Page 69 - WTP Vol. XIII #1

~
“During the conservative Reagan and Bush admin- istrations, there was another eruption of tension, over changes in gender relations that had been brewing for a generation,” write Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker in their book Satan’s Si- lence, on the bizarre-seeming belief in Satanic cults that started popping up in America at exactly this moment in my youth. “Between the early 1960s and the early 1980s, many middle-class ad- olescents stopped keeping their premarital sexual experimentation a secret from adults, abortion was legalized, the proportion of unwed teenage mothers more than quadrupled, the divorce rate tripled (...) The swiftness of these changes un- settled many Americans, and society’s new villain became the satanic child molester.”
This was the first Satanic Panic, a kind of QAnon be- fore social media, when significant numbers of mentally balanced people became persuaded that the instabilities racking the country were best explained by a crowd of Devil worshippers cavorting obscenely behind the curtain. The Exorcist didn’t originate
that trend—most commenters locate it in the 1980 Michelle Remembers, an expose of “Satanic Ritual Abuse,” the popular term lending clinical authority to something that wasn’t happening—but the film did provide indelible imagery, serving as accessory before the fact. The grotesqueries claimed in Michelle Remembers and others of its kind (before Satan him- self appears, his minions torture Michelle by rubbing her with dead baby parts) weren’t metaphors for
the country’s lengthening political divide, especially over abortion; they weren’t exaggerated (Geraldo Rivera reporting that over a million Satanists were about their hoof-footed depredations) or hilariously unlikely (traumatized toddlers pointing the finger at Chuck Norris). They were real. They were happening. This could happen to you.
Witches, in fact, play a fascinating background role in the original screenplay to The Exorcist, though their presence, suspected by the detective who is trying to determine whether Burke Dennings’ gruesome death might be the result of DC Satanic ritual, is never con- firmed. Who gave the girl a Ouija board, if her mother has never seen it before? Who desecrated “Saint Mike’s,” vandalism that must have involved breaking in, painting a statue of the Virgin Mary with a signifi- cant amount of blood, building and affixing lewd clay genitalia? Moreso than in the novel, the possibility that witches are involved, to which Friedkin said he
remained open, is never ruled out. Reading The Exor- cist that way adds a “hidden cabal” element, one not only in keeping with its famous predecessors Rose- mary’s Baby and The Omen, but with all three films’ culmination in the Panic.
It also connects this most Catholic of horror films to the hysteria being created by a rising Evangelical base, and thus to one facet of our conspiracy-addled present. “This image,” write Nathan and Snedeker, “cast a wide swath of fear over the political and cul- tural landscape. Indeed, in the early 1980s, belief in ritual sex abuse conspiracies extended from a host of concurrent rumors that were promoted by law and order conservatives and the Christian media.” The grand guignol character of the rumors swelled and finally erupted, notes Pete Stanford in The Devil: A Biography, to include “drugs, abuse, torture and mutilation of animals and people, victims being buried alive in coffins, the sacrifice of adults and babies, ceremonial marriages to Satan,” and a good deal more. Some of the claims—the ritual killing
of a giraffe, entire toddlers flushed down toilets— were risible from the start. “There was no smiling, though, at other, related rumors,” write Nathan and Snedeker, “about rashes of stranger-abducted children, countrywide kiddie-porn mafias, or, later, satanist connivance in day-care centers...”
And there it is. Countrywide kiddie-porn mafias, run by witches. As seemingly unfathomable as the QAnon narrative has grown—Pizzagate, Frazzle- drip, blood drinking Devil cult in the halls of DC power—as transparently as it expresses stark horror at a woman having won the popular vote, at economic dislocation on all corners, at radical action from Bernie to Black Lives Matter—those
(continued on next page)
62