Michelle Smith, the author of Michelle Remembers, during a television appearance on To Tell The Truth in 1980with patient Michelle Smith. This book purported to reveal Smith’s repressed memories of Satanic ritual abuse and moments from her childhood where she was tortured and abused by a secret cabal of Satanists.
Distance seems to have softened the impact of the period of Satanic panic. Our bygone obsession with Satanic ritual abuse has become a joke – a fitting anecdote to summarize ‘80s America and a prosperous idea factory for horror movies and procedural television. That is why it is so important that directors Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams take a pragmatic approach to the material.