Satanic Panic: Pop-Culture Paranoia in the 1980s by Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe

While moral panics may appear in new form to deal with evolving fears and anxieties, the enduring cultural legacy of the Satanic Panic era lies in the pop-culture artifacts it produced.  The paperbacks, music, comics, movies, talks shows and religious tracts that argued for or against the Satanic Panic, or that sometimes lampooned it, are unique documents that give you a feel for what it was like to live through the period.  Rather than being dry pieces of socio-cultural history, these artifacts of the era are sill engaging as entertainment when taken at face value, or as kitsch.  Whether they illustrate the fears of parents and authority figures, or take a sympathetic view toward the typical long-haired teenage metalhead, it would be impossible to truly understand the era without them.

Since the summer I've been writing a novel that takes place at the tail end of the "Satanic Panic"--a period during the 1980's and 90's in which widespread beliefs of organized Satanism and ritual abuse produced deep anxiety and paranoia in America and around the globe.  My research for that book has, so far, included Debbie Nathan's account of the McMartin preschool trial, Satan's Silence, and Mara Leveritt's The Devil's Knot, about the conviction of the West Memphis Three.  Satanic Panic is a series of essays about the cause and effect of pop culture on the Satanic Panic era, including movies, music, Dungeons and Dragons, talk shows, and even the infamous mass-published tracts of Christian propagandist Jack Chick.

The essays themselves are an uneven bunch.  Some are sensitive cultural analyses, others polemics, and some are sort of shoddy.  The least interesting keep their tongue firmly in their cheek, convinced that the hysteria around Satanism for the better part of two decades deserves nothing more really then to be laughed, or marveled at.  It was, of course, ridiculous, but it snookered a lot of people, as moral panics still do.  The best of them made me look at familiar tropes in new ways: Kevin Ferguson's essay on technology and Satanism on film, for example, thinks of the Satanic Panic as a reaction to the dwindling authority of not just the traditional home, but of print authority: computers and telephones place authority outside traditional modes of discourse, including the Bible, and locating it in frightening and foreign places.  (I didn't know, actually, that 900 numbers produced their own mini-hysteria about pernicious influences on kids at the time.)

One thing they all have in common is Geraldo.  Alison Lang provides an essay detailing Geraldo's landmark 1988 special Devil Worship, but references to the special itself appear in almost every essay in the collection, demonstrating somewhat implicitly the special's central position in spreading the hysteria.  The special itself, for what it's worth, seems to have been a potboiler and a travesty: ambushing each of its dozens of guests in turn, including serial killers, Ozzy Osbourne, and Anton LaVey's young daughter and leader of the Church of Satan, Zeena Schreck, then pulling away before they could say anything of substance.  As the postscript notes, Geraldo continues to enjoy influence and audience even today: as silly as the panic may seem in retrospect, its purveyors have not disappeared and its consequences have not diminished.

The best essays, though, are the ones by writers who had a stake in the era, so to speak.  I really enjoyed Forrest Jackson's account of his years-long habit of pranking Bob Larson, a Dallas-era radio talk show host and key proponent of the panic.  Jackson, whose affection for Larson's outrageous antics is palpable, called in for years pretending to be a Satanist named Wayne.  Like Jackson, David Canfield's essay about Christian provocateur and supposed former Satanist Mike Warnke comes from a place of affection: Canfield discusses being an acolyte of Warnke's, then being disillusioned as he joined the staff of the Christian magazine Cornerstone, whose expose on Warnke's lies shattered his credibility.  Canfield makes an important point:

It's easy to see in hindsight that these narratives, including the urban myth of the Satanic underground, were effectively a covert horror culture--a way for Christian folks to get those campfires story heebie-jeebies outside the verboten cultural arenas of secular entertainment.  And it wasn't any less entertaining.

When you look at it this way, Canfield and Jackson's complex relationship with Larson and Warnke comes to resemble the entire Christian and paranoiac obsession with Satanism in general.  The parents who obsessed over their teenager's black clothing and frightening music are not so different from the teenager who wore the clothing, and listened to the music: both emerge from a prurient need for release from the conventional.  And yet, when these two manifestations of the same impulse collided, lives were ruined.

The most baffling essay, to me, is Adrian Mack's analysis of HBO's made-for-TV movie Indictment, which was a dramatic reenactment of the McMartin preschool trial of the 1980's.  The McMartins were accused by dozens of children of Satanic ritual abuse, though eventually the public came to agree that they had been the victims of zealous prosecutors and Satanic panic true believers, and they were acquitted.  Indictment came in this after-period, when public opinion had long since settled on the McMartins' side.  To Mack, the bias of Indictment is a distortion of the truth, and while the essay doesn't come out and say that the prosecutors were right, that's what it clearly believes, and it blames HBO, and all the prosecutors' critics, for "sowing doubt about the reliability of witness testimony."

But that's a pretty broad statement: the critics of the McMartin trial don't doubt the reliability of witness testimony, but they do doubt the reliability of young children's testimony, especially those placed under manipulative conditions, as the children in the McMartin case clearly were, and the "expert" testimony of doctors who had not sufficiently researched claims about the way sexual abuse is physically detectable.

To Mack, the bias of Indictment is inexcusable, a pattern of groupthink that diminishes the serious claims of abuse made by children and their parents.  There is a reasonable claim, I think, that public opinion can shift too far, and that the dynamics of hysteria that fomented the McMartin case are the same that unraveled it, and should be treated with similar skepticism.  But the essay treats the McMartin case devoid of context, and fails to even grapple with the idea that public opinion was against the McMartins before it was for them, or that in other cases--like the West Memphis Three, and other day care workers, most of whom have since been released after long prison sentences--public opinion never got the chance to swing the other way.

It's a strange essay in a collection that mostly finds the value in, as the excerpt above says, the "kitsch" of the Satanic Panic era: the most outrageous music, the goriest films, even Christian "white" metal--all of them are as much a product of the Satanic Panic as they are the cause of it.  That is to say, these cultural artifacts are still fun and interesting because they see, clearly and satirically, the stifling and unflappable character of American monoculture.