Just in Time for Halloween: “Satan Wants You” Explores the Origins of the Satanic Panic Spreading Worldwide – For the Love of Doctors

In the 1990s there was a “Satanic Panic” in North America and other parts of the world, a false belief that devil worshipers were carrying out widespread ritual abuse of children by drinking their blood and turning them into prostitution and other heinous crimes . Force.

The hysteria in which countless innocent people were accused of committing heinous acts to please their evil master can be traced back to two people: a Canadian woman named Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist (and future husband), Dr. Larry Pazder. They wrote a book together in 1980, Michelle remembersIt revolved around therapy sessions in which Smith “remembered” joining a satanic cult and becoming “the devil’s bride”.

The award-winning documentary Satan wants youDirected by Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams explores how Smith and Dr. Pazders started such a widespread and harmful cultural phenomenon. The film was screened as part of Deadline’s “For the Love of Docs” virtual event series.

“Memory recovery therapy” has fallen into disrepute. But in the mid-1970s, when Smith and Dr. Pazder did it, the psychiatric technique had a certain authority.

The process involved “hypnosis or suggestion or putting people into a form of trance,” Horlor explained during a panel discussion following the screening of “For the Love of Docs.” “And [patients] Relive those memories you can’t remember. And if [you] Seen in the movie, these are probably memories you shouldn’t trust.

The filmmakers used actual footage from some of Smith’s therapy sessions with Dr. Pazder. It was sent to you anonymously by post.

“When we got it, we could listen to it… I mean, it was scary,” Adams recalls. “Most of the group is her, Michelle, shouting. But when you really started to dig into it and hear what was being said, we realized that these were exact passages from the book. [Michelle Remembers]. This allowed us to see that what we were hearing was actually happening in the therapy office.”

Michelle remembers became a huge bestseller and Smith and Dr. Pazder has traveled the world to speak about her alleged experiences in a satanic cult. Horlor grew up near the couple in Victoria, BC, and remembers how scared the town was after Smith’s horror story spread like wildfire.

“They lived 10 minutes from my family… So it’s like ‘Satan Woman’ and her doctor in your town,” Horlor said. The director described a “black cloud of fear” that descended on Victoria as the community faced the (false, as it turned out) realization that the devil’s disciples lurked everywhere.

“I couldn’t go to the city because they were there.” [Satanists] set up altars in the background and killed children, drank the blood of babies and killed animals,” Horlor said. “The local cemetery – a big part of it Michelle remembers is working – [I] I couldn’t go there on Halloween because the satanists would come out and steal you as a child. People who wore black clothes in the city were Satanists. You had to avoid them. They wanted to kidnap you and kill you.”

Horlor added: “I knew about it in my city. What I didn’t realize was how far it had spread. It was, as the movie says, patient zero of the satanic panic, and if you lived in Canada and the US or the UK and a dozen other countries around the world in the 80s and 90s, you knew what it was. What this means is that you can be sent to prison for crimes you never committed and accused of terrible things that aren’t even real. And people took it so, so seriously.”

And it’s not like it can’t happen again. Satan wants you draws a direct parallel between the Satanic Panic of the 1990s and the much more recent Pizzagate uprising, a wild conspiracy theory that alleged Democratic Party officials were involved in a secret human trafficking and child sex operation.

Watch the full conversation in the video above.

For the Love of Docs is a virtual Deadline event series sponsored by National Geographic in association with the International Documentary Association (IDA). The series continues with a new film showing every Tuesday until December 12th. The next film will be shown on October 31 ReichlandDirector: Irene Lusztig.