No it wasn’t.
The “satanic panic” was about 18 years after this spate of movies. The movies were made between, say, 1968-1974, the multiple personality/satanic cult hysteria was mid-to-late 1980s.
Don’t forget The Devil In Miss Jones.
Satan had a lot of influence back then, due to the backmasking on all the rock songs.
I think it was as suggested the relaxation of censorship codes etc .
As well as being a strong dramatic use it was a good excuse to have a bit of nudity (for purely necessary ritualistic reasons of course) …
You don’t get it. See, the kids thought that they were the ones in control . . . heh-heh-heh . . .
There was also a spin off of sorts from the Bremuda Triangle stuff in the 70s as well. The BT was sometimes caller the Devils Triangle and there were a few TV movies showing Satan as behind the mysterious goings on in that area. I remember one with the Flying Nun’s “Carlos Ramirez” as the devil causing ships to vanish and helicopters to crash while the pilot says the Our Father. This stuff scared the pants off me when I was a kid.
There were a few hints in Halloween 4 (1988) that Michael Meyers was being protected by some sort of (implicitly Satanic) cult. (This appeared nowhere else in the series.)
Totally awesome typo for the thread.
You mean HAW HAW HAW, right?
And werewolves. Don’t forget werewolves.
Actually an analogy with Comics comes to mind, we had a lot of new Horror type comics launched in the 70s as well:
It seems to me it would take a God-fearing hyper-religious nation to produce the kind of cultural artifacts you’re talking about. That’s the explanation right there, in your question (other posters have mentioned the immediate triggers of the phenomenon). It would be a bit weird for a secular humanist nation to make The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and the like.
They made a pretty good case, I thought. The demon-child movies weren’t really about Satan, they were about children. If you want to cast a child as the villain, in anything more than a comical Dennis-the-Menace way–and people did, in the late Sixties and Seventies–you almost have to invoke supernatural possession.
The genre peaked during the relatively secular 1970’s and faded about the time the Religious Right became more visible in politics, although this was probably coincidence. The last and sickest gasp was Children of the Corn (1984), which spawned a series but by the 1990’s they were cult horror films rather than mainstream.
I think it was a reaction to many issues of the day. In one sense it was the dark side of the hippie new age spiritual movement; it was a fictional representation of what the more conservative segment of the culture feared lay at the root of the counter culture. But this sprang up, I think, from the fifties, when suddenly the atom went from representing the most fundamental material of creation, to being symbol of destruction and Armageddon. Once we learned how to destroy the world, the horrors written about in Revelations were suddenly cast in a new light: they were no longer safely fantastic fairy tales; they seemed more and more plausible in a very real way. Combine these factors with the second wave of the baby boom, and you have these images kind of floating around the collective unconscious.
And while Manson came after the first glimmers of this trend, he certainly helped to propel it into a genuine cultural phenomenon. Like the atom, he made all these fictional horrors very, very real.
“Dude, we got totally lied to by our album covers.”
– Bill, of Bill and Ted, in Hell
Well, I don’t know about that. The UK, despite having an established church, is (in terms of actual popular religious belief) very much a secular humanist, or “post-Christian,” nation, and has been for centuries. And it still produced Night of the Demon.
Not necessarily. See The Bad Seed, or Cody Wyckoff in Wild Palms.
The cover of the April 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine simply read, “Is God Dead?” and I imagine many people worried if that were literally true. Also, there was an actual boom in hippie communes and religious cults during the late 1960s, so it was fear of that development and fear of the counterculture at large, as lissener posited.
There’s your answer.
This seems closest to my own theories on the subject.