Brief: Documenting Michelle Remembers (w/Sean Horlor & Steve Adams)
Following up on our review and coverage of Satan Wants You, Matthew talks with Canadian filmmakers Sean Horlor and Steve Adams about how they excavated the origin story of the Satanic Panic movement.
Show Notes
151: Satan Wants You Watch Party (Spoilers)
Satan Wants You
Conspirituality: UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series 4 | Michelle Remembers: Context & History
Conspirituality: UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series 5 | Michelle Remembers: Themes & Framing
Conspirituality - UNLOCKED: Michelle Remembers: Literal Symbols
Conspirituality - UNLOCKED: The Courage to Heal Pt. 1
Conspirituality - UNLOCKED: The Courage to Heal Pt. 2
The Smoke of Satan on the Silver Screen: The Catholic Horror Film, Vatican II, and the Revival of Demonology
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
You can catch us on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions.
For today's brief, I'm joined by Canadian filmmakers Sean Horlor and Steve Adams to discuss their excellent new documentary called Satan Wants You.
It's in theaters now.
And it's a film that pulls back the curtain on how Patient Zero of the Satanic Panic, which is a bizarre book called Michelle Remembers, was written, published, and marketed by its authors.
the late Lawrence Pazder and his client, later wife, Michelle Smith.
In episode 151, Satan Wants You Watch Party, Julian and I reviewed the film against the
backdrop of our prior coverage of the cultural impact of Michelle Remembers on figures like
Teal Swan, as well as phenomena like recovered memory theory and how it continues to haunt
some mainstream sectors of what is known as somatic psychotherapy.
We also explored how Michelle Remembers has an even more cursed legacy as an influence on today's Satanic Panic iteration, QAnon.
Now we left a lot of questions dangling in that episode and so I was happy to catch up with Sean and Steve via Zoom on their press tour and hear more about how they dug this story out of its very shallow grave.
And I really enjoyed talking with them because it confirmed for me the grace and care with which they approached this fever dream and the families.
It changed forever.
Now, just a note, I will encourage you to go back and listen to episode 151 for the backstory and some spoilers on the film, because there are a few parts of our conversation where we shorthand things in respect of the time that we had.
For instance, we discuss Sean and Steve's attempts to interview Bishop Remy Derue for the film, but he was in his 90s and he died before they could get the interview filmed.
And that's an important point because DeRue originally gave his blessing to the book and also facilitated a visit to Rome where Pazder and Smith brought their BS story to church officials for verification.
So to catch up on threads like that, 151 is your ticket.
Here's our conversation.
Sean Horlor and Steve Adams, thank you so much for joining me here on Conspiratuality Podcast.
Thank you for having us.
Our listeners have our review of the documentary already, so I'm just going to give this to you directly, very briefly.
We found it thorough, probing, sensitive, and also very timely, of course, so thanks for that.
Thanks for your work.
Yeah, thanks for that.
Yeah, we're huge fans, so it's a pleasure to talk to you.
Let's start with origin story stuff, but with you guys personally.
First of all, how old are you both?
Are you from Victoria?
Did you guys grow up Catholic?
What's the story?
All of the above.
Yeah, I grew up in Victoria after the book was published in 1980.
And my family, both my parents were practicing Catholics and left the church before we moved to Victoria from Edmonton.
And for me, this is, you know, like Michelle and Larry, spoiler alert for your listeners, lived in a big house overlooking the ocean 10 minutes down the road from my family.
And growing up in Victoria in the 1980s as a, you know, everyone listening knows something about the Satanic Panic.
You know a lot.
This is like the standard stuff that happened everywhere.
Like there, you know, people in black were going to snatch you off the street to murder and sacrifice you.
There were stores downtown in Victoria that allegedly had altars where children were murdered and animals were sacrificed.
And this is, you know, like the queer bookstore.
In town, they were satanists.
This is what it was at that time for me.
For myself, I had grown up in a small town in northern British Columbia, and we didn't really have a lot of exposure to it.
