When satanic panic swept Canada

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/08/2023 (757 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The devil is in the details of this focussed, forensic documentary from Vancouver-based filmmakers Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor. Looking closely at the Canadian roots of the satanic panic that swept North America and Britain in the 1980s, this project is fascinating in its specifics but sometimes frustrating in its tight parameters.

In Satan Wants You, Horlor and Adams concentrate closely on Michelle Remembers, a now discredited book that recounted the recovered memories of Michelle Smith, who claimed that as a child growing up in 1950s Victoria, she had been held captive for over a year and tortured by a secret satanic cult.

Smith co-wrote the 1980 bestseller with her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pazder, based on their therapy sessions. Using what they called a “reliving process,” in which Smith spoke in the voice of a small child, she told stories of being bathed in murdered babies’ blood, forced to consume human flesh, thrown into an open grave and covered with slaughtered kittens.

This lurid account became a massive bestseller and its contentions were picked up by sober-minded journalists from CTV and CBC and reputable newspapers like the Globe & Mail and the Times Colonist.

Smith and Pazder — who went on to leave their respective spouses and marry, suggesting some very fuzzy therapeutic boundaries — became famous. They were feted on book tours and featured on the cover of People magazine. Together they would give lectures to social workers, medical professionals and law enforcement officials.

One commentator calls Michelle Remembers “the Patient Zero of the satanic panic,” though there were other factors. As the notion of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” took hold of the popular imagination, this metastasizing misinformation generated a kind of industry, drawing in true believers as well as grifting opportunists — unethical or incompetent therapists, self-styled occult experts called in to consult on criminal investigations.

How could parents not be terrified? Some of these “specialists” claimed that two million children went missing every year in the United States, destined to be victims of secret satanists. The fact that there was no actual evidence of this wave of murderous devil worshippers was just taken as “evidence” of another kind — proof of the cult’s sinister, far-reaching power.

Some of the clips compiled by Adams and Horlor, especially from those sensation-seeking ‘80s daytime talk shows, might almost be comic if not for the real-life consequences of this spreading cultural anxiety, including the destruction of families and the wrongful convictions of teachers and daycare workers.

One young teacher was accused of committing bizarre, bloody, elaborate brutalities against children that had “somehow gone unnoticed in a crowded school,” said one reporter, who seemed strangely incurious about that “somehow.”

Tragically, these spectacular stories also drew attention away from real issue of child abuse. Smith, for example, had grown up in an unstable home with a violent, alcoholic father, her childhood shaped by much more ordinary forms of cruelty and neglect.

The filmmakers have sourced extensive home-video footage and media clips. They use excerpts of the audio recordings of Smith’s original therapy sessions to unsettling effect, though they could have cut back on the visual re-enactments, which feel a bit overwrought. There are also talking-head interviews with friends and family of Smith and Pazder, as well as with an informed, somewhat idiosyncratic group of commentators, including an investigative journalist, a world-weary FBI agent attached to the “mindhunter” unit and a Wiccan police detective.

All this information offers insight into the psychological dynamics of Pazder and Smith and the ways their therapeutic process might have turned into a strange folie à deux.

But there could be more examination of the larger social context of the Michelle Remembers phenomenon. Shadowing the entire film but not referenced explicitly until the end are the connections to other moral panics, going back centuries to the blood libel against Jews and persisting into our own fraught times with QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories, with their blood-drinking, baby-eating satanic elites. Horlor and Adams could have looked more closely at what real anxieties are being displaced onto these made-up tales, where these fears come from and how they have been politically exploited.

Satan Wants You tells us a lot about how Pazder and Smith sold their story, but it could have told us more about why people bought it.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca