Murder, she (mis)remembered

The satanic panic documentary at Hot Docs Cinema

What is now known as the satanic panic, and used to be thought of as an epidemic of satanic ritual abuse between late 1970s and 1990s, originated, weirdly, in Victoria, BC. It’s there that one not great day Michelle Smith, a stay-at-home wife grieving a miscarriage, decided to resume therapy with her psychiatrist Dr Lawrence Pazder. During those conversations, in a sort of folie à deux, the two “recovered” the horrific memories of her being kidnapped and tortured and forced to watch and commit torture, which also implicated her own mother who, she “remembered”, handed her child unthinkingly to the satanic sect. (Smith’s mother had by that time been, conveniently, long dead and unable to defend herself.) After the ordeal was over, Michelle’s brain, she claims, suppressed all the memories of the event, but she managed to recover them as an adult with Dr Pazder. 

The two published a book based on their recorded sessions, Michelle Remembers, and within a year or two from the book’s 1980 publication a full-blown panic raged across Canada and the US. (Sorry, American friends.) Satan Wants You, a documentary directed by Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams, currently showing at Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto and in limited release in seven other cities in Canada, looks at the story behind the book and its effects.