Satanic Panic (2019)
Tying into the ongoing Dissections series we’ve been calling “Satanic Panic,” this week we’re bringing you a new Judgment on the 2019 film of the same name. So no spoilers today, and no rankings or ratings either. Just some thoughts to help you decide whether it’s worth your time.
You can watch Satanic Panic on Shudder as of this writing, 11/14/2021.
We don’t have a lot of smart, thinky stuff to say about this one, but it’s good old fun-loving, culty, campy horror-comedy, and we wanted to talk about it. Plus, it bounces nicely off of Meg’s recent Dissection of 2019’s Ready or Not, another fun, campy slashfest very much in the same vein and dealing with many of the same themes--which mostly revolve around the idea that the rich are evil Satanists who derive their money and power through demonic pacts and sacrifice of the vulnerable. You know, “Death to the weak. Wealth to the strong.”
Satanic Panic, in that sense, isn’t getting at anything new, and it’s not what we’d call especially artful. But we would call it a playfully gross film that says what’s been said before with great gory gusto.
The Inequities of Pizza Delivery
We follow pizza guy--or girl... or delivery person… or whatever--Sam (Hayley Griffith), into the trenches of the affluent Mill Basin neighborhood. The community is out of her work’s delivery zone, but she’s desperate for tips and desperate to get away from her creepy coworker, Duncan (AJ Bowen), who got her this pizza gig and fancies himself her boyfriend.
Before she heads out on her Vespa to make her deliveries, her prick of a boss demands that she leave her only five bucks, which she needs for gas, as a deposit on the thermal delivery bag, emphasizing the exploitation of working people--a point the movie repeatedly drives home throughout its hour-and-a-half runtime.
The opening few scenes before this have all been building on that same idea--the labor inequities of, in this case, pizza delivery--as Sam has not only been stiffed on multiple tips, she’s also had to deal with weird racist comments about Mexicans, a guy who schmoozes her into helping him move a couch, and a sex worker who offers Sam twenty bucks to pee on the guy paying her for sex, but won’t even leave the quarter from her change when Sam tells her “um, no?”
A bit later, on her way out to Mill Basin, Sam spots another coworker, Karim (Mark E. Winfield), who tells her about the time he delivered a pizza to a house in that neighborhood. The customer left no tip and slammed the door in his face. So he climbed in through an open window, stumbled upon a group orgy, tapped into the madness, and passed around his scooter helmet to collect on the stiffed tip. He came out with a paltry $32, but--driving home how crappy it is to work a pizza delivery job--he says this as if the number had some zeroes and a comma tacked onto it. “You go to Mill Basin a delivery boy,” he brags, “but you come back a delivery man.”
So right from the start, the film is hammering away at themes of class struggle and the evils of capitalism. And it all culminates in Sam’s discovery that the wealthy aren’t just terrible tippers (like everyone else), they’re also Satanists. And not the good vegan kind. These are the bad Satanists. The ones who commit human sacrifices and stuff.
Sam’s night goes from pretty bad to so much worse when she breaks into a mansion to demand her well-earned tip and crashes a meeting of rich folks getting hyped up for the evening’s ritual sacrifice. Cue the chaos and absurdity.
“I Am, I Think, I Will!”
This is where the film really comes into its own. Like Ready or Not, part of what makes Satanic Panic work is how fully it embraces the conventions of its genre and how much fun it has playing those conventions to their absolute campiest. The movie leans hard into the idea that these Satanists talk like speakers and attendants at a self-empowerment seminar. In this case, empowerment through the embrace of Satan.
“Are you ready to be a winner?” asks the coven’s leader Danica Ross (Rebecca Romijn--who’s utterly goddamned fabulous in her callous disdain).
“YES!” respond her enthusiastic followers.
“Are you ready to take back what you are owed?” she asks, “to fully commit yourselves to Satan?” Then later, “Are you ready to break the chains of conventional morality?” and “to make an investment in your future?”
“YES!” and “YES!” and “YES!” they answer each time.
“And whose power unlocks our true potential?”
“Hail Satan!” they reply.
Throughout, the dialogue is chock full of these kinds of campy lines, always delivered in over-the-top fashion, but with straight-faced performances from a talented cast, drawn out by solid directing from Chelsea Stardust. In particular, Maya Perkins’ character, a young girl also named Sam, is the vehicle for some of the funniest and most horrific moments in this very funny and horrific film.
Working alongside the exquisitely schlocky dialogue and performances, the film is also a seriously well-executed slasher brimming with excellent (and disgusting) practical effects. One scene involving something called a “soul souffle” recalls the moment from the 1986 musical horror-comedy Little Shop of Horrors when Seymour first learns that his sweet little plant is a carnivore that craves blood drawn from his pricked finger. Satanic Panic takes the anal eroticism of that scene to a bawdiness approaching John Waters. But whereas the grossness of Waters’ films is often undercut by the silliness of his effects, here, the effects are uncomfortably visceral--which is a particular kind of fun; so if you’re not good with gross, you might want to cover your eyes during that scene.
Satanic Panic knows the Satanic cult genre well and revels in its absurdities. The film doesn’t say anything original, but it doesn’t want to. And it doesn’t have to.
In the same respect, it’s not saying anything with particular nuance or artfulness. Rosemary’s Baby this most certainly is not. But again, it doesn’t want to be. And it doesn’t have to be.
Satanic Panic is unadulterated, campy, horror-comedy fun--a slashy blast of a film about rich people worshipping at Satan’s capitalist altar, sacrificing their own families, friends, and neighbors for wealth and power.
I am, I think, I will! Death to the weak! Wealth to the strong!
