SATANIC PANIC: POP-CULTURAL
PARANOIA IN THE 1980s

Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s features new essays and interviews by 20 emerging and established writers who address the ways the widespread fear of a Satanic conspiracy was both illuminated and propagated through almost every pop culture pathway in the 1980s, from heavy metal music to Dungeons & Dragons role playing games, Christian comics, direct-to-VHS scare films, pulp paperbacks, Saturday morning cartoons, TV talk shows and even home computers. The book also features case studies on McMartin, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth and Long Island “acid king” killer Ricky Kasso. From con artists to pranksters and moralists to martyrs, the book aims to capture the untold story of the how the Satanic Panic was fought on the pop culture frontlines and the serious consequences it had for many involved.

PREORDER HERE

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FOREWORD
By Adam Parfrey

INTRODUCTION
By Kier-La Janisse

REMEMBERING MICHELLE REMEMBER
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

THE UNHOLY PASSION: SEX AND GENDER ANXIETY IN RUSS MARTIN’S EROTIC HORROR PAPERBACKS
By Alison Nastasi

DICING WITH THE DEVIL: THE CRUSADE AGAINST GAMING
By Gavin Baddeley

20-SIDED SINS: HOW JACK T. CHICK WAS DRAWN INTO THE RPG WAR
By Paul Corupe

MASTERS OF THE IMAGINATION: FUNDAMENTALIST READINGS OF THE OCCULT IN CARTOONS OF THE 1980s
By Joshua Graham

DEVIL ON THE LINE: TECHNOLOGY AND THE SATANIC FILM
By Kevin L. Ferguson

ALL HAIL THE ACID KING: THE RICKY KASSO CASE IN POPULAR CULTURE
By Leslie Hatton

« WHAT ABOUT THESE 10,000 SOULS, BUSTER? » GERALDO’S DEVIL WORSHIP SPECIAL
By Alison Lang

THE FILTHY 15: WHEN VENOM AND KING DIAMOND MET THE WASHINGTON WIVES
By Liisa Ladouceur

SCAPEGOAT OF A NATION: THE DEMONIZATION OF MTV AND THE MUSIC VIDEO
BY Stacy Rusnak

TRICK OR TREAT: HEAVY METAL AND DEVIL WORSHIP IN 80s CULT CINEMA
By Samm Deighan

STEALING THE DEVIL’S MUSIC: THE RISE OF CHRISTIAN METAL AND PUNK
By David Bertrand

THE TRACKING OF EVIL: HOME VIDEO AND THE PROLIFERATION OF SATANIC PANIC
By Wm. Conley

BEDEVILING BOB: PRANKING « TALK BACK WITH BOB LARSON »
By Forrest Jackson

CONFESSIONS OF A CREATURE FEATURE PREACHER: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE MIKE WARNKE AND STOP WORRYING ABOUT SATANISM
By David Canfield

BOUC EMISSAIRE: MANIFESTATIONS OF SATANIC ANXIETY IN QUEBEC
By Ralph Elawani and Gil Nault

THE DEVIL DOWN UNDER: SATANIC PANIC IN AUSTRALIA, FROM ROSALEEN NORTON TO ALISON’S BIRTHDAY
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

GUILTLESS: BRITAIN’S MORAL PANICS, SATANIC HYSTERIA AND THE STRANGE CASE OF GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
By David Flint

FALSE HISTORY SYNDROME: HBO’s INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL
By Adrian Mack

END OF THE 80s: PARANOIA AS COMIC CATHARSIS IN JOE DANTE’S THE ‘BURBS
By Kurt Halfyard

AFTERWORD
By John Schooley

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Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (March 31, 2015)
Équinoxe d’Automne MMXIV (September 22, 2014)

HEXEN 2039 (2006) & HEXEN 2.0 (2009-11) by SUZANNE TREISTER, Black Dog Publishing

SUZANNE TREISTER (b.1958 London, UK) studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London (1978-1981) and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981-1982) based in London having lived in Australia, New York and Berlin.

Initially recognized in the 1980s as a painter, she became a pioneer in the digital/new media/web based field from the beginning of the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organisations. Utilizing various media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolour, TREISTER has evolved a large body of work which engages with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge.

Often spanning several years, her projects comprise fantastic reinterpretations of given taxonomies and histories that examine the existence of covert, unseen forces at work in the world, whether corporate, military or paranormal.

HEXEN 2039

By SUZANNE TREISTER
2006

In 1995 SUZANNE TREISTER created the fictional alter ego Rosalind Brodsky, a delusional time traveller who believes herself to be working at the Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) in the twenty-first century. IMATI is an independent research institute with government and corporate clients, based in South London.

Consisting of drawings, interventions, a film, a website, a book and an event, HEXEN2039 charts Brodsky’s para-scientific research towards the development of new mind control technologies for the British Military.

The information in HEXEN 2039 is based primarily on actual events, scientific research and military histories.

HEXEN 2039 reveals links between conspiracy theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behaviour control experiments of the US Army and recent practices of its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of alarming new research in contemporary neuroscience.

The results of HEXEN 2039 were utilized between 2040 and 2045 in the development of a range of non-lethal weapons for remote alteration of belief patterns in the subject.

HEXEN 2.0 

By SUZANNE TREISTER
2009-2011

HEXEN 2.0 looks into histories of scientific research behind government programmes of mass control, investigating parallel histories of countercultural and grass roots movements. HEXEN 2.0 charts, within a framework of post-WWII U.S. governmental and military imperatives, the coming together of scientific and social sciences through the development of cybernetics, the history of the internet, the rise of Web 2.0 and increased intelligence gathering, and implications for the future of new systems of societal manipulation towards a control society.

HEXEN 2.0 specifically investigates the participants of the seminal Macy Conferences (1946-1953), whose primary goal was to set the foundations for a general science of the workings of the human mind. The project simultaneously looks at diverse philosophical, literary and political responses to advances in technology including the claims of Anarcho-Primitivism and Post Leftism, Theodore Kaczynski/The Unabomber, Technogaianism and Transhumanism, and traces precursory ideas such as those of Thoreau, Warren, Heidegger and Adorno in relation to visions of utopic and dystopic futures from science-fiction literature and film.

Based on actual events, people, histories and scientific projections of the future, and consisting of alchemical diagrams, a Tarot deck, photo-text works, pencil drawings, a video and a website, HEXEN 2.0 offers a space where one may use the works as a tool to envision possible alternative futures.

HEXEN 2.0 is the sequel to HEXEN 2039 which imagined new technologies for psychological warfare through investigating links between the occult and the military in relation to histories of witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing and behaviour control experiments of the U.S. Army.

Merci JLFRNR