The shocking story behind the Satanic Panic: Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor take us into their film

Here & Queer is an interview series hosted by Peter Knegt that celebrates and amplifies the work of LGBTQ artists through unfiltered conversations.

The new documentary Satan Wants You has been haunting the film festival circuit since it debuted at SXSW this past — and now it's streaming free on CBC Gem. Directed by queer filmmakers (and real-life couple) Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor, the film essentially explores how a young Canadian woman and her psychiatrist helped ignite the global Satanic Panic with their bestselling memoir Michelle Remembers. 

Adams and Horlor — whose previous film Someone Like Me followed a LGBTQ refugee seeking asylum in Canada — stopped by the set of Here & Queer to talk about their journey bringing Satan Wants You to the big screen, and how they've managed over a decade of being both creative and romantic partners.

You can watch the full episode below:

Much of the story in Satan Wants You takes place on Vancouver Island, which is also where Horlor grew up. So he was well aware of the story of psychiatrist Larry Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith, the co-authors of Michelle Remembers.

"They were honestly everywhere," Horlor says. "Michelle and Larry were on the radio, newspapers, TV and you sort of had the idea that they're connected to what happened in countries all around the world. But we had no idea this story touched millions and millions and millions of people all around the world."

The story did not touch Adams, who had little knowledge of it going into the project.

"I grew up in the 80s, but I just I didn't know that this happened," Adams says. "I didn't know how big it was. I didn't know how many lives that it actually touched. And actually going back and going through the archive and actually studying what 'Satanic Panic' was, it was shocking."

Another shocking thing Horlor and Adams encountered was how much the Satanic Panic disproportionately went after queer people.

"Some of the earliest research we did was just going through newspaper archives," Horlor says. "And it was shocking to see how many newspaper headlines in the 80s were 'queer Satanists' or 'gay Satanist' or 'lesbians Satanists.' It really targeted queer people. When this spread from Michelle Remembers and people are starting to accuse daycare owners and teachers and preschool teachers of this, a lot of them were queer men and queer women. And their lives were ruined." 

Unfortunately, this feels not too dissimilar from the recent surge in targeting queer people — particularly drag queens — as "groomers."

"We first started studying and researching the story in 2018, and around that time was when QAnon and Pizzagate were really going on," Adams says. "And now five years later, you kind of see how it's progressed and how much more it's through the culture. Sam Smith, performing at the Grammys, set everybody off because he was doing that Satanic performance. And you just see its much more prevalent today from even within that five-year period."

"I mean, this was 40 years ago," Horlor says. "And today, it's the same thing if you are different than the mainstream.  It's just an othering of people. And it's just crazy that this is happening all over again."

Satan Wants You is now streaming free on CBC Gem.