Admittedly, it is a strange strategy to open up this year’s series of essays by revisiting the same movie I opened with last time. What more can I have to say, really, about the WNUF Halloween Special? Tradition dictates I must watch it, and since I am watching it, I must write; and if I must write, I need to find a topic.
Thankfully, the film keeps on giving.
A lot of my commentary in the early version of this essay project in 2024 was emergent. I was trying to find something as I moved from movie to movie and essay to essay, not quite sure where I was going until the prospect of individualized topical essays focused on nostalgia stood out to me. Looking back at my first essay, there was a seed of something interesting that I had just barely mentioned.
Specifically, I looked at the character of Frank, as presented in the movie, while noting something about the film’s verisimilitude regarding a representation of Reagan’s America. Case in point, extracted from the essay:
The framing narrative of the special is set against the background of Reagan’s 80s, and the town is deep into what we might see as the nostalgia and cringe-wash of the remembered 80s. Scares about teens on drugs, the need to arm oneself, and fears about Satanic cults in sleepy suburbia pervade the ad breaks in the tape. The news broadcast bookending the main story set the stage for the special: could it have been a scam, or has real violence related to the Satanic Panic emerged?
I didn’t cook here, exactly, but I had something on the stove. Let’s reheat and repeat.
Conservative Paranoia
The Satanic Panic is a dark chapter of American culture that was a cancerous cell budding off the larger conservatism of America, emerging from televangelism. The 20th century of the United States is broadly a startlingly sharp pivot from left to right, to left, to right. Progressivism of the late 1800s, such as trust-busting and the eventual New Deal, gives way to militarized mindsets and anti-commie hysteria of the post-WWII era. A countercultural movement ineffectually attempts to reclaim the wheel of the national vehicle, culminating in the Carter administration and its failures. The ascension of Ronald Reagan, boosted by the quasi-legal support of conservative and religious special interest groups, ushered in the final gasps of the Cold War.
The specters of Marx would ultimately not be enough. The external threat of the Soviet Union justified defense spending, but couldn’t socially manage Americans at home beyond the threat of nuclear annihilation. Control through the presence of an external threat was there, but how to control society from within the home and church pews? The paranoia turned inward – it was not merely a godless evil affecting the nation from overseas, but there was a moral rot at home, supposedly exposed through the publication of Michelle Remembers in 1980. Reagan’s moral crusader backers set to work at home, dredging up suspicion. There was a war to fight at home, too, and maybe the ultimate war against the ultimate evil: Satan himself.
The problem is, when everything you hate is tied back to Satan, it comes off as rather desperate and silly, doesn’t it? Looking back at it now, of course, anyone can find the Satanic Panic laughable and disgusting. One wonders if they weren’t so desperate to cling to power now that these conservative figures still serving today, who witnessed and fed into this hysteria, might feel some shame or embarrassment. The nice thing about a paper tiger is that it can be hastily assembled when a crowd needs controlling.
Indistinct From Reality
The verisimilitude (there is that word again) of the WNUF Halloween Special (2013) is in how effectively it maintains the 1980s Satanic Panic paranoia of the community in which the in-world broadcast is set.
Case in point: the film could have easily edited in any number of actual real reports and ads from the time, and they would serve the narrative just as effectively as the pastiches and parodies present in the film.
For example, explaining Satanic influence in the youth? This was a real 1990 video:
Rumors of local devil-worshipping activity near you? Here is a broadcast from KABC.
Need an informative, brief public service announcement to keep people freaked out as you’re about to share a live séance on television?
The fact that the WNUF Halloween Special so clearly understands the style and plays into it relatively straight emphasizes the natural comedic look we have on this subject now. But Christian Conservatives believed that child-murder-molesters would spike candy with all manner of nasty things on hearsay and very few recorded incidents. So when the film tackles it, it is presented straight. Worldbuilding.
It’s funny, yes. The paranoia was largely unwarranted, and there is a grim, sick humor in that. Something so wrong you kind of just need to be able to laugh it off before you fall into the void of despair. Medicate by embracing the absurdity.
But the sick and twisted truth is that it exposed a disease and moral rot in the Conservative Christian mindset – a mindset that has an Old Testament obsession with inflicting harm upon evil, even if the evil is just socially engineered to give politicians a wedge to press into the public, even today.
