humans inflict on one another, which is of course the real horror.

Hysteria! flirts with the idea that the demonic might exist, suggesting a desire to have your desecrated wafer and eat it, too. The mother of the guitarist in the teen heavy metal band experiences strange phenomena consistent with satanic possession. But perhaps she has merely fallen prey to the panic that surrounds her.

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.

“There’s nothing fun about the West Memphis Three,” Kane said, referring to the case of three teenage males, targeted partly for their interest in the occult and heavy metal, who were convicted in the 1993 murder of three young boys. (They have been released, though they are still pursuing full exoneration.) “There’s nothing fun about McMartin. These things are tragic.”

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.”

Which is to say that Americans may not want to learn. And lending credence to one panic makes us more susceptible to others: An academic paper that Uscinski co-authored, published this summer, found robust correlations between people who believe in satanic cults and people, more than a quarter of those surveyed, who believe in more immediate moral panics, such as the belief that queer and transgender people pose a threat to children.

Given time, this new crop of conspiracy theories may come to seem just as absurd as the satanic panic does now. That doesn’t mean that they can’t terrify and wound. “We’re still in these cycles, these cycles of something is the devil and something is going to erode the morality of our youth,” Kane said.

He now realizes he should not have worried about the timing of his show. “It’s always going to be relevant,” he said.