Satan Wants You pulls back the curtain on the 'Satanic Panic'

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article contains graphic details of sexual abuse that, while discredited, may be uncomfortable for some readers.

What Michelle remembers, you will never forget.

That’s just one of many marketing catchphrases for the 1980 book Michelle Remembers — a central element of the new documentary film Satan Wants You, which had its Texas premiere Saturday at the 2023 South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin.

Created by a team led by Sean Horlor and Steve J. Abrams, the film tells the untold story of the origins of the "Satanic Panic" in the 1980s.

As podcaster Sarah Marshall says early in the film, she considers Michelle Smith to be "patient zero" of the Satanic Panic.

The film takes place in Victoria, British Columbia, where Smith begins to recall traumatizing, sadistic, and barbaric memories from her childhood.

Through months of therapy with psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, Smith starts piecing together a tragic 14-month period when she was five. 

During that time, she says her mother gave her away to Satanists, who kept her in cages, forced her to eat her own feces, and slaughtered animals in her presence.

It might sound ridiculous, but in the 1980s, the tale took the world by storm. After co-writing her memoir — an unusual, if not completely inappropriate, move by a psychiatrist and their patient — Smith and Pazder went on a press tour, speaking on daytime talk shows, appearing on an episode of the game show To Tell the Truth, and even visiting the Pope at the Vatican.

But as reporters were asking about the gruesome and sordid details from the memoir, few were inquiring about the developing relationship between Smith and Pazder, who would go on to divorce their partners and marry each other.

The film raises questions about the motives of the psychiatrist and the patient. Pazder’s wife, for example, noted in an interview that after watching Sybil, a TV movie about a possessed woman and her therapist, her husband turned to her and noted he didn’t want to be a regular psychiatrist — he wanted to be famous.

Sybil was released in November 1976. Pazder began taping his interviews with Smith that same month.

There was little skepticism about the Catholic Church’s involvement in the book. After all, Pazder was a devout Catholic, and the church paid $10,000 to subsidize the memoir.

Over the course of 90 minutes, the filmmakers demonstrate a masterclass in documentary, weaving together the lies and false narratives of the Satanic Panic.

For example, law enforcement claimed Satanists were kidnapping and sacrificing two million children in the United States each year. That’s despite the fact that only 3.17 million children were born on average each year in the 1980s—suggesting more than half of American children were being taken from their homes by devil-worshiping baby eaters.

It’s remarkable how many resources in law enforcement were used to combat "Satanic Ritualistic Abuse" without any concrete evidence that the concept was more than an urban legend.

Speaking to audience members following the film’s premiere, Horlor and Abrams revealed the interview tapes from Smith and Padzer’s therapy sessions nearly didn’t make it into the film.

The two said many people have spent the better part of four decades scouring for the tapes, which were transcribed and featured throughout their best-selling book.

But after the final cut of the film was finished, an anonymous source gifted the filmmakers the ultimate piece of primary sourcing — the raw cassettes themselves.

Don’t expect to hear from Smith in the film, as she declined to participate. But between her sister, Pazder’s ex-wife and daughter, and former law enforcement agents, the interviews conducted in Satan Wants You paint a twisted picture about the false notions of "recovered memory" and how Smith’s psychiatrist played a key role in pushing the Satanic Panic.

The lies weren’t harmless either. Many people were charged with and falsely convicted of abusing children in the name of Satanism, including some who worked in daycares like the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.

The film touches on how the most sensational and stomach-churning elements of the Satanic Panic — like killing and eating fetuses —have found their way back into the fringe, with Qanon and Pizzagate representing a "new age" of conspiracy theories with age-old fables.

While the film briefly mentions the harms caused by the Catholic Church relating to rampant child sexual abuse, it’s striking as a Canadian that while the church was promoting propaganda about kidnapping, abusing, and killing children, that’s exactly what many were doing to Indigenous children across the country.

The filmmakers weren’t able to answer my question, but it’s clear that pushing the idea of Satanic Ritualistic Abuse helped divert attention away from the harms done by the Catholic Church itself.