It sounds like a Brian McNaughton novel, but Smith claimed it was all true. To warn the world, she and Pazder wrote Michelle Remembers, a blockbuster memoir that helped spark America’s Satanic Panic in the 1980s. People who should have known better became convinced that Satan lurked under every heavy-metal album cover and operated day care centers across the country. Smith and Pazder left their respective spouses and married each other; they appeared on Oprah, went on a national book tour, popped up in People magazine, and shopped around a movie adaptation of their book, which was kept out of theaters thanks only to threats of a lawsuit from both the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVey and Smith’s father.
Michelle Remembers was a foundational text that brought recovered-memory syndrome and Satanic Ritual Abuse into the mainstream, updating for the ’80s lurid, turn-of-the-century conspiracy theories about white slavers running an international network of sin. The Satanic Panic posited a cradle-to-grave satanic network that indoctrinated children into sex and drug rings, using Saturday morning cartoons and He-Man action figures, with New Age occultists wielding crystals behind it all. Eighties America was ready for conspiracy theories, no matter how silly, and we’re about to meet a man named Russ Martin who had a few for sale.
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Could the demonic ordeal described by Michelle Smith possibly be real? (Spoiler alert: No.) Credit 30
Logically, Playboy Press published most of Martin’s kinky, cynical, psychosexual books. Credit 31
Russ Martin’s Conspiracy of Kink
Between 1978 and 1984, Russ Martin wrote seven books about the Satanic Organization, a global conspiracy dedicated to the Devil and run by the elite 0.01 percent who rule society and use mind control and body swapping to destroy their enemies. Rhea is an outlier: nothing more than the straightforward story of a cheating Hollywood executive, the witch who seduces him, and the wife who ends up impaled on Satan’s ice-cold, two-pronged penis.
After that, he stepped firmly into the new decade with The Desecration of Susan Browning. Susan and Marty are young actors in Los Angeles about to make it big when Marty saves a wealthy woman named Wanda Carmichael from being raped. Wanda is intrigued by this young stud, and soon Marty has disappeared, filed for divorce, and is living with Wanda on her fabulous estate. The Satanic Organization has made him Wanda’s love slave using an obsession spell. As he tells Susan, if Wanda asked him to kill his ex-wife, he’d do it in a heartbeat.
This was Satanic Panic fan fiction, updating the Michelle Remembers fever dream of a global satanic conspiracy to the yuppie-infested ’80s and giving it a kinky twist. In the next five books, Martin returns obsessively to certain themes: betrayal by authority, body swapping, mind control, and an ever-shifting power exchange as obsession spells bounced from character to character like pervy pinballs. Lisa Black, a minor character in Susan Browning, takes center stage in The Devil and Lisa Black. In The Possession of Jessica Young we meet Stephen Abbott, head honcho of the Satanic Organization, locked in a psychic war with Jessica Young, whose powerful abilities spell trouble for Satan. Abbot mind-controls Jessica’s sister, Jessica teams up with a cop to stage a rescue, the cop betrays Jessica, and then Jessica’s sister betrays Jessica, too.
And so it goes: betrayal bleeds into betrayal in an endless blur of sexualized dominance and submission. Nine-year-olds are trapped in adult bodies. Powerful women are turned into French maids. Psychic vampires from Hong Kong murder children in Washington, D.C. The final installment takes place at a military academy, which is also a secret base for swapping the minds of older Satanic Organization loyalists into the bodies of teenaged cadets. The only ones who can resist the mind control are virgins. Lest one think this is too kinky for mainstream publishing, know that when Playboy Press shut down in 1982, Tor instantly picked up the rest of Martin’s series.
Underneath all the pseudosexual silliness was the message that a decadent elite controlled everything. In Martin’s world, everyone was either a master or a slave. Satan was the force that made your dreams come true at the price of your soul. Satan was the cause of all corruption. Satan was the reason things never worked out. Resistance was futile. The game was rigged before you were ever born.
The horror of these books is that Satan always wins. Just look at the world. The evidence is everywhere.
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All the way back to Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, with its little creeps Flora and Miles, kids in fiction have been trouble. In the ’40s, Agatha Christie’s Crooked House featured a twelve-year-old psychopath named Josephine, and Ray Bradbury’s 1946 short story “The Small Assassin” gave us a baby out to murder his parents. But the ’50s were the true decade of the terrible tyke. The decade kicked off with Richard Matheson’s short story about a spider baby, “Born of Man and Woman.” In 1953 came Jerome Bixby’s classic “It’s a Good Life,” with its all-powerful, bratty three-year-old psychic god Anthony. It has been adapted three times for The Twilight Zone (the original series, the reboot, and the feature film) and once for The Simpsons.
The next year saw the arrival of the twin masterworks of killer-kid literature: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and William March’s The Bad Seed. John Wyndham rounded things out with The Midwich Cuckoos in 1957, which was adapted for film as Village of the Damned in 1960. For the next ten years, evil kids belonged on film. Turn of the Screw became director and cinematographer Freddie Francis’s dripping, doomed, black-and-white chiller The Innocents (1961). Lord of the Flies hit the silver screen in 1963, and then Jack Hill gave us Ralph, Virginia, and Elizabeth Merrye, three murderous adults with the minds of children in 1964’s Spider Baby, followed by the game-changing satanic fetus of Rosemary’s Baby and in 1970 Freddie Francis did it again with Girly.
As discussed in Chapter 1, Thomas Tryon’s 1971 evil-twin best seller The Other inspired the horror boom of the ’70s, with its underage murderers playing big brother to the most infamous killer child of them alclass="underline" Damien Thorn. Wanting to cash in on the success of The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard hired screenwriter David Seltzer to write The Omen, a smash that spawned two sequels and numerous remakes (as well as popularizing 666 as the “number of the beast”).
A few weeks before the movie debuted, Seltzer wrote a novelization of his screenplay that ran a slim 202 pages and it became a surprise hit, selling 3.5 million copies. It’s one of the better movie novelizations, with the film’s big scenes all present and accounted for. Seltzer adds even more details, such as gutter journalist Keith Jennings being so lonely that he creates a friend by sticking a cooked chicken on a root beer bottle and making it dance. There’s also a nutty backstory in which one of the priests selected to kill Damien reminisces about doing missionary work in Africa, where he fell in love with a young man and was forced to watch his lover eat his own testicles before being flayed alive.