I Learned About The Devil So I Could Watch Horror Movies: Part 1
Content Disclaimer: *TW: This essay contains examples and experiences of spiritual abuse*
This essay was first published on my Patreon September 2022. Stay tuned for Part 2.
I was forced to watch the movie,The Exorcist, by my bio dad after getting into fight with him and my bio mom. In their minds, I was being a defiant and hard to manage teen and needed to be scared shitless by the possibility that the devil could possess me if I continued behaving in a way they deemed to be unacceptable. I watched the movie and that night I crawled into bed with my sister, so scared that I couldn’t fall asleep without holding her hand. I was fourteen.
What was I so scared of? I was scared of evil spirits, believing they could take over my body and soul. I believed that I would go to Hell and burn for all of eternity. I was scared of ghosts coming to me and screaming in my face or doing things to hurt me. I believed that if I drew jagged lines, I was evil. I believed thinking I was bad for having “dirty” thoughts. This is before I even knew I was queer. My mind became an obsessive breeding ground for OCD thoughts regarding my eternal damnation once I died.
I always loved the concept of horror movies. I was fascinated by the characters and storylines and general fucked-up-ness they can be. However, I could never watch them. Until the age of 30, I could not watch horror movies without having intense bodily reactions and the inability to sleep for nights.
After the divorce from my wife, I struggled for about a year and a half to sleep throughout the night. I would be scared of seeing ghosts or spirits in the mirror, I was scared of sleeping with my toes pointed (connected to a memory of my brother having a night terror, his body in full contraction, hence his toes pointing and my mother shouting at me that he was possessed and that I brought the devil into the home). I was scared of noises and believed that spirits were waiting to possess me and take over my body.
I logically knew that none of this made sense. I knew that my values did not align with the fear that was taking over my body to a point that I could not control my heart rate. I was angry for not being able to control my reactions to the fear my fundamentalist Roman Catholic mother instilled in me over the years of my childhood.
My mother grew up during the height of the 1980s Satanic Panic. I did not connect this fact until I decided to read about the “devil”. I was walking in a used bookstore and saw the book, The Satanism Scare by James T. Richardson, Joel Best and David G. Bromley. Learning about the origins of the CONCEPT (Note: not EXISTENCE) of Satan, has changed my life in the sense that after 31 years, I am able to walk the world without the fear of being possessed, evil or Hell.
My bio mother tried to enter the convent not once, but twice. Both times, she was turned away due to her having a severe eating disorder that she used as a practice of “penance” after her father died of a heart attack. It was also her way of coping with a significant history of childhood abuse by him and her mother. Years later, she met my bio dad and then believed her actual life’s purpose was to have children. It was when my bio mom decided to have children that she continued the cycle of trauma she came from, with the additional component of fundamentalist religious beliefs.
Like most households in which fundamentalism is practiced, abuse was a regular and daily occurrence in my home. One of the key factors that made the abuse spiritual, is that it usually contained a component of mentioning or “summoning” god. My mother would perform “exorcisms” on me while splashing holy water in my face and holding a crucifix or saint Benedict medal (St. Benedict is known as the saint who battles evil spirits and demons). We were made to pray the rosary multiple times a day, we went to mass, we went to churches where females wore veils to cover their hair, my parents took me to a priest when I came out as a way to “change my lifestyle”, we went to prayer groups and youth groups and went to groups where we prayed the rosary as people spoke in tongues. We were prayed over and “taken under the holy spirit”. I remember having people pray over me and it feeling odd and weird. I would pretend to faint just so it would be over and to win good graces and acceptance from my mother for being a “holy” child. We would go to meditate in front of the holy eucharist to “keep jesus company”. My mother would tell us that she spoke to jesus and his mother, mary. She would tell us that she saw spirits come into her room at night and that she would be paralyzed and pray that god would protect her. To say we grew up terrified of god and hell is a gross understatement. Our whole identity was based off of the Catholic Church and fear.
When I began reading about the satanic panic, my mouth dropped open in disbelief at what I was reading. Not because what people believed about “satanic cults” was crazy (it was), but because these were things my own mother told me growing up.
A brief history of the Satanic Panic begins with the societal shift that happened in society of women entering the workforce. This followed the “Free Love” era of the 70s and the War on Drugs in the 80s spearheaded by Ronald Reagan. Reagan represented and promoted “traditional” American values rooted in Christianity.
With women entering the workforce, moral panic began to rise as it was thought that children would suffer from not being raised by their mothers. Daycares began to be labeled as places in where children were exposed to and at risk of abuse. Allegedly, the abuse these children were at risk of was sexual, satanic, ritualistic, violent, pedophilic and physical in nature. These rumours began in small and rural cities (Hamilton, Ontario, being one of them) and eventually spread across Canada and the United States. Reporting has indicated that one of the major influences of the rise of satanic panic were the fundamentalist evangelical churches which preached sermons about the risk children were under if they attended daycare. This narrative was confirmed by the conservative and christian political leaders, the police and FBI. In a podcast by CBC, interviewees shared gruelling detailed about the lack of evidence behind any of these claims. Police began investigating local daycares and child protective services workers began apprehending children on the suspicion they were being abused, despite no physical evidence to prove such a thing happened. Police ran “expertise workshops” on satanic ritual sacrifices and how to identify satanism. Examples such as: listening to music backwards will reveal hidden satanic messages, Dungeons and Dragons led people to perform evil magic in real life, graffiti was a symbol of satanic ritual, punk clothing, rock and roll culture, sex and drugs all were thought to be “signs” that someone was involved in a satanic cult which would undoubtedly harm children if given the chance.
Police interviewed children repeatedly about “what bad things happened to them”. Investigation into the police process for interviewing the children was revealed to be extremely problematic and unethical. Often times, police asked the children over and over if they were abused until they said yes. Children would share stories about what that abuse looked like (often, based on what police or parents instilled in them) and be rewarded for their “disclosures”. A number of allegations, child apprehensions and arrests were conducted during the period of the satanic panic. All rooted in word of mouth “evidence” and no concrete proof that any of these children were actually being abused.
To be continued