Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s

 

Exorcising Demons

Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural 
Paranoia In The 1980s
Edited by Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe
Fab Press/Spectacular Optical
ISBN: 9781903254868

Just a very brief shout out now to a book edited by one of my favourite movie people, Kier-La Janisse... Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s. This one took me out of my comfort zone a little because it’s not exclusively about movies but, I saw it on the Fab Press stall at Bank Holiday FrightFest a couple of years ago and, it being one of the very few books I didn’t already own on the stall and, to boot, a tome I’d been keeping a look out for since it’s first US edition on Kier-La’s Spectacular Optical publishing arm, I thought I’d finally pick it up and give it a go. 

The book is a collection of various essays by a variety of authors, such as Alison Nastasi and the redoubtable Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, on various aspects of the absolute alarm caused by parents and other authority figures who believed the ‘youth of today’ were being attacked/corrupted/coerced/recruited by various devil worshipping organisations/unofficial groups during the 1980s. 

Now, I have to say, 90% of the contents of the book was completely unknown to me and this tome covers a variety of manifestations such as child molestation rings/enthusiastic money grabbing preachers and many other ‘authority figures gone wrong’, sometimes by first hand witnesses of the people and organisations in question. Although there certainly is some overlap with UK slants on the phenomenon, such as the worry, even in this country, about the game Dungeons And Dragons... once again proving that whenever anyone is given a creative outlet which any one group of individuals doesn’t understand, there’s going to be a huge push back by some of the more ignorant of them, as they seem to have a habit of empowering those gullible enough to throw in with their lot. 

So, yeah, I think you get the idea... if you were into heavy metal music, gaming, horror movies and various other stuff... you were going to be targeted as a devil extolling, malevolent presence in somebody’s life. 

The book is full of stuff I’d never heard of such as the Procter And Gamble logo being a manifestation of 666, religious comics, White Metal (or Christian Metal) music, teenage murder, paedophilia rings and so on. Those interested in film will also find some good things to contemplate here... such as an article on horror movies utilising ‘devil worship via computers’ such as Evilspeak and a nice chapter on Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs. There’s also stuff about the Dungeons And Dragons missing person case that inspired the novel and subsequent movie of Mazes And Monsters (which I reviewed here) so, there were some elements familiar to me in the book. But, of course, it’s precisely because a lot of the things covered is stuff I’m not so well acquainted with, that makes it a valuable addition to my book shelves... err... book piles (like I could ever get enough shelves installed). There’s one very interesting chapter, for example, about devil cult books published by Playboy magazine as an imprint, which were deliberately marketed to susceptible female readers while the books actually seemed to favour wanting to show control over women. It’s fascinating stuff, to be sure.

And I’m going to get out of this review now while the getting’s good, I think. So I’ll just leave you with the thought that Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s is, if nothing else (and I’m sure it probably is a lot more to many readers), an entertaining and educational read, throwing light onto subjects which, due to the country I live in more than anything else, were certainly unknown to me in a lot of cases. Definitely worth a read for the inquisitive minded at the very least and, with people like Heller-Nicholas on some of the chapters, you know it’s going to be well researched and written, for sure.