If you listened to You’re Wrong About when it was presented by both Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes, you’ll probably remember that Marshall would open every episode by saying “I’m working on a book about the Satanic Panic.” Years went by. It never transpired. Eventually, she declared that she didn’t want to write a book after all. But all those years of research, not to mention the experience of podcast hosting, didn’t go to waste.
In The Devil You Know, the eight-part podcast from CBC, Marshall talks to various figures caught up in the Satanic Panic. The series is set mainly during the 1980s, when Americans were seeing the devil everywhere; the slightest behaviour outside of the norm could lead to witch hunts, jail terms, and ruined lives.
Each episode of The Devil You Know tackles “The Panic” from a different angle, using primary sources from the period. In episode two, Marshall looks at one of the era’s seminal texts, Michelle Remembers, a book about Michelle Smith, a woman who was convinced by her therapist Larry Pazder that she was repressing memories about suffering Satanic abuse as a child. Marshall interviews Michelle’s sister Charyl and Larry’s ex-wife Marylyn about what this strange time was like for them. Even without the Satan of it all, it’s a fascinating human story, full of questions around doctor-patient relationships, familial estrangement, and spousal betrayal.
Other highlights of the series include episode six, where Marshall talks with a man who was arrested as a teen for being wrongly suspected of being in a Satanic cabal with a school shooter, and episode seven, where she interviews four women who each served over a decade in prison after being falsely convicted for child abuse. One of the biggest factors in their false conviction was their homosexuality, and indeed, the ways in which the general air of fear was used to manipulate antipathy towards those who weren’t white and/or straight becomes one of the show’s most prominent running themes.
In the fourth episode, Marshall explores another major motif of the Satanic Panic: TV ratings. TV news and Satanic incidents were a poisonous ouroboros. Innocuous events were reported as having Satanic roots, and that widespread reporting led susceptible viewers to imagine more devil sightings, causing them to report further incidents. On it went.
While the wider themes of the podcast are clear, the ways in which they are elucidated can be clumsy. Between You’re Wrong About and You Are Good, Marshall’s podcasting experience has been in languorously chatting through all sides of an issue with a co-host or amiable guest. A sleeker, less discursive venture like The Devil You Know often feels an awkward fit for her.
Marshall can get tangled up in the wealth of her research, and her desire to underline how all the different facets connect frequently feels uncomfortable crammed into the comparatively narrow confines of a 40-60 minute episode.
There’s no real flow to the arc of the series; it plays more like a non-fiction anthology show than a singular work that’s building towards something. That’s extra apparent in the final episode, which though titled “Where Are We Now?,” is largely about the Jonestown massacre. Marshall stretches to explain why she’s ending a podcast about the Satanic Panic on a topic only tangentially connected to it and… sort of succeeds. But the fact it is such a stretch underlines how the show struggles to cohere as one unified production. Frankly, it almost feels as if she was surprised to get an interview with one of Jim Jones’ sons, and the best place to put it happened to be right at the end.
Nevertheless, despite the general messiness to the way the series hangs together, The Devil You Know gets one thing resoundingly right: the Satanic Panic stemmed from society being more willing to shun difference than to engage with it.
Although there are fewer accusations of devil worship and baby sacrifice these days, this toxic era lives on in places like the frighteningly powerful accusations of QAnon and the demonization of trans folk. As Marshall says, “This is a scary story because it hasn’t gone away.”
If there’s a single issue that’s connected all of Marshall’s podcast projects so far, then it’s the importance of empathy, and that is more true than ever in The Devil You Know. When we collectively start talking to the neighbours we don’t understand, rather than fearing them, perhaps we’ll finally be able to vanquish “the Panic” once and for all.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.