Vengeful Tools of the Vengeful God
The Conservative Christian anxiety around the Satanic Panic was cruel, spiteful, and sickeningly indulgent. Even I, someone who writes near-exclusively on horror, find them terrifying. Their conjurations about a sudden streak of darkness that lurks in America, focused on causing so much harm, are evocative to such a degree it’s no wonder it became such a major part of the drive behind the “moral majority” – also known as the loudest voices in the room who actually held power but preferred to play the victim.
Horror creators could only dream of how to be as effective as the crusaders against the apparently vast network of Satanic Ritualistic Abuse that was “totally real.” Never mind that it was actually a mask for uncomfortable questions about the dissolution of nuclear families and abuse within families. The process of investigating these claims only further abused children. No, wait, it’s the Spooky Satanists, really.
And regrettably, the media was manipulated into perpetuating all of this. Enter Frank and the local news of the WNUF Halloween Special.
Frank the Grifter, Frank the Tool
The character of Frank Stewart, played by Paul Fahrenkopf, the best performance in the film, is a manipulative scumbag. His Halloween special has all the hallmarks of a grifter trying to tap into the Satanic Panic through manipulation, lies, and callousness. He treats everyone around him based on what they can provide for him in his career aspirations. It’s pathetic, sad, and hilarious. His fate is deserved.
But also, he is enabled by the very media landscape he is so desperate to make a mark in. The first third of the film is a recorded news broadcast that establishes Frank’s upcoming special, but it does a wonderful job portraying the media’s approach to the patently ridiculous anxieties of Conservative Christians. Ads for politics and capitalism, with sprinkles of mass-market “youth culture” to keep the teens in the grip of the moral majority, add to the conservative miasma that blankets the fictional community. Even the anchors of the broadcast, Gavin and Deborah, play these special reports about supposed Satanic Worship as the truth, with no sign of putting any thought into it beyond “so I just gotta say this for my paycheck?”
The way the news broadcasts and ads do not question reality and embrace the paranoia is authentic to the reality of the Satanic Panic in our real world. They are tools of the Christian Conservatives who are frothing for a jihad. The film tips its hand early with a report about a local group that wants to destroy Halloween.
Deborah, ever the tool of the establishment, gives this line that makes me shudder about twelve minutes in: “So in order to show we’re fair and balanced, our reporter Donna Miles recently interviewed Mrs. Angela Harris, the leader of a group called H.A.R.V.E.S.T., a religious organization that believes any celebration of Halloween to be satanic and inappropriate for Christians.” Many schemes of control and the normalization of losing rights come clothed in the concept of “fair and balanced.” Sure enough, Mrs. Angela Harris comes off like a religious terrorist, practically gleeful in her fury over the celebration of Halloween. After all, as she says, “Halloween is Satan’s night. The night of the devil. Tonight, the vortex of hell opens.”
Donna, the reporter in this segment, presents a light skepticism and does the bare minimum to push back. But here is the issue: the station airing the ranting of such a crank, a hateful bigot, only lends support. After all, the same Donna closes her report with information about how to join the prayer circle.
Meanwhile, this specter of Satanic Panic hangs over the rest of the film and into the increasingly chaotic and deadly investigation Frank is broadcasting. He’s the unwitting tool to provide evidence that all of this is very much “real” for H.A.R.V.E.S.T. and those they wish to recruit to their cause. Is it at all any surprise then that Frank’s project comes under attack by these soldiers of Christ? The shocking broadcast even shows that Mrs. Angela Harris is there, and she gets upset; the co-conspirator, in his zeal, catches her on film.
What is wrong, Mrs. Harris? I thought this was the moral high ground? Why so camera-shy? Masterful work of irony, though, cutting out Frank’s tongue: the zealots silence an avatar of the media that gave them their influence. Frank has outlived his purpose.
This ending, the resulting massacre, feels like an apt metaphor for the lasting damage of the Satanic Panic. It’s darkly funny, but also reflects the desire for bloody vengeance for perceived enemies that did not matter. Conservative Christians needed a fight – they had everything and were not satisfied. To be a Conservative Christian is to place your own boot upon your neck and claim a conspiracy is keeping you down, even as you are the dominant power. The external threat of the Cold War faded with the dissolution of the Soviet Union (more or less if today’s rhetoric is anything to go by), but the domestic terror stuck around a little while longer to try to police the American home and obfuscate the reality of abuse present in family structures.
We exorcised one red devil in Communism, but kept a far more abstract and fictional one at home – and we will never recover from it. The Satanic Panic would wane in the 1990s, but never truly vanished. QAnon begs to differ.
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