To promote the release of their new book on 1980’s Satanism paranoia, Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s, editor Kier-La Janisse and several of the collection’s contributors spoke to Fantastic Fest 2015 attendees about their firsthand experiences with the satan worship panic that spawned demonization campaigns against heavy metal and Dungeons and Dragons, eventually spiraling into multiple jail sentences for innocent people accused of satanic ritual abuse. Their insight into the fevered paranoia of an American Christian era is both farcical and frightening, encompassing both prank calls to evangelical demon-thumpers and brutal injustices.

Satan Worship In America

In the intro to Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s Janisse offers this succinct summary of the era:

“I experienced firsthand the furor surrounding heavy metal as the ‘80s wore on, and the fear that covert Satanic machinations were at work everywhere around us—in our cartoons, commercials, music, movies and, most tragically of all, our daycares. It was a time of Ricky Kasso, Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez and, later, Saturday Night Live’s The Church Lady. The media exploded with headlines and news specials about the supposed Satanic threat, and ambitious journalists tripped over themselves to attach a Satanic mandate to every societal transgression. ”

Forrest Jackson, contributor to Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s, was a young man during the height of the Satanic Panic and began prank calling Christian radio hosts pretending to be a Satanist. His favorite target was Bob Larson, an evangelical radio and television host who leapt into the Satanic panic with gusto, publishing multiple books against heavy metal and imagined Satanic cults with lurid titles like Satanism: the Seduction of America’s Youth and Rock & Roll: The Devil’s Diversion (Larson branched out with 1997’s UFOs and the Alien Agenda).

This is what Bob Larson is up to these days:

Bob Larson “The Real Exorcist”

But while he’s been mercifully reduced to a YouTube joke today, Larson used to wield considerable influence, stoking Christian fears that their children were engaging in Satan worship and violent Satanic rituals.

Jackson played for the Fantastic Fest 2015 audience several samples of Bob Larson’s unique brand of Satanic panic rabble rousing. Here’s a representative sample of the kind of nonsense Larson seeded:

“In Toronto, Canada a mother testified that her two foster children told her they were being forced to participate in satanic rituals conducted by their biological mother, her boyfriend, and her estranged husband. According to the foster mother, the two girls were forced to participate in ritual sexual orgies, cannibalism, and murder at their home and at graveyards. The children also told their foster mother of watching their real mother and father perform bestiality with dogs and chickens. The graveyard orgies included drawing pentagrams in blood. Bizarre as it sounds, this is not the only tale of adults forcing children to participate in satanic rituals. Satanism itself isn't illegal, but it's been linked to murder, sexual molestation, rape, kidnapping, and other crimes.”

Larson was correct that a sickness was infecting America, but it wasn’t the Satanists with diseased minds. Instead, it was the very people who had assigned themselves our nation’s moral watchdogs: the Christian evangelicals who could believe any evil and accepted ludicrous prank calls as fact because it fit their twisted ethical universe.

Dave Canfield, contributor to Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s, offered a further glimpse into the minds behind the satanic panic. Canfield wrote for Christian culture magazine Cornerstone during their remarkable run of exposés aimed at fear-mongering Satanic Panic voices like serial liars Laurel Rose Willson, John Todd, and Mike Warnke (who pioneered a bizarre evangelical Christian comedy circuit with stories from his fraudulent ex-Satanist high priest backstory). Canfield recalled for the Fantastic Fest 2015 audience their shock upon reading a leaked manuscript of Bob Larson’s novel, which includes “a fictional account of a naked 9-year-old girl that’s been lead through these various Satanic rituals and then is pulled through the rear end of a dead horse.” Responding to gasps from audience members, Canfield said, “This is all out of Bob Larson’s wonderful Christian imagination.”

It was the heavy metal rockers, dungeon divers, and day care workers who were made to suffer for the prurient imaginations of evangelicals; their delusions empowered by a mainstream media unwilling to question the religious grounding that lead America to the dark heart of the Satan worship panic.

John Schooley, who wrote the afterword for Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s, emphasized that the lingering effects of the satanic panic are still with us. “Really respected journalists were fanning the flame of this panic,” Schooley says, “It’s not just a kitschy Geraldo special.”

Geraldo Rivera 1988 Satanic Panic Specials

Schooley ended on the sobering reality of the persecution Christians, in mortal terror of imagined Satanists, imposed on Frances and Dan Keller. The Kellers were Texas day care center owners accused—by children and their gullible Christian parents — of dismembering babies, flying kids to Mexico to be raped by soldiers, throwing babies into shark tanks, and making Kool-Aid with human blood. “They served 20 years. They didn’t get out until 2013 and their charges weren’t thrown out until this year,” Schooley says, “And that’s kind of terrifying.”

Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s is available now from Spectacular Optical publications.