“I didn’t even know that there were any modern satanists and when I found out there were, it was a whole series of revelations,” she said. The film is constantly unfurling, revealing a misunderstood network of outsiders banding together to promote a liberal agenda, a reveal that Lane was initially unprepared for. Yes, it’s a stunt and one that is shamelessly tailored to provoke, shock and, for some, enrage but like many of the public-facing actions taken by the temple, it’s one that primarily aims to challenge the notion of a theocracy and how religious values can have a damaging effect on lawmaking.
It’s a battle that started in Little Rock, Arkansas, and one that’s documented in the film, a perfect crystallisation of what the temple seeks: equality. One of their overriding goals is to remind institutions and the broader public that America is a secular country and that a blatant Christian bias is antithetical to this, leading them to insist that any attempt to erect a statue of the ten commandments should be accompanied by a similar mission to erect a statue of the demon Baphomet. While satanic imagery is used, it’s not supported by any actual belief in Satan, a fact that often gets overlooked by the Fox News outrage which accompanies some of their attention-craving stunts.
Her focus is the Satanic Temple, a nontheistic group started in 2013, based out of Salem, Massachusetts. Her film doesn’t implore that you must accept or embrace satanism but instead it suggests that you at least understand them. “As a film-maker you talk about your film with different people and everyone that I talked to about this was absolutely certain that they knew what satanism is and everyone I’ve talked to has been completely wrong,” Hail Satan? director Penny Lane said to the Guardian. There was one slight problem: it was all a lie. Their goal was to rape and murder, usually children, and as the panic became more mainstream, satanism became a byword for real world evil, easily linked to any number of horrific crimes. From the 70s through to the 90s, the country was gripped by the so-called Satanic Panic, a widely reported phenomenon that crept up in everything from local news reports to Oprah, alleging that devil worshippers had constructed a vast underground network that had infected everything from daycare centres to Dungeons and Dragons.
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