Hot Docs 2023: Satan Wants You

Michelle Smith is patient zero of the Satanic Panic. Her memoir, Michelle Remembers, written with her psychiatrist Larry Pazder, spun a ghastly tale of recovered memories, childhood horrors, and Satanic ritual abuse that whipped up a frenzy in North America during the 80s and 90s. However, Michelle’s story was entirely made up, by both her and Larry. Nonetheless it ignited a maelstrom that destroyed the lives of many. Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor’s Satan Wants You unpacks this story and the damage it caused to Michelle and Larry’s family members and the broader culture. Packaged in the slick, manipulative style of contemporary true crime, Satan Wants You is undeniably entertaining and the sort of documentary you could see yourself binging on a Saturday night on Netflix.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the film is the sheer audacity of the story. Our contemporary culture is notoriously ahistorical, so even a story like Michelle Smith and Larry Pazder’s from 1980 has mostly been forgotten in the culture at large. Satan Wants You goes back to the beginning and uses archival footage, recreations, and interviews with Michelle and Larry’s family members to tell their story and dissect the social hysteria at large. Most effectively, it uses Larry’s never-before-heard audio recordings of his sessions with Michelle, which demonstrate an emotional torment that complicates the falseness of her story. It doesn’t take long for the interviewees to rip apart the claims of Satanic ritual abuse, but the audio recordings make clear that Michelle was nevertheless a troubled woman. Considering that she refused to be interviewed for the film, and lives in isolation in Victoria, BC to this day, the recordings give her a voice in the larger proceedings.

Less effective are some of the other hallmarks of true crime documentaries that Adams and Horlor employ in Satan Wants You. Interviews are unconventionally framed with lots of headspace, dark lighting, and a narrow depth of focus. Recreations use stand-ins for Michelle and Larry to take us “into” their therapy sessions and give context for the audio recordings, but they also lend the film a hacky veneer. The constantly booming and screeching sound design, which tries to pack every single revelation and archival moment with dread, adds to the manipulative approach. 

I can’t really blame Adams and Horlor for approaching the story as a trendy true crime flick. It’s the dominant documentary style of the day and I can see viewers eating up the film and its approach once Satan Wants You inevitably hits streaming. But there is a luridness to the approach and a skimming of the social implications of the material, which undercuts the effectiveness of the work. As does the film’s insistence on identifying Catholic hysteria as the root cause of the panic.

The film features interviews with a member of the Church of Satan as well as a Wiccan police detective, who both attempt to correct the record on these counter cultural practices. But when Michelle and Larry’s story is already so patently ludicrous, having these shallow defenses of Satanism seems unnecessary, and scapegoats Catholic superstition and prejudice as the root cause of the Satanic Panic. The social and psychological causes of the Satanic Panic go much deeper than problems with American Catholicism, and are much more troubling on a societal level, but Satan Wants You only gestures at these with links to QAnon and other hysterical social movements.

The film is on stronger ground when it digs into Michelle and Larry’s relationship and the details that inexplicably seemed to slip away from history, such as the fact the two got married during their media tour. Michelle and Larry are troubled individuals who seem well-meaning in one sense, but are undeniably driven by darker and more disturbing impulses in fabricating this massive lie. For Michelle, it’s a complicated, damaged relationship with her abusive father and devout mother, using the stories of Satanic ritual abuse to somehow blame her father’s actions on her helpless mother. For Larry, it’s a kind of colonial dissociation, which fabricates Michelle’s story and explains the meaning of her lies as a way to process his discomfort and fear of West African tribalism he experienced as a Catholic missionary.

The film is riveting when it focuses on Michelle and Larry, the dysfunction of their relationship and their creating of the story. It’s on less sure ground when it tries to make broader commentary on society at large. Nevertheless, Satan Wants You is an effective reminder of how social hysteria works and an expose of how easily our therapeutic culture can create trauma while attempting to heal it.

6 out of 10

Satan Wants You (2022, Canada)

Directed by Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor.

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