Death metal, Reaganomics, leg-warmers forged in the knitting factories of Hell, coke-fueled executive orgies in every corporate boardroom from coast-to-coast, the Red Hot Chili Peppers in their prime, Falcon Crest, pastel everything, shoulder pads everywhere.
Now everything is so not Satan. I miss Satan.
It;s really funny to look back on the 80s at what people were saying involved or revolved around Satan and Satanic images. I lived in the midwest and my mom claimed to be Pentecostal, so I often heard a lot of BS when she got together with her friends.
Some of it makes a little sense. When you have pictures of Satan on an album cover and the songs talk about the number of the beast, you're just giving these people ammunition to use in their argument. Here are some of the things I remember being called Satanic and why:
Rock music - mentioned Satan, number of the beast, satanic images, and so on.
Backmasking - supposedly these songs played backwards had hidden messages with some of them being about Satan.
Dungeons and Dragons - this game supposedly turned innocent youths into satanists.
Video Games - my mom and her friends would go on and on about how video games and arcades were the work of the devil.
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I'm just expressing my opinion.
You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.
It was the time of the Satanic Ritual Abuse moral scare that swept the nation. It's alluded to a lot in the movie and makes up the whole reason that Ben is suspected of child molestation and murder.
shareSo true---I came up as a teen during the '80s, and yeah, using Satanist symbols and imagery was very common (and popular) amongst '80s heavy metal rock groups back then (they mainly just exploited them to get attention and sell the hell out of some records---you know those things that existed to play music on before CDs were invented,lol.) That's when the PMRC (Parents Resource Music something, I forgot) intiated the practice of putting parental guide warning stickers on records (which continue to this day to be put on CDs, now that I think about it, and with good reason,given how much more explicit both music and rap have gotten in the last 25 years.) In fact I remember a real-life case that pretty much sums up just how bad the hysteria around Satanism had gotten back then---the McMartin pre-school case, in which a number of children accused the NcMartins, the family that owned/ran the school and had some members teaching there, of molesting them. Turns out none of the accusations were true, but it took years before that was cleared up, and by then the McMartins' lives had been completely ruined, and their school closed down on top of that.
Here's a book detailing what happened:
https://www.amazon.com/Abuse-Innocence-McMartin-Preschool-Trial/dp/1591021650/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476666505&sr=1-3&keywords=The+Absence+of+Innocence
There was also a film made about the case called Indictment:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113421/