Purple-haired feminist filmmaker Chelsea Stardust’s tongue-in-cheek horror outing Satanic Panic offers more or less what one would expect from the title and poster, and if anything was probably marginally better than I was expecting. The cute presence of actress Hayley Griffith in the lead goes a long way toward making this ultimately disposable movie smell a little bit less like the garbage it really is. Griffith stars as financially struggling millennial Sam Craft, who just started her new job as a pizza delivery girl and needs every penny of every tip she can get. Venturing out of the pizzeria’s delivery radius in order to score what she hopes will be a big tip in an affluent community called Mill Basin, she instead stumbles into a devil-worship cult’s human sacrifice ritual and spends the rest of the night defending herself against rich occultists and otherworldly beings – which, pleasantly, are realized without the assistance of any cheesy CGI. Gross highlights include a bloodsucking kitchen creation, a grab-happy forest monster, worm-vomiting, and the sickening sight of a man’s intestines being pulled out through his mouth – all of which ought to satisfy the fanbase of Fangoria, which produced.
3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Satanic Panic is:
Class-conscious, suggesting that the wealthy get rich through evil – perhaps even satanic – machinations, and meanwhile stressing the protagonist’s working-class background in her victimhood and her struggle against them. Sam’s troubles begin when one of the Satanists fails to give her a tip to cover her gas – fails to pay his fair share, in other words. A stereotypically smug and entitled frat house jerk also stiffs her for a tip.
Anti-white. All of the nasty rich people are white, and the only blacks who appear in the film work at the pizzeria. A trashy old woman to whom Sam delivers a pizza mistakes her at first for “Mexicans”. She then gives Sam a tacky sweater that, as Sam later complains, “smells like racism”. Sam finds antagonism, therefore, not only among the upper class, but among the common people whose ranks she aspires to leave behind, if only culturally.
Misandrist. No positively depicted male characters appear in the film, and Sam is first harassed, then almost raped, and finally actually raped and impregnated before successfully escaping from Mill Basin. Her boss at the pizzeria is also unfeeling, and the coworker who helped her get the job expects to be able to get into her pants in return. Still a virgin, Sam has spent her life avoiding such advances. Significantly, the only male character given favorable mention in the script is an old boyfriend who had cancer, was unable to perform sexually, and was therefore no threat to her womanly independence. The ending has Sam happily riding her motorcycle into the clueless twilight of her solitary and probably nonprocreative future.
Rainer Chlodwig von K.
Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.