- Directed by Steve J. Adams, Sean Horlor
- Written by Steve J. Adams, Sean Horlor
- Stars Blanche Barton, Charles Ennis, Ken Lanning
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 28 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmgDFuh-KMc
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
There aren’t really any spoilers to spoil because it’s a documentary. It’s primarily about Michelle Smith, who declined to be part of the film. It was put together very well, and we thought it was interesting.
Synopsis
We start out watching old interviews of people involved with the book, “Michelle Remembers,” wherein a Satanic cult abused her. At age five, she was given to a group of people who put her in cages and sacrificed animals. Credits roll.
We then cut to Sarah Marshall, who talks about studying the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s. She began by reading “Michelle Remembers,” which seems to be the centerpiece for this documentary.
We cut to more interviews with Michelle and her psychiatrist in 1976-1978. We get some re-enactments of cultists dancing. There are recordings of Michelle talking about her mother, a Satanist herself, handing her over to the cultists and what they did.
There’s a lot of talk about Lawrence Pazder, the psychiatrist who recorded all of Michelle’s sessions. Pazder had been in Africa in the 1960s and had run-ins with evil nuns and secret societies. Pazder and Michelle actually saw the pope about her stories, and they took it all very seriously.
In 1980, Michelle’s story was everywhere, and she became quite a celebrity on the talk shows. The book tour only added to that. During these interviews, Pazder invented the term “Ritual Abuse,” an idea that took off with the media. We watch the intro to “The Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults,” a training video. Police nationwide were being trained to deal with cults and Satanists. This is about the time that people started freaking out about babies being stolen from hospitals.
An FBI agent comes on and explains how these kinds of cases started snowballing out of control around 1983. There was a preschool where all the children, 41 of them, claimed they were molested and forced to participate in cult rituals. The agent says that he eventually came to the conclusion that the vast majority of these cases were imaginary or otherwise less-than-honest.
The “Satanic Panic” was in full circulation by the late eighties, and it was all started by that book. Michelle started following Pazder’s family on vacation; it was becoming an obsession to her, and the story may have just been a way to keep Pazder under her finger. The book deals kept coming, making nearly a million dollars. Pazder’s ex-wife is interviewed, and she doesn’t understand how anyone could have believed any of it.
Pazder and Michelle were clearly having an affair, although they were both married to other people. Pazder’s wife filed for divorce right away. Pazder and Michelle were eventually married. The fear of Satan was a product that many people were selling, making a fortune by teaching, preaching, and making up new stories about ritual abuse. Therapists swarmed on the idea. Even educated people really believed all this. People blame heavy metal music as one of the roots of the problem. All the missing children in the country, millions of them, were supposedly taken by cultists and sacrificed.
We then change over to talking about Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan, which was a new thing in the late 60s and grew quite a bit in the 1970s. LaVey argued that most of the stuff in “Michelle Remembers” wasn’t accurate and sued them for defamation in 1981.
The FBI man, Ken Lanning, made tells about meeting Pazder and Michelle in 1987, and the things they told him were not convincing at all. Geraldo Rivera did a three-hour special on the topic, and the guests talked all about killing and sacrificing babies. People went to jail over this.
Pazder’s ex-wife went to Lanning, the FBI man, and worked with him to discredit Pazder and help get some of the convicted “abusers.” They started researching where Michelle really was during her childhood; Michelle’s school yearbooks showed her there every year– Satanists had never taken her.
More and more, the interviewees lead into how they all figured out that the stories were all made up and fraudulent. Turns out, the book was actually subsidized by the Catholic church as propaganda.
Around 1992, the insurance companies, of all people, put a stop to the Satanic Panic. They refused to pay for the therapy of all the so-called victims of Satanists and abusers.
We then shift to the modern day, Pizzagate, QAnon, and Fake News. It’s all the same thing all over again, with new things to fear that aren’t based in fact.
The various interviewees say that Michelle regrets the whole thing now and believes that the book ruined her entire life. Still, she they say she doesn’t admit that any of it was untrue and hasn’t apologized…
Commentary
It’s well-made, moody, and atmospheric, which is unusual for a documentary.
According to Wikipedia, “[Michelle Remembers] presents its claims as fact, and was extensively marketed on that basis at the time, no evidence was provided; all investigations into the book failed to corroborate any of its claims, with investigators describing its content as being primarily based on elements of popular culture and fiction that were popular at the time when it was written.”
If you were ever wondering where all the fear of Satanism and the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s and 90s came from, this lays it out pretty clearly.