It was a mild night late last summer that I ventured out with a couple of my mates to the dense woods which lay about twenty minutes from my house. Clad in all black get-ups, our super goth crew were in high spirits as we made our way up the path that bore us away from the safety of the street. But as the undergrowth crept in, and the lights of civilisation vanished into the inky blackness of the trees, fear descended. After several unplanned detours and a hasty run from a dog walker, we whipped out our phones for an unatmospheric check of Google Maps. Having located the forested gravesite that haunted local urban leg- end, we doubled back until a disappointingly well maintained tombstone lurched into view. We squatted before it. Out of a satchel we pulled candles, incense, photos, and aromatic foods (a minestrone Cup-a-Soup we grabbed after a last minute checklist go-over). We linked hands and began to chant. It was time for a seÌance.
With a grand total of zero spirits contacted and not a curse or hex on us, we left the woods about twenty minutes later hugely under- whelmed. Still maybe the dumbest scheme any of us have ever willingly participated in, we look back onto our voyage into the spirit realm with palpable disappointment and appropriate bewilderment. What possessed a group of supposedly smart youths on the wrinkly side of adolescence to head out in search of the macabre? Certainly a dislikeable amount of self-conscious irony. Perhaps a dash of morbid curiosity. Definitely a desire to have something to talk to each other about after three long months trapped in a suburb whose ghastliest offering bursts forth from a KFC drive-thru. We were also fascinated by the idea of what we thought teenagers should do, aware we were fast being forced out of adolescence by overdrafts, pension schemes and facelift consultations. But where does this link between teenagers and the occult come from? Why is it such a recurrent trope? To find out, we must venture back to the era of the scrunchie.
A ‘Satanic Panic’ broke out amongst conservative parents everywhere in the tumult of the early 1980s. Apocalyptic visions of damaged youth wafted like the scent of baked cherry pie from television sets across the suburbs. With the outsourcing of American industry, the Cold War being brought to the boil and the increasing secularisation of society, middle class suburb-dwellers needed something on which to pin their escalating fears. Thankfully, daytime television was around to provide it. Audience-hungry producers of panel shows, newscasts and infomercials determinedly hit their audience’s sweet spot, located somewhere between conservative good taste and appalling horrors experienced from a safe distance. So tale after tale of satanic priests, sacrificial victims and cult escapees came forth to titillate their viewers with stories of a secret, insidious world just outside the picket fence. Mostly relegated to syndicated talks shows in local markets, these tall tales eventually scaled the heights of a national audience. Even Oprah was not immune from rustling up some satanic scares. For the faithful, mega-church tours of “Satan survivors” sat nicely alongside the regular programme of light shows and concerts playing at their local mega-church, and exacerbated their increasing anxiety about the recession of Christian values from American public life; the youth were at risk of straying from the path of the Lord.
And stray they did. The consumer culture of the 1980s brought with it the phenomenon of the neighbourhood mall, a “cathedral of consumption,” according to a historian of the period. Here teenagers congregated away from the watchful eye of concerned guardians, speaking in a language of references and slang impenetrable to parental ears. Thus the teenager – an alienated storm of raging hormones adrift in a secular ocean – became a site of crippling anxiety for any respectable, neoconservative parent.
The rot was first located in the fantastical realms and Nordic graphic design of popular role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, after a handful of suicides and deaths amongst its young players. But it wasn’t until the rise of heavy metal bands that the mainstream of youth culture was believed to have been sucked into the Satanic void. All hell broke loose. In the 80s, where media networks had multiplied but transmitted only one way, mis and partial information could spread like wildfire.
So protest groups were founded and campaigns drawn up, all in the name of halting an epidemic that existed only on television and in the minds of those who watched it. The cultural reaction has been swift and ceaseless. The camp and ironic have found fertile ground in such a ludicrous phenomenon. We can see its tendril unfurling in the early 90s, with David Lynch’s zeitgeist-capturing Twin Peaks exploring the mysterious dark side of blonde small-town cheerleader Laura Palmer. Teen girls, forever the impenetrable canvas onto which social anxieties are projected, seem to bear the brunt of these ironic reinterpretations. It’s there from The Craft and Edward Scissorhands to Heathers (featuring the immortal exchange “You look like hell!” “Yeah? I just got back”) right through to Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body, which plays as a pastiche of its ironic forbears. The obsession with teenage Satanists has transformed into a fascination with “Satanic Panic” itself, the transformation of pentagrams (alongside chintzy furnishings) into the realms of kitsch.
Today the fear of adolescent occultists is celebrated in the Kiddiepunk zine Teenage Satanists in Oklahoma, and this week sees the release of Regression, which stars Emma Watson and Ethan Hawke, and mines the idea of ‘repressed memory,’ which fuelled the 80s hysteria by promising that anyone could potentially recall being attacked by Satan’s disciples at a moment’s notice. That many of the televangelists and authors who spurred the Satanic Panics were quickly exposed as frauds really doesn’t matter. The concept of an army of teen Satanists is so ludicrous, so potent and rife, that it needn’t be ‘real’ to be endlessly fascinating and wildly entertaining. The imprint that this footnote of 80s cultural history has left in the media and the zeitgeist is inescapable – and alluring enough to send a gang of overgrown kids off into a dark wood on a summer night
