I’ve posted a lot on these lit-up pages about the Satanic Panic of the 1980′s and 1990′s, and I was reminded of the mass hysteria of those times this weekend when I came across an article that looked back to the classic documentary Paradise Lost. It’s hard to believe that the film is 20 years old as the movement that it helped to create is enjoying its high water mark as I type this post. Here’s a bit from Rolling Stone about the film and the movement it inspired…

When filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky arrived in West Memphis, Arkansas in June 1993, they came with an agenda: to document what looked like a new wave of alienated youth-turned-murderers. A few months earlier, two 10-year-olds in the U.K. had made headlines when they abducted, tortured and murdered a two-year-old, and now the filmmakers had read about the brutal murders of three eight-year-old boys ostensibly committed by teenage Satanists. It seemed like a trend. “We went down to make a film about guilty teenagers, like a real Rivers Edge,” Berlinger says, referencing a 1987 Keanu Reeves movie about a metal-loving teen who murders his girlfriend. “How could three teenagers become so disaffected with life that they could do such a horrible thing?”
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Damien Echols: ‘Today Was My Original Execution Date’If it would have been carried out, I would have been dead 21 years today,” Echols noted on Twitter. For months, the documentarians met with the victims’ families and talked to the accused. But something wasn’t adding up. Berlinger recalls looking at defendant Jason Baldwin’s “skinny little wrists” and thinking he would be incapable of using a hunting knife to mutilate and murder anyone; after an interview with the boy and another seemingly innocent defendant, Damien Echols, the filmmakers believed they had a bigger story on their hands. “When we saw Damien and Jason being chained up and taken off, it was just so emotional, ’cause we felt the wrong guys were being carted off,” Berlinger says. It was then that the film that would become the influential documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills changed course.

After it aired on HBO in June 1996, Paradise Lost became one of the most catalytic documentaries ever produced. It presented the story objectively, showing the trial and reactions from the victims’ family members, allowing viewers to make up their own minds about what happened. And it subsequently inspired a movement among viewers who concluded that the accused – who went on to become known as the West Memphis Three – had, in fact, been wrongly convicted.

Moreover, the film’s legacy would span decades, inspiring not only two sequels but a hands-off storytelling style that can be seen in docuseries like Making a Murderer and scripted dramas like Rectify. It’s a film that changed the lives of all involved – including the filmmakers themselves.

Read the whole story at the link above and watch the movie that started it all right here…

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Jack Chick hated Catholics, Jews, Freemasons, Dungeons & Dragons, Mormons, Harry Potter, and the Devil. He also published a series of comic book bible tract zines for just over a decade during the 1970′s and 1980′s that helped to kickstart the Satanic Panic. The comics also won Chick an ironic status among comic fans and artists who admired Chick’s prolific publishing even if they thought his ideas were ridiculous, hilarious or just plain crazy. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing pulled this bit from the Wiki…

Chick Publications has released over twenty-three full-color “Chick comics” since its founding. They are full-size comic books and most were first published between 1974 and 1985. The first eleven form the Crusader comics series, which follows the stories of two fundamentalist Christians and addresses topics such as the occult, Bible prophecy, and the theory of evolution.[21] Six comics present the testimony of anti-Catholic activist Alberto Rivera, who said that, as a Jesuit priest, he had become privy to many secrets about the Roman Catholic Church. Among Rivera’s statements: He says the Catholic Church created Islam,[22] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,[23] as well as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.[24] He also says the Catholic Church was responsible for the Holocaust,[25][26][27] the founding of Communism, Nazism, and the Ku Klux Klan; starting the World Wars;[25] masterminding the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Great Depression and the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy.[25] There are also three independent comics, one telling stories from the King James Version of the Bible (Chick is pro-King James Onlyism), one relaying the statements of Charles Chiniquy regarding Catholicism, and one detailing Chick’s opinions on Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Everybody is talking about Chick today as news of his death started popping up all over the internet on Monday afternoon. Here’s a kickass YouTube playlist featuring a bunch of Chick’s comics. Laugh at the clumsy Christian propaganda, be shocked at the barely concealed hate and conspiracy theories, and bid farewell to a comics pioneer of a kind whose best accomplishment in life was probably making some nerds laugh. Vaya con Dios, Chick.

