Stranger Things ignites my 80s nostalgia like nothing else. It transports me to a childhood of riding bikes, reading comics, and playing D&D. But in season 4, the quaint town of Hawkins is riled up into believing a group of teens who play Dungeons & Dragons is an evil, murderous cult. While this may sound far-fetched to some, this is based on the Satanic Panic, a time in which fundamentalists and the media created widespread fear and paranoia that their kids would succumb to the occult lures of rock music, Procter & Gamble, daycares, and D&D. I even remember my mom showing me an article in the local paper about a school librarian who banned all books related to witchcraft, including It's Magic, Charlie Brown. We shared an eyeroll on that one. Little did we know this would reoccur every few years.
In the late 70s, I was introduced to hard rock/heavy metal, thanks to an older cousin who proudly displayed posters all over his bedroom walls. I gawked at album covers of KISS, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest. My favorite was the devilish motorcycle rocketing from a grave on Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell album. A buddy of mine let me borrow his KISS records, and I remember arguing about which solo KISS album was the best. Gene's was my favorite, and it would inspire me to dress up as his persona, the Demon, for Halloween that year. My mom helped me make a makeshift costume from on-hand materials -- black jeans, a studded belt, black sneakers. The hellish armor would have crossed the line for her, so I had to be satisfied with a cheap plastic mask of the Demon's tongue-lashing face.
In addition to hard rock, I succumbed to the siren's lure of the fantasy genre. In elementary school, my Mighty Men & Monster Maker allowed me to create an endless combo of characters. I also checked out as many books on monsters and myths as I could find, like a biography of Dracula, whose woodcut images of Vlad the Impaler doing his thing kept me up at night, cowering beneath my magically protective bedsheets. Or novels like The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander, with its awesome cover of the Horned King. But when my 4th grade teacher read The Hobbit to our class, fantasy sank its dragon teeth into me. I was hooked for life. My parents didn't discourage me. In fact, when the animated film aired on TV, they set me up in the dining room. I sat on the edge of the kitchen stool, munching popcorn, entranced by the imagery on that tiny screen. When the Spiders of Mirkwood appeared, I was so terrified I fell off my stool, injuring my back and scattering popcorn everywhere. I loved every minute of it.
Around that same time, I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons, a roleplaying game. We lived in a small neighborhood, so that first D&D group, if you could call it that, consisted of my neighbor, who lived a couple doors down and was my age (we'll call him Noel), and some high school kids down the block. One of the high schoolers was always the Dungeon Master. We didn't have cool baseball tees like the Hellfire Club in Stranger Things, nor could we afford mini figures, boards, a DM screen, or fancy character sheets. We created characters on loose leaf paper, rolled dice, and used our imagination to enact the adventures of wizards, barbarians, and rangers. I was usually a ranger, a Strider wannabe. Because the adventures were disorganized and generally silly, the gaming sessions devolved quickly. On one occasion, Noel was being a jerk, so the DM made an angry god appear and turn Noel's magic-user into a golden phallic statue. Red-faced and pissed, Noel stormed away. Boys are stupid.
Noel had a growing collection of RPG books, so we spent Saturday afternoons creating geometric dungeons on graph paper, drawing Conan-like weapons, and generating characters. My parents bought me the D&D Basic Set set for Christmas one year. Over the years, I saved my allowance to buy those awesome Advanced D&D hardcover manuals, like the Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and the Dungeon Master's Guide. I bought a few modules, too, like Tomb of Horrors, which was featured in Ready Player One, and my favorite, Ravenloft, which was set in a vampire's castle. While it featured amazing black-and-white artwork, the well-crafted passages by Hickman and Weiss inspired me to write my own adventures with accompanying dungeon maps.
When we got our first family computer, a Texas Instruments, I wrote a Choose-Your-Adventure novel. Years later, on loose leaf paper, I wrote a badly titled D&D novel set in an Egyptian-inspired pyramid filled with mummies, liches, and traps that would give Indiana Jones pause.
