Satan Wants You

Satan Wants You was well-received at its world premiere at SXSW Film Festival. Satan Wants You explores the story of how a book by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist Lawrence Pazdur supposedly based on her recovered memories produced a worldwide panic about supposed Satanists torturing children. Much of this panic turned out to be utter nonsense that made millions for therapists and TV shows. The history of how this happened is absolutely fascinating. It appears as if it may have been initially well-intentioned, but the result destroyed many lives. It also shows how easy it is to manipulate human memory. It suggests the need for great skepticism about any recollection based on so-called recovered memories.

The film reconstructs the time and events through interviews with the participants and video from the period. It is an enjoyable and provocative historical examination. While the originally Satanic Panic finally died out, it has reappeared again in recent years in the more politicized version of the QAnon conspiracy. This film is recommended to those who are intrigued by history and the nature of human memory. It is truly a story of how the road to hell can be paved with good intentions.

This was a documentary that I got turned on to when searching Letterboxd/The Internet Movie Database for horror/documentaries to watch at work. This caught my attention for the fact that while I was reading Paperbacks from Hell, the novel Michelle Remembers popped up. It was a book that was passed off as fact originally. The repercussions that came from that was felt for the next decade.

Now as I started to watch this, I texted my mother to see if she had read the book. She had read it and my guess there; she thought it was real when it came out. This documentary does well in setting up who the subject of this documentary is. Michelle Smith is the subject of the book and her therapist that helped uncover these repressed memories was Lawrence Pazder. He uses reel to reel tape recorder and then had a team dictate what they heard. I'll say, listening to the tapes made me uncomfortable. Hearing the pain that Michelle went through or what she thought she did, got under my skin.

The bigger thing here are the repercussions of what they did. I like that we learn about both lead characters from their childhood to where they ended up in the wake. Both were married. Michelle was raised in a troubled home. Her mother was doing what she could to raise her and they had a father who was addicted to alcohol and gambling. He caused them to move regularly and there would be nights when he was on a bender that were terrifying. We hear things from friends and Michelle's sisters.

What I want to share about Lawrence was that he loved technology and was a doctor who did missionary trips to Africa. While there, he was not well liked by the nuns. He did film local rituals, but from what we hear through this doc, he didn't seem to fully understand them. This is brought up as it feels like it factors into what went into the book. Lawrence is important for starting the recovered-memory therapy and things that were pushed, helped usher in the 'Satanic Panic' era.

The subject matter is interesting to me as an atheist. I only bring that up here since I look at all religions as something that is good for people, but I also see how it is used as weapon. It causes people to bring in their own biases, which is problematic. This is a bit too slanted toward looking at religion as the main problem here. I did like that they used archive footage of Anton LaVey, the writer of the Satanic Bible and founder of the Church of Satan. He has passed away now, but I did like that Blanche Barton is standing for this church to share information as well. Having that side represented was good. What I will credit here is that I get the feeling there are Christians interviewed here, but they are also rationale people as well.

Other than that issue, I thought this was well-made. It is interesting and harrowing. If these things did happen to children, it would be sickening. Looking at it from that angle, I agree. Knowing that these people that are interviewed on the daytime talk shows probably have mental illness that is being encouraged and exploited is also terrifying. I thought that this does well in conveying its information and looking professional. If anything, it has me interested in reading Michelle Remembers as a fictional work to see what was put down to paper. This was an interesting documentary for sure.

My Rating: 7.5 out of 10.

I remember visiting a relative a few years ago and coming across a forty year old book called MICHELLE REMEMBERS. It was marked non-fiction, but it had a Stephen King sort of fiction feel to it.

The story was hard to believe. The story was over the top and had no secondary sources to back up many of the claims made in the book. The book made several serious allegations, yet there were no police reports referred to in the book. The Wikipedia article pointed out several inconsistencies with the book.

Satan Wants You picks up from there and gives a play by play account of the book and the subsequent events that followed. The movie gave more evidence that the book was a hoax, such as playing some of the original audio tapes and interviews with others related to the case.

The film seems to place the blame on the two authors who un-intentionally caused a lot of harm to others, some who spent years in jail on false charges. While much of the blame does rest on those two, some also rests on the people who believed it too easily.

While the original Satanic Panic died down, the film points out several repercussions felt today in the form of things like Pizzagate and several alt-right conspiracy theories.

A great film overall.

An interesting documentary, the only complaint I would make about it is that it puts too much of the blame for the Satanic Panic on Michelle and her Doctor, when there was a huge cultural underpinning to the craziness that happened in the late 80s and Early 90s.

It wasn't just this book, it was panics about heavy metal music, Dungeons and Dragons, and horror movies that created the illusion that there were a bunch of Satan Worshippers out there. Heck, Geraldo did a whole special on it, and the other Daytime Shows followed suit. (This is when Daytime shows still tried to do serious subjects and not just people fighting and taking paternity tests and fighting over the results of paternitiy tests.)

Still, the story of Michelle and her doctor is horrifying, regardless of if they were scammers or good intentioned people practicing bad psychaitry. But really, where were the people who knew better. Law enforcement went along with this nonsense for years and treated these hucksters like they were real experts.

If you know anything about the Satanic Panic there are numerous child abuse allegations including a daycare in the United States in the early 1980s. Satan Wants You is the overly specific probe into the life of a woman named Michelle from Canada who has been blamed along with her psychiatrist for creating Satanic Panic. The documentary is ambivalent as to if any of the details in the lurid, violent biography the psychiatrist wrote actually happened to Michelle (her sisters have no recollection of it) but the stories she told are pretty disgusting and jarring. So the damage was done, everyone from the Catholic church to police stations were on the look out for cults of devil worshippers.

The problem is that too much is made of Michelle's subsequent marriage to her doctor, and bitter resentments are repeated ad nauseum by his adult children and elderly first ex-wife. Nothing new was really revealed by this documentary, it's not that enlightening and it's certainly not comprehensive. No background or context is given for the counter culture of the Sixties or numerous Satanic-themed horror films from the Seventies - this isn't a documentary for academics or intellectuals, its basically a bunch of gossip about Michelle.

The brief and absurd shallow defense of Anton LeVey adds nothing to the film, as LeVey was a disturbed and abusive man and none of that is explained, either. The entire point seems to be an attempt to convince people that the Church of Satan is harmless which isn't quite the whole story. Everyone wants things to be black and white, nice and clean, and that's not real life. While the shadowy horror movie ideas about Satanic cults were greatly exaggerated or even fabricated, people involved with LeVeyan Satanism aren't exactly a bunch of innocent scholars. To the contrary, LeVey himself was a low-life and a perfect example of the banality of realistic evil.