[SXSW ’23] ‘Satan Wants You’ review: The start of the Satanic Panic

Satan Wants You examines one of the most – if not the most – important stories to come out of the Satanic Panic. Michelle Remembers was a book co-written by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient (and eventual wife) Michelle Smith. The book details graphic accounts of Satanic ritual abuse. Though it has since been discredited, it was one of the driving forces behind one of the largest moral panics in recent history.

The documentary gets off so a slow start explaining the sessions that were held between Pazder and Smith. Initially, it does not seem like there will be much about the Satanic Panic and it is hard to get a feel for what Satan Wants You is trying to accomplish. Is it a defense of Michelle Remembers, a study of her life, or something in between? The constant jumps in time do not make things any easier to follow.

Satan Wants You soon finds its footing, and when it does, the beginning starts to make more sense. After laying the groundwork for how the information was gathered for the book (recovery-memory therapy and West African rituals play a big part), the film begins to explain the aftermath. A mix of modern interviews and archival footage explain how people feel now and show what was happening at the time.

Daytime talk shows of the time jumped on the scare while police organizations everywhere concentrated on bringing down the Satanic cults. Anyone old enough to have lived through it and remembers how scary it seemed then will laugh at how ridiculous it sounds now. When Satan Wants You shows some of the conspiracies that exist today and how they are tied to Satan worship things become less funny and become a different type of frightening.

Satan Wants You is not the in depth look at the Satanic Panic some audiences may be expecting. It looks at what started it all and the damage it caused. Lives and reputations were ruined as people worried about the millions(!) of kids that were kidnapped in order to be sacrificed to the Dark Lord. It is also a cautionary tale about the ease in which mass hysteria can be caused.

SXSW takes place from March 10 – March 19