Satanic Panic (2019)

Painfully nice Sam Craft (Hayley Griffith) doesn’t have a lucky first day in her new job as pizza delivery girl. For one, she’s stuck with the rich part of town for her first tour, so, obviously, tips are more of a fictional concept there. Secondly, she stumbles into the motivational speech/Satanic ritual of the devil worshipper coven of Danica Ross (Rebecca Romijn), and soon finds herself the centre of attention when Danica quickly pegs her as a virgin. Hint: never answer “that’s a very personal question” when a movie Satanist asks you about your virginal status.

After Danica’s daughter Judi (Ruby Modine) has let her mother badly down by getting herself deflowered, the cult is in dire need of a virgin for this night’s big ritual, for they plan to conjure up Baphomet, give him a fine virgin womb that also moonlights as a sacrifice and use his demon child to rule the world even more than they already do. So, bad luck for Sam. However, it turns out she’s much tougher than her sugary sweet demeanour suggests, and just plain lucky when luck’s the thing to have. So she not only escapes the cult’s clutches early on, she also manages to accidentally save Judi from a fate worse than death - plus death – and soon has her own witchcraft expert. She’ll need all the help she can get.

Chelsea Stardust’s Satanic Panic, as written by Grady Hendrix, is a surprisingly fun little horror comedy, going the 80s horror comedy throwback route a bit, but not actually set in the period. It’s another Fangoria production, yet unlike old Fangoria productions, the films coming out under the banner of the revived and allergic against digital magazine are actually worthwhile. Or at the very least, are always trying to be proper fun movies beyond being special effects delivery systems.

Of course, the film’s effects are still pretty important to it (it is a film in the spirit of 80s horror after all), and it does have quite a bit of fun coming up with icky  but cheaply doable on a budget stuff for its evil Satanic witches to do, so while this isn’t spectacularly gory, what’s there is very much in the proper spirit of rubber and a mildly grotesque imagination.

The film’s not always looking too great, with a couple of sequences – the climactic Satanic orgy comes to mind – that overstep the line between merry cheapness and mildly embarrassing tackiness, but it is usually saved by a script that puts a lot of imagination in its series of little set-pieces fun and funny, pacing that leaves a lot of breathing room but never so much you get the impression the film is dragging its feet, and a cast that is willing and able to go with the silly, the funny, and the slightly unpleasant yet also perfectly able to go a bit deeper when necessary. Plus, there are not many horror films that feature an impressive fight against linen (making at least this M.R. James fan very happy), Satanist infighting (turns out evil rich people have trouble building a collective front even when Baphomet would really need one), and demonic infighting (as above, so below, as the film in one of its cheekier moments remarks) as well as adorable bunnies.


I was also pleasantly surprised by the film’s willingness to not go for the typical horror movie bullshit ending (not to be confused with a proper downer ending) but give its likeable heroine an actual happy end.