Even media-wise, we didn't get a lot of channels, so we didn't get to see a lot of the talk shows.
So I was largely unfamiliar with the satanic panic outside of what I saw in culture.
What you'd see on like Stranger Things or how it was represented through Dungeons and Dragons, but I didn't really have an understanding of just exactly the scope of what the Satanic Panic was.
And after the book came back into our lives in 2018, and we started to research it, that's when I really began to see just how crazy the story was.
Now look what it's done to you!
You know, this sort of scene of it's in the water in Victoria as you're growing up is incredible and this really confirms a conversation that I had with a friend of mine who spent some of their childhood growing up in Victoria and they knew the story as a kind of folklore.
They never thought that it was false.
As a Gen X kid at the time, they also knew where the car crash was supposed to have been.
They knew the highway.
They were shocked to find out that it was debunked.
It's quite extraordinary that you grew up almost on the movie set of this book.
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the Malahat Highway where the accident took place, Ross Bay Cemetery where Michelle was given away to Satan in this huge elaborate ceremony at nighttime.
That's just right downtown next to the Parliament buildings.
Like, it is...
And then every year after that, of course, right, there's graffiti, there's, you know, satanic pentagrams on gravestones, broken tombstones, and the rumors circulate again.
There's that portion in the film, and this is like real stuff, folks, where, you know, there's rumors spreading that the local Satanists who had abducted Michelle originally were going to steal children from the hospital.
And for multiple years, police officers had to actually be posted in the hospital to protect the newborns and their mothers.
Like it is just, you can't even make this up because like now people would just think you're telling a fiction or a narrative film.
It is just so surreal.
Now, you come back to the book in 2018, and I'm wondering if that has something to do with meeting up with Sarah Marshall, who becomes a kind of tour guide through the documentary, which I love because I think it's super important that very smart millennials are working so hard to make sense of this story.
Was that part of your reintroduction to this book?
No, well, we were doing a different project in 2018 on books on authors in British Columbia, and our researcher had provided us with 100 books, and midway down the list was Michelle Remembers.
I'd never heard of it.
Sean saw it and was like, oh my god, this book!
And his sister started to have these conversations about it and what it was, and that was what kind of spurred that on.
With Sarah Marshall, her podcast happened during the pandemic, so in 2020.
We hadn't listened to it.
We were doing all sorts of other research and we were deep into trying to figure out what the story was.
And we had a fairly good understanding of what the story was.
And then we got to listen to her five-hour podcast.
And that just spurred on a whole other level for us because she is one of the smartest people I've ever met.
Right.
Yeah, and like listening to her talk about it is just brings so much more context and information that I'm not even sure that we were able to think about.
Though if I could say about 2018, you know, like the funny thing for us that book came back into my life and for the first time into Steve's.
And this is like right after Pizzagate.
Like I have to say, like you start to, and right when QAnon rumors about, you know, Satanists Pedophiles infiltrating the government and Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, all these things that were happening.
And then seeing Michelle Remembers again, it was that moment where I was like, Oh my God, it's happening again.
Like this is exactly my childhood happening again.
And why is this happening again?
And that's sort of like for us was like, no one has ever told a documentary that explored the Michelle Remembers story.
And we have to do this.
Yeah.
I empathize or I really connect with you over finding Sarah's treatment along with Michael Hobbs of the book as incredibly perceptive.
I think the two jaw-dropping, I mean many jaw-dropping moments, but two that stand out are her sussing out from Michelle's descriptions in the transcripts Uh, that she's probably describing the Twilight Zone of a DNC in some of those dream sequences.
And then the other one is where, uh, there's one point closer to the end of the sequence where Michelle is telling, uh, Larry that she really wants everything to stop.
And Sarah hears a double meaning in this, uh, You know, appeal, which is, I want the memories to stop, but I also need this process, this dialogue, perhaps this fiction-making process, which I'm not in control of, I want it to stop.
And her sensitivity there, it was just, I think that opened a doorway into also empathizing with a story in a way that I never had before.
Yeah, I definitely think so.
