After snagging a copy while in
Montreal, I finally finished reading Spectacular Optical's second
release, Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s, an
exhaustive compilation of essays that further reinforces just what a
whacked-out decade the eighties truly were.
I was raised in a neutral environment
when it came to religion. Well, truth be told, it may have leaned
toward disdain on my father's part based on his constant mockery of
said establishments. I know our address was eventually blacklisted by
the Jehovah's Witnesses that used to come door-to-door. The point is
that I never gave Satanism any less legitimacy than any other
religion out there. Even as a kid, I knew that the extremes offered
up in the horror movies I watched were just that; extremes.
Not all of us were as liberal, as I
cannot understate what an accurate term “panic” truly is. The
deeper I got into the book, the more fantastical it became. Several
decades removed, some of the fear mongering that was going on was
downright comical. The chapter by Joshua Benjamin Graham on
fundamentalist readings of the occult in Saturday Morning cartoons in
laughable. At worst, they were a disingenuous way to sell toys and
merchandise to millions of children, but a conduit of evil? Let's get
real, people.
He-Man: The Great Corrupter... |
As highly visible figures like Geraldo
Rivera – whose infamous 1988 “Devil Worship” special is broken
down by Alison Lang – continued to fan the fire, hysteria began to
take hold.
A phenomenon called Satanic Ritual Abuse arose and several
high profile criminal cases popped up around the world, the most
publicized being the McMartin Pre-school Trial. As written about by
Adrian Mack, due to a lack of evidence, no one was ever convicted and the media fervor over the alleged Satanic activity seemed to
overshadow the real tragedy of grievous child trauma.
The book balances out these horrific
chapters with some lighter fare, including the chapter by W.M. Conley on
Christian evangelical VHS and Paul Corupe's piece on Jack T. Chick. I learned of Chick and his religious tracts just a few years ago around the
release of Dark Dungeons.
I find this trailer highly amusing, yet I'm still not completely sure this is supposed to be satire. What is no laughing matter is the
genuine alarm Dungeons & Dragons brought about in the early
eighties, profiled here by Gavin Baddely. I was introduced to the world of D&D very early on
through my older brother and was acutely aware when the media
started portraying it in a negative light. How anything that fostered
imagination and creativity (I was designing dungeons by the time I
was nine) not to mention reading and math skills, could be rallied
against as evil was beyond me. Alas, I distinctly remember being told
by a friend that he wasn't allowed to play at my house
anymore because I engaged in such activities. Such prejudices are
hard for a young kid to absorb.
Still got my set. Still got my soul. |
Naturally, my favourite chapters of the
book were the ones about film, of which they were a few as horror has
often danced with the Devil. Kevin L. Ferguson explores the
integration of technology and Satanism through the eighties films
Evilspeak & 976-Evil, Samm Deighan runs down the fairly robust
history of “Heavy Metal Horror” & Kurt Halfyard quite astutely
heralds Joe Dante's The 'Burbs as the death knell of the Satanic
Panic, even if America's inherent xenophobia still lives on to this day.
When it comes down to it, the
establishment is always going to look for a tangible element to pin
the woes of the world on. Before heavy metal music and its “Satanic”
disciples, it was comic books and now, many years later, violent
video games are allegedly corrupting our youth. Sadly, the
Satanic Panic happened due to a religious
right having just enough clout to sway even the most supposedly
objective of peers. It was a time of widespread insanity and, even
putting aside the prevalent threat of nuclear annihilation, it is
kind of a miracle that we all made it through to the other side and into
the nineties.
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