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Episode 666: The ’80s Satanic Panic

🕑 Added 2025-01-20 12:43:26 +0000 UTC

Comments

Michael Castleberry

My capstone research paper for my BA in History was on the Satanic Panic. Love this.

JRIII

First of all, EXCELLENT episode (and I’m only 1/3 of the way through). I really appreciated learning about each of your backgrounds and how that affected your experiences with the Satanic Panic. Even though I lived through the panic, my memories of it are limited to the hysteria around heavy metal music. Second: I have strong memories of watching Mazes and Monsters when it first aired on prime time TV. Based on the release date I was 14, which is probably why I was fascinated with the concept, but I saw it as “only a movie”, not as a warning of real danger.

Wood Duck

Great episode, and the point on general-absent-parenting angst (and possibly also some intergenerational lapsed-faith/not-being-as-religious-as-we-should stuff too?) was the one I was waiting for. Though Jeremys broad generalisation of boomers/post-WW2-culture throwing them all into one-generation-fits-all did cause me pain, those are the sort of generalisations that detract from the overall credibility of an episode. Even just acknowledging he was speaking in very broad terms would have been good!

James Eldred

Really good episode, you covered the topic seriously and respectfully with the right amount of humor. It's funny how all of this barely seemed to affect me as a kid. My mom was way more afraid of stranger danger after someone tried to abduct a neighbor. I think her biggest worry about me getting into D&D is that I would get TOO into D&D and not do anything else, which, based on how obsessed I was with video games, was fair. My mom was an 80s metalhead though so I guess she was already converted to Satanism.

Billiam

some kids in my hometown had the cops called on them because they were playing vampire the masquerade and their jug-hooting neighbors thought they were a satanic cult

Diamond Feit

I still won’t Google it!

JJR

in my neck of the woods, it was mostly about D&D and rock music. My church brought in someone who was an "expert" on these things and mostly talked about the music side of things. This persisted into the mid-90s in the region of Ohio where I lived. A couple of goth pranksters freaked some folks out and people thought it happening again. Also, in the mid-90s, there was a huge panic about child abuse (which people believed had satanic ties) in Wenatchee WA (I lived there for a few years much later) that lead to many innocent people being locked up. (43 adults were arrested on 29,726 charges of child sex abuse) There was definitely a through-line from the 80s moral panic to people jumping on board with that. Its sometimes called the "Wenatchee Witch Hunt".