I think one of the moments for us was when we actually got the tape with the therapy recording on it.
Well, let me let me ask you that.
How on earth did you recover the audio tapes and what did you first think when you heard them?
For us, it was a lengthy research process.
The acknowledgments in the back of the book is where we started.
There was a lot of reaching out to people.
We said if you didn't want to have your name published or anything, you can submit them to us anonymously.
And that's what happened.
Towards the end of the editing process of the film, we got one of the tapes in the mail.
And that was like, I'll never forget that day because it was a moment when, like, we all gather ground.
We all got there.
We got it digitized very quickly.
And us plus the producers were all listening to it.
And our jaws were just on the ground.
That's amazing because you didn't have a tape recorder.
You had to take it somewhere to be digitized first.
Oh my gosh.
We also had to be really careful with it because it was a really old tape and you could tell it was something that had been recorded on a bunch of times.
Yeah.
So we just wanted to be really careful.
It was like a literal artifact for us.
And it was, like, originally two reel-to-reel tapes that had been combined onto a cassette in the late 1970s.
Like, this is something that is... And, you know, there's, like, a lot of these tapes existed or still exist, is the thing, right?
Like, so many copies were made.
There were so many transcribers.
Oh, really?
Oh, yeah.
To actually type out the therapy sessions that Larry then took and cut and pasted into the book.
Like, it's quite the process.
You probably didn't have time to cover that aspect of it, because my impression was that Cheryl was the primary transcriber, but she was one of them.
But many people had to participate.
Or did I just miss that in the film?
It's Chidi, so Michelle's friend.
Oh, sorry, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
It was Larry's literary assistant in addition to being their friend.
And she was the one who sort of, you know, helped the taping process between the audio tapes to the, or sorry, the reel-to-reel tapes to cassette and helped send them out to transcribers.
And she really dived down into that whole, it's a quick, quick scene in the film.
You know, there's so much going on.
Yeah, right.
What are you focused on?
They were sent everywhere too.
It wasn't just like, they didn't keep them very tightly.
They were sent out to some schools for listening.
They were sent to churches and different religious institutions.
The tapes were widespread, so there's more tapes out there, but we could only get our hands on one.
So when Pastor says, oh, the tapes are being studied by the Vatican, he might be partially telling the truth.
Yeah.
And I mean, the whole transcription.
So the 600 hours of therapy sessions that they recorded was turned into one giant transcript that was given to Bishop Remy DeRue, the Bishop of Victoria.
Right.
And one who has that that exists somewhere as well.
He we were talking to him.
Oh, the people we have talked to.
You spoke to Bishop DeRue?
And a sister, Sister Margaret, who also was friends and worked with the bishop.
Like, you know, it's a 90-minute doc.
There's only so much that we could put in.
He passed away, like he was actually, you know, he was in his 90s and he passed away before we could actually have the full conversation and talk to him about this.
What was your sense of how he was going to respond to what had become of this story?
He had spoken to another journalist a few years before we were kind of so like probably like around 2017-2018 and we talked to her about her conversation and he was like pretty frank and he spoke openly about it and it didn't seem like he was like keeping a lot to himself within like what they were talking about so I mean, we were hopeful.
Yeah, we were hopeful that you'd be able to speak to us, but unfortunately, time wasn't on our side.
Incredible.
Well, that was my question about did you get in touch with church officials and did they have anything to say about it?
So, was there anybody else in that category who was able to speak on behalf of the church's influence on this book?
Sister Margaret would not talk to us.
So, this is the thing.
I mean, if you We go into sort of the belief and the layers of belief that allows people to believe these conspiracies and these rumors.
Like, if you have those pre-existing beliefs, if you're Catholic, if you're devout, this is still, you know, for a lot of the people who are involved in this story, this is still real.
Yeah, right.
In other words, it worked.
It worked.
The story worked.
You know, going back to the technology of reel-to-reel tapes, was the actual tape taken from reel-to-reel and packed into cassette, or was there a translation process in between there as well?
That's really in the weeds, but that sounds fascinating to me.
From what we could hear on the cassette tape, there is quite a lot of ambient noise that we had to actually help reduce so you could actually hear what was happening for the film.
My guess is that it was actually like the reel-to-reel was playing and then a cassette was actually taping.
Oh, right.
But yeah, we'd have to do some more investigation to confirm.
Well, the thing about what you've accomplished is that, you know, the whole film is about memory.
And it's about how memory is distorted, or it gets filled with noise, or we make of it what we will.
And then this is part of your memory, especially, Sean, growing up where you grew up, and you cut some very specific images into my brain that evoked the time.
Whoever styled that office that you did the recreation is was just they were a master.
I don't know if you did that or if you hired some genius but like the whole thing is caught between nostalgia and morbidity.
On the back of Pazder's office there's there's this you know three foot tall Virgin Mary glazed in plaster or ceramic.
It looks like it's kind of a cheesy one from like a mid-century church And it's standing beside the big old reel-to-reel tape recorder.
How important was it for you to just evoke the period and how hard was it to do?
So important.
I mean, part of our process for this that, you know, we knew that Larry had videotaped the sessions.
So there's actually video, not videotape, sorry, but film.
So he shot it on a film camera and, you know, In addition to the reel-to-reel audio.
And earlier on, when we were investigating, People Magazine did a profile and sent reporters to Victoria to speak to Michelle and Larry.
And in that People Magazine article from 1980, is a still of Michelle on the therapy couch with the two pillows and the plaid back print of her in a trance.
And this, for us, was like, we took this to our production designer and said, Use this to recreate the world.
And Juan Gonzalez was our production designer and his whole team really ran with it.
Like we knew that there was video that we searched and searched and searched to find and could not get.
And then when you're talking about recreations in the stock, this is why we did that because it exists somewhere.
And this is our take on what is actually real.
Well, it looks like it's shot on 8mm from that era in some ways, like you also filtered it properly.
It's lit in this kind of sepia glow.
Yeah, it's really, and there's something about it that I think It's so important to evoke the age because we're talking about a generation of people and where they come from.
And it's very, very pre-digital.
And there's so much work and labor involved in getting the story out and transcribing it and 600 hours of tape.
You know, it's like it was an incredible production.
And so I think it really makes sense that you had to recreate in real time this real life set.
Amazing stuff.
I think the other thing for us, a lot of people with DOCT are not big fans of including recreations.
But for us, we needed to visualize various aspects.
And one of the things that we really wanted to show was how the patient-doctor relationship started in kind of a regular fashion.
But they slowly get closer and closer together until they're cuddling on rubber mats at all sorts of different hours of the evening.
And it was really important for us to show that you get that subtext within the text, but you don't actually... I think it would be hard for a viewer to understand just how close they were coming together.
So that was like another reason for us to do the recrease the way we did.
And that they're conducting therapy with Michelle's top off wearing a bra.
Like this is in that photo from People Magazine.
It's like, we're not making this up.
This has actually happened, right?
Not only are you not making it up, but they presented that to People Magazine and Larry is filming it.
Presumably those films are around and he was going to do something with them.
And that, I did not know about the film, that puts another kind of spin on the kind of spectacle that he was actually engaged in, whether he was conscious of it or not.
You know, your sourcing was incredible.
You were able to speak with Marilyn, Larry's first wife.
You were able to speak with Teresa, his daughter.
They were very generous with their time and story.
Had they been waiting for a long time to tell it?
I think I don't know if they had been waiting.
I just think that they were ready.
The thing that always stands out to me the most is this was something that took over their lives for 10 to 15 years.
Like they were deep in it.
For Teresa, it was during some of her most formative years.
It was her first marriage.
It was with her childhood sweetheart.
It was this divorce that actually had the ability to ruin her life.
So she had to like really make sure that she was doing all the investigative work and getting
all of the receipts and making sure that she was building a case that made her be able
to keep her children.
And keep her house like Larry wanted to take the house out from under her and her four
kids like it's just.
Sorry, I can't.
No, no, no, but that's really good information.
So like she she was really on that like she was making sure that she had a very solid
case.
And in turn, I mean, nobody had really like what any time an investigator would reach
out to her.
She was always forthcoming with the information.
Um, but nobody had ever asked her about her side of the story and if she wanted to participate.
And when Sean first got in contact with Marilyn, um, and called her on the phone and said what he was doing, she, it was like, no time had passed.
She got on the phone and they spoke for an hour solid and it was just like she gave all the information and during the interview it was basically the same thing like she knew everything front to back.
It's amazing to hear the detail about him wanting the house.
I'm wondering, do you know this type of Catholic guy who is willing to completely fuck up, like absolutely trash his professional standards to betray the church that he says he's devoted to, but that's not enough, like he had to also Try to win in terms of assets, like that's a very particular type.
How did you wind up feeling about Larry after doing this?
You know what?
I mean, it takes two to tango.
That's sort of what I feel about this story.
And, you know, there's in addition to what you see in the film.
And honestly, like, you know, the family members, as Steve was mentioning, had never gone on public record before.
So a lot of this was new to us.
It was new to Sarah Marshall, who you mentioned earlier.
Hearing the family side changed some things for her and how she thought about this story as well.
Right.
In addition to them, there are, you know, I conducted 40 audio interviews.
So there's a lot more people, childhood friends who live next door, a woman who lived with Michelle when they were, you know, in their 20s.
And Michelle first started seeing Larry in 1972 for four years before any of this satanic stuff happened.
Right.
The publicists who traveled with them when Michelle Remembers came out.
There's the publisher's wife and the publisher himself, who was the Thomas Congdon, who was the editor of Jaws, which also covers this story.
There's so many different layers and a lot of it does come out in the film but you know you hear all these stories and it does definitely influence me where you know it's hard to say Larry is to blame for this or Michelle is it's for me it's both of them acting together that created this huge societal failure right that affected millions of people around the world
Right.
Well, let me go there then, because Michelle Smith declines to be interviewed.
What was on your question list for her?
And have you heard anything from her or maybe her lawyers since this has dropped?
We haven't heard anything from her.
I mean, we contacted her twice, just making sure that we were doing our due diligence to make sure that she wanted to, if she wanted to say her piece, we were going to give her the time to say it.
She made it very clear to us that she didn't want to participate, which we understand.
But I mean, the question list is a laundry list.
It would have been a fascinating interview to Finally get her perspective on what had happened, and how she feels now, you know?
I mean, she could recant, she could say that it's not true, she could say that Larry did it, she could say a multitude of things, but at this point in her life, she's not ready to do that.
I gotta ask you about a kind of penny drop moment where Michelle's sister describes the Smith family chaos growing up, where It just becomes a very mundane story of maybe something is being recalled here, but it's not being recalled in a transparent way.
And that was also sort of part of having this very strong sense, listening to the tapes, that Smith We use this metaphor in our review of the film that Smith is kind of pulling a bit of a Kaiser Soze role on Larry during the therapy where, you know, who knows what she's going through, but it does seem that she's very talented at pulling details together or out of these so-called memories that would appeal to his sense of
Did you get that same sense as well?
Do you feel that that's fair?
That as much as he needed that story that she also wanted him to have it?
A hundred percent.
And you know, like, it's interesting too, you're talking about how the story unfolds in therapy.
We show some of the home videos that Larry shot while he was a doctor in Western Africa.
These tribal ceremonies that he took as a, you know, they're satanic and cult-like.
And that formed his worldview that bled into the book.
Those videos he showed, you know, we heard from everyone.
He showed those to everyone, like Chidi, Cheryl, Michelle's sister remembers watching them.
So like that, you know, like there's that section of the film where Charles Ennis, the Wiccan police detective, sort of goes through and picks apart and all our other experts do to the passages in the book.
Where, you know, something happened in the video that Michelle then relays in the therapy sessions and it's like, you know, for me Crystal clearly must have shown those videos to her and she fed that material back to him maybe under hypnosis, though they claim that she was never hypnotized.
You know what I mean like it's just and you're telling a story that he wants to hear and he's telling a story she wants to hear.
But it's also they're doing like intensive therapy they're doing six hours a day there's no way that somebody can come up with all this information just all the time so she's reading books she's like doing the research and then she's bringing it back into the therapy sessions and she's like saying no more but he's like I need more so she's like okay I'm gonna read the book and give it to you like And they are falling in love, obviously, and this is part of how they do it.
This is their story, and it happens to be recorded, and then it becomes a piece of media.
And then when it becomes a piece of media, then there's the impact.
And I wanted to ask you about all of the archival footage that you went through and you ended up putting into the film that shows these journalists, Valerie Pringle, Dawn Herron of the CBC, interviewing them, really just handing them the mic.
And now you're saying, oh, well, nobody came to Marilyn for her story.
But also, none of those people pushed back on anything that they said.
So what did it feel like listening to journalists just not do their job?
It was like everybody was Geraldo.
Yeah, I think specifically, I mean, you mentioned Valerie Pringle.
That clip that we include in the film is from, you know, the midday new news in Toronto where she's talking about eating feces and sex cults and sacrificing children, just like you talk about, you know, Chernobyl at that time, right?
Like in a flat newscaster, here's what's going on, people.
She does say with a huge shoulder pads, she says that people find that very disturbing or something like that.
It's just so anodyne!
It's incredible!
For me, it's like, yes, you look at those media clips, but you have to understand the whole chain that led to that, right?
So you have Michelle looking at this as the, you know, patient zero of the satanic panic, her saying that she is having these dreams and recovered memories, her doctor who she trusts saying this is real, it's happening to you, Going to the church who's saying these are also real we're going to investigate them and take them to the pope and have the church actually saying this is true to police officers then also saying hey look this is book is physical evidence that this is happening let's investigate crimes in our communities and then the lack of evidence is evidence because they're satanists and then the whole psychiatric profession saying we're also looking into this like you have to like
When you look at it that way, when it gets to the mainstream news, of course, they're like, well, all these all these pillars of society are saying this is true.
They're not questioning it.
Yeah.
How much time does Valerie Pringle have with her producer to get the story in that morning or the day before and say, hmm, I wonder what I want to ask and how?
Because as you're saying, it's been pre vetted.
It's institutionalized already.
Like if if if Congdon published it, then why not?
Yeah.
And I still think, like, even with Valerie Pringle, we couldn't include the whole interview, but she does kind of, like, push back a little bit.
But even those pushbacks doesn't matter because, like, the other shit that she's saying is still so, like, crazy that people are just, like, going to want that.
And the guy who's, I mean, I love your talking heads.
You really collected a wonderful bunch.
Charles Ennis, as you mentioned, who knew that Vancouver had a Wiccan cop.
Um, Blanche Barton of the Church of Satan, and then the FBI guy, Ken Lanning, uh, fantastic find who's able to say, oh yeah, uh, I was in neck deep.
I was supposed to do this stuff and, uh, boy, uh, it was really hard to believe.
And I was just, I think is the only time I felt bad for an FBI dude.
Because he was clearly over his head at the time and really wants to walk it back.
I wanted to ask, though, did you come across anyone who wanted to speak to, I mean, maybe this is another documentary, but People who would have spoken to the direct impact of the book on their lives because, you know, there's like thousands of children whose parents were obsessed with the book.
It really disrupted their lives.
I mean, that's part of the context here.
Did you hear from anybody like that?
We came, I mean, Kelly Michaels is somebody that we feature in the film, her case.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
Her case is, as all of them are, just you read it, she actually went to prison and it is just shocking with no physical evidence, horrendous crimes that she's accused of involving children, five years in jail, comes out, And her life is just, you know, like you are not the same after that.
And for us, like we did want to, Debbie Nathan, the investigative journalist, was going to connect us to Kelly Michaels.
And we, you know, it's a 90 minute film.
We really wanted to focus on the origin story of the Satanic Panic.
I think that is a different film.
And there, you know, there's possibly a series where you could look at all of these cases and look at the different adult survivors versus the daycare trials versus the West Memphis Three.
There's so many.
Different layers and so many different experiences of terrible that happen to people.
Well, I'm glad that you brought up Debbie Nathan because that was my next question.
She, you know, investigative journalist superstar who ends up in your film giving a kind of elegy for the apparent ineffectiveness of her reporting at the time.
And so I wonder how it felt for both of you to hear that.
And, you know, perhaps by contrast, what might your highest hopes be for this film?
I mean, when we heard her say that, it was like a disparity moment.
It was like one of those moments where you try so hard and you put so much effort into trying to get the proper information in front of people and realizing that people just will bypass that and go towards the thing that's the easiest information to consume, I guess.
And to see her just to feel that way was really hard.
It made me think a lot about what we were making, what we were doing.
It made me think about current culture and how people are willing to believe the wackiest shit without any sort of evidence.
Um and it just made me wonder if like this is part of the human psyche and that like you're it's going to be something that's always going to exist within human nature and if we can never really like change that.
Our film has been interesting.
I mean you have a great story about the Epoch Times.
So like when we were at Hot Docs for the Canadian premiere in Toronto, this article ran, I think, immediately after the premiere in Utah or involving a case in Utah where a woman in 2023 is claiming to be a satanic ritual abuse survivor.
And this is and then specifically mentions the film.
Our film is why she's come forward with her truth.
Uh that this happened to her and this is real and there are satanists and our film is wrong to us in this in the Epoch Times and for this to for us to actually see that I'm like wow we're perpetuating the cycle again by creating media that's debunking what happened 40 years ago and it's just I don't know I mean I can see why Debbie You know, Debbie Nathan, her work helped stop the satanic panic in combination with Ken Lanning, Charles Ennis, all of these, Elizabeth Loftus, all these people who do speak in the film.
It stopped, like it wound down and people realized this wasn't true and it's all made up.
The majority of people, right?
So she did do that, but I can understand her feelings for it to return and that, you know, the people just fall into the same behaviors and the same traps and it's...
What do you do?
Well, one thing that you do is you record the history, which is what you've accomplished.
And I also hear you say, in relation to Debbie's comments, but also the woman that comes forward for this article in Epoch Times, is that there are hard limits to the tango between the bunk and the debunk.
There's going to be a lot of people who will harden in response to your treatment and in some ways you might have to be satisfied with knowing that part of what you're doing is you're helping You know, people like me stay sane, right?
That people who actually care about the effects of conspiracy theories on the possibility for a reasonable politics, for example, that we actually need good documentation for what has actually happened in order to support our lives and our work, but actually addressing people who will say that your film is a piece of counter-propaganda, that requires something else entirely.
It's like it has to be outside, probably, of the discourse of, well, this is what really happened.
And I don't know what that is.
Do you guys have any ideas?
Steve?
I don't know.
I mean, my brain goes to fiction.
My brain goes to to to the video games that my children play.
Like it just it's like this is what I'm struggling with, actually, on our podcast and in the rest of my work is, OK, you showed this thing.
To not be true, and you even gave reasons for why it happened, and you expressed empathy for why people got sucked in.
And now what?
Now what?
Because, you know, another sort of TikTok platform has opened up dedicated to promoting the thing that you're saying is harmful to public health.
And so, yeah, I'm always like, over my shoulder, there's like, okay, what kind of thing can I make that would be as effective as Michelle remembers, but in reverse?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like, what kind of positive bullshit could I make up with my therapist that would have
a healing effect upon the world?
Yeah.
Well, we can we can get together and talk about that later.
But it's a pleasure to speak to you both.
I'm really happy for the work that you've done.
I hope you don't get too much blowback for it.
And I hope you're sleeping well and all of that.
Thank you.
Thanks for this discussion.
It's been really great to talk about this with you.
Yeah.
Thank you both.
And thank you for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
