Satanic Panic (2019)

Movie: Satanic Panic (2019), directed by Chelsea Stardust

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.51 miles, 8’37”/mile, 01:04:47 (recovery run)

 

I decided to go for something modern and unfamiliar tonight in contrast to last night’s Suspiria run, and I settled on Satanic Panic, which wound up having precisely two things in common with Suspiria: 1) they both have witches in them, and 2) they are both films. Beyond that, all bets are off. That’s not to say I disliked Satanic Panic; it was a welcome change-up with some likable characters, some great lines, and a touch of wicked comedy.

 

Sam is a 22-year-old folk singer but busking doesn’t pay the bills, so this is her first night delivering pizzas on the back of her mint-green Vespa. It’s not going well; she gets roped into helping customers move furniture and her only tips seem to be dead men’s sweaters from racist widows. In desperation, she takes a big order outside of her delivery zone to Mill Basin, an upscale McMansion neighborhood complete with anachronistically dressed kids waving creepily on the lawns. She gets stiffed on the tip on a $100+ order (poor Sam; I could have told her that rich people are the worst tippers), but now she’s out of gas, so she enters the house in hopes of securing at least enough of a tip for gas money and finds herself in what seems to be a sort of rally for a satanic multi-level marketing plan. Unfortunately, the satanists are planning to raise Baphomet but are short one virgin for the sacrifice, so Sam is abducted as the guest of honor. Without spoiling too much, I’ll say she kindasorta escapes and teams up with the head satanist’s ex-virgin daughter Judi to foil the demon summoning, or at least survive the night.

 

Satanic Panic has its fair share of comedy, but it’s definitely a satanic horror flick first and foremost. When it’s funny it’s mostly darkly funny, and when it’s not funny it’s often just plain… dark. The dialogue is snappy and clever, though not especially deep. That means there are a lot of good, quotable lines, but the characterization is fairly thin throughout. Hayley Griffith reminds me of a young Lindsay Felton (old school Caitlin’s Way fans REPRESENT) and has the chops to give us a good handle on what makes Sam tick, while Ruby Modine (hey, it’s Lori from the Happy Death Day movies!) does an admirable job fleshing out her character Judi to a level beyond what the script gave her. These two are the heart of the movie, and the scene in which Sam tells her cancer story while sealing Judi’s skin against an increasingly lethal hex is a tour de force.

 

The supporting cast isn’t half bad either. It’s fun to see Rebecca Romijn as Big Mama Satanist—I mean, Danica—when these days I mostly know her as the host of the Hallmark Channel’s American Rescue Dog Show (which is probably the single most important annual event in my life, I am not even kidding—all hail Big Rig, 2020’s Best in Wrinkles!) And her real-life husband Jerry O’Connell makes a brief appearance playing her rapey in-movie husband Samuel, which is the sort of dumb-douchebag role I feel like I’ve seen him take up at least a few times in the past quarter-century, so I guess either he likes them or he’s good at them or both.

 

The take on satanism here is mostly of the predictable evil movie variety: basically one-half gross stuff being either magically expelled from or physically pulled out of bodies, and one-half rich people staying rich. (“Are you ready to make an investment in your future? Are you ready to fully commit yourselves to Satan?”) Apparently the satanic creed is “death to the weak; wealth to the strong,” which, ya know, capitalism. In that vein, there’s also a lot of improbably smart dialogue in which rich people make fun of Sam’s working class status. (“That’s a K-Mart bra so I assume you’re not one of them.”) As far as social commentary goes, Jonathan Swift it ain’t, but no one said it has to be.

 

It’s not likely to become a much-beloved classic, and its ending suffers from Raiders of the Lost Ark syndrome (nothing the characters does changes the outcome, which is all down to a daemon ex machina), but all in all, Satanic Panic is a more than decent romp if you’re not looking for anything too deep or too serious. Bonus Easter egg: pretty sure I spotted Some Kind of Hate playing on the TV during the babysitting scene! Maybe I’ll do a run to that soon.

 

Side note: Satanic Panic is the tenth horror movie I’ve written up here on Running Scared, and unless I’m mistaken, it’s the first that actually has explicit nudity in it. That’s sort of astounding, given the historical conventions of the genre. Not that I have anything against nudity in horror or otherwise, but five of the six movies I watched from this century were nudity-free and it’s nice to see that after the zillion-plus naked vampire movies of the ’60s and ’70s and the topless teen slaughterfests of the ‘70s and ‘80s, nudity is finally becoming less of a mandatory fixture. Thumbs up to variety.