Back in those days, parents let their kids run feral during the day, which is one of the many things that rings true in Stranger Things. My parents laid down two strict rules: do your chores first and be back before dark. I rode my white Montgomery Ward bike everywhere. While I behaved most of the time, I got myself into plenty of trouble, usually the result of hanging out with Noel, who never ceased to surprise me with his sociopathic acts of vandalism and cruelty. I didn't stand idly by when he shoplifted, taunted a neighbor's dog, started a wildfire, or opened a ditch gate to flood a neighbor's crops. I tried to stop him or right the wrongs, and we even fought a couple times. He got caught most of the time, and because I was with him, I was guilty by association. My parents disciplined me more harshly than he was disciplined, I should add. Still, I was no angel. Once, another friend and I tried to shoplift a D&D module from a mall store. We were busted by the manager and banned from the mall for a year (a terrible punishment for a young teenager). My mom dragged me out of the mall by my ear.
I started listening to heavy metal. Iron Maiden blew me away, especially with poetic storytelling songs like "Run to the Hills" (condemning the American Indian Wars), "Flight of Icarus" (loosely based on the Greek myth), or "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (based on Coleridge's classic poem). And it wasn't long before I was drawing their undead icon, Eddie, on my school notebooks along with the gnarly metallic lettering of all the bands I liked. As heavy metal grew darker, along with the popularity of horror films, links to occultism and rock music surfaced, including claims of "backmasking," hiding subliminal messages inside the music. If you listened to records backwards, you would hear evil messages. Satan was thriving in America, according to the evangelists who attempted to save America's youth from rock's evil magic. (Fun fact: KISS is not an acronym for Knights in Satan's Service, as it was claimed during those crazy times, but rather was an alternative to Paul Stanley's first choice, Lips.) While some churches held record burning parties, rock and heavy metal responded by using the Satanic angle to sell more records. Bands also began intentionally creating backwards messages to poke fun at their accusers, as in the case of Iron Maiden: "'What ho,' said the monster with the three heads, 'don't meddle with things you don't understand.'"
Extracurricular activities, like soccer and band kept me busy, and it was through both that I met one of my best lifelong friends (we'll call him Derek). He taught me the complexities of AD&D and introduced me to the worlds of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and David Eddings. When we hung out, we played video games and/or D&D. We created characters and put them through arduous adventures. Years later, in the early 90s, he invited me to join my first real D&D group whose DM actually prepared adventures for us. This guy was our Eddie Munson. He was the real deal. He participated in Renaissance Faires and owned armor and swords. We played D&D for hours and hours, stopping only to scarf down pizza. It wasn't the Hellfire Club, but it was damn close.
How It Started
Here's a brief history as I understand it. The Satanic Panic stemmed from the heels of serial killers that were glorified in the 70s and were believed to be occult in nature, creating a growing fear in the US that children were at risk. Horror books/films, like The Exorcist didn't help, which stirred the public's black cauldron of fears that demonic possession was real.
A biography cowritten by a psychologist called Michelle Remembers created a panic that some daycares and preschools in the US were performing satanic rituals in underground tunnels and turning children into witches. The unfounded claims were debunked, of course, but it didn't matter. The paranoia was snowballing.
And then came James Dallas Egbert III, a MSU college student who went missing. Egbert suffered from drug addiction and depression. He also happened to play D&D. When he went into hiding in the utility tunnels beneath the school, it was believed that D&D made him seek refuge in the "dungeons" beneath the school. Sadly, when Egbert killed himself in 1980, activists blamed his death on D&D because they claimed the game caused him to lose his sense of reality. Never mind the other issues.
But it wasn't until the suicide of Irving Lee Pulling that D&D was officially attacked. Pulling had trouble fitting in as well as other psychological issues. Yet his mother believed that D&D was the cause of his suicide. She claimed the high school principal, who ran a gaming group, had put a curse on her son, a real curse. She sued the principal as well as TSR Inc., the publisher of D&D. Even though she lost those legal battles, she soon created BADD (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons), a campaign opposing D&D, and launched a media assault that included an appearance on 60 Minutes. Despite wide debunking of Pulