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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