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One of the most interesting — and tragic — conspiracy theories of recent times has been the Satanic Panic of the 80′s and 90′s. During this time faulty research, hearsay and the fears projected by Christian conservatives resulted in a very real panic that saw a number of innocent people’s lives ruined over what amounted to an urban legend. Here’s a long quote from Wiki as the panic was a very complex and nuanced phenomenon and their summing-up is too thorough not to include here…

Satanic ritual abuse (SRA, sometimes known as ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organised abuse, sadistic ritual abuse and other variants) was a moral panic that originated in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout the country and eventually to many parts of the world, before mostly diminishing in the late 1990s. Allegations of SRA involved reports of physical and sexual abuse of people in the context of occult or Satanic rituals. In its most extreme form, SRA involved a supposed worldwide conspiracy involving the wealthy and powerful of the world elite in which children were abducted or bred for sacrifices, pornography and prostitution.

Nearly every aspect of SRA was controversial, including its definition, the source of the allegations and proof thereof, testimonials of alleged victims, and court cases involving the allegations and criminal investigations. The panic affected lawyers’, therapists’, and social workers’ handling of allegations of child sexual abuse. Allegations initially brought together widely dissimilar groups, including religious fundamentalists, police investigators, child advocates, therapists and clients in psychotherapy. The movement gradually secularized, dropping or deprecating the “satanic” aspects of the allegations in favor of names that were less overtly religious such as “sadistic” or simply “ritual abuse” and becoming more associated with dissociative identity disorder and government conspiracy theories.

The panic was influenced to a large extent by testimony of children and adults that were obtained using therapeutic and interrogation techniques now considered discredited. Initial publicity generated was by the now-discredited autobiography Michelle Remembers (1980), and sustained and popularized throughout the decade by the McMartin preschool trial. Testimonials, symptom lists, rumors and techniques to investigate or uncover memories of SRA were disseminated through professional, popular and religious conferences, as well as through the attention of talk shows, sustaining and spreading the moral panic further throughout the United States and beyond. In some cases allegations resulted in criminal trials with varying results; after seven years in court, the McMartin trial resulted in no convictions for any of the accused, while other cases resulted in lengthy sentences, some of which were later reversed. Scholarly interest in the topic slowly built, eventually resulting in the conclusion that the phenomenon was a moral panic, with little or no validity beyond paranoia.

Official investigations produced no evidence of widespread conspiracies or of the slaughter of thousands; only a small number of verified crimes have even remote similarities to tales of SRA. In the latter half of the 1990s interest in SRA declined and skepticism became the default position, with very few researchers giving any credence to the existence of SRA.

Here’s a Satanic Panic propaganda classic preserved on shiny black VHS tape. Here’s Escaping Satan’s Web…

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This crazy video features an insane look back on the toys and cartoons of the 1980′s by a couple of confused evangelical Christians who see the Devil in every detail. Author Phil Phillips and Pastor Gary Greenwald would be just a couple of bumbling buffoons if their brand of humorless hysteria hadn’t been part of a bigger trend that lead to the “Satanic Panic” of that era — a time when hundreds of unsubstantiated cases of so-called Satanic ritual abuse were reported around the United States.

The good people at i09 published a short version of this video. Here are some of their favorite bits:

• Dungeons & Dragons “game pieces” scream when you set them on fire!

• “There’s a form of witchcraft [in Star Wars] called ‘Obi witchcraft.’” Obi obi obi!

It’s all in good fun kids until you draw a direct line from a pastor obsessed with zombie Smurfs to the convictions of the West Memphis 3. Be careful when you see the Devil that you do not see him in a mirror.

There is a sevenish minute version of this floating around on the net. Here is the the full 90 minutes plus:

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