Chattanooga Film Festival 2023– Torture. Baby sacrifices. Satanism. These topics featured prominently in the 1980 book Michelle Remembers, co-authored by Michelle Smith and her Canadian psychiatrist/future husband Lawrence Pazder. Though the book was later discredited, it initially sold quite well and ignited hysteria known as the Satanic Panic. Satan Wants You, a documentary by Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor, is a fascinating look at the book’s massive influence and the very real consequences of the Satanic Panic.

Smith and Pazder are really the main subjects here. The beginning of the doc features unnerving interviews from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, in which Smith recounts being abused by Satanists. There’s some rather graphic detail in these audio recordings, before the documentary digs deep to uncover Smith’s life and the sexual relationship she had with Pazder, even when he was married to his first wife. The 90 minutes include interviews with their family and friends, as well as journalists who covered the Satanic Panic and an FBI agent who recounts covering wave after wave of alleged Satanic rituals.  The interviews are comprehensive, offering an array of viewpoints on the issue. There’s even an interview with a Satanist who dismisses claims the Church of Satan sacrifices babies and is instead about personal liberation.

For those born after the 1980s, or who maybe don’t remember that era, Michelle Remembers is at least partially responsible for a wave of reports about Satanic cults sacrificing babies. Claims became so widespread that police units hosted guests to train officers how to identify Satanic rituals. By the mid and late 1980s, talk shows across the West focused on story after story about women who were allegedly raped, only to have their babies scarified to Satan. It seems ludicrous to consider all of this now, but the fever gripped the U.S. and Canada and lasted for years. The footage of Larry King, Oprah, and Geraldo Rivera discussing this very topic shows just how mainstream it became.

The documentary does question whether or not Michelle Smith made it all up, or truly believed these memories, perhaps due to Pazder’s therapy techniques, but it never arrives at an answer. Maybe to no one’s surprise, Smith declined to be interviewed. It also explores how the Satanic Panic ruined people’s lives, including a New Jersey preschool teacher who was wrongly accused of abusing children. She was jailed for five years, until the case was overturned by an appeals court. The doc also draws some parallels to what’s occurring today, specifically Pizzagate, QAnon, and the age of disinformation and conspiracy theories gone wild, thanks to social media. However, that aspect of the documentary is far, far too brief, along with the cultural legacy of the Satanic Panic, including the attacks on heavy metal music and even horror films. That’s a missed opportunity, which would have put the Satanic Panic into a broader cultural and historical context, as well the negative legacy of Michelle Remembers.

Satan Wants You isn’t quite a documentary about the Satanic Panic as a whole. That would need far more than 90 minutes. Instead, it namely focuses on Smith, Pazder, and the far-reaching influence of their book. More than 40 years later, it feels like we’re living through a period similar to the Satanic Panic, considering the book bans and resurgent conspiracy theories. This doc is a compelling look at the origins of a decade-long hysteria. It also questions if we’ve learned anything from that period. There are important lessons here, if we’re just willing to heed them.

7 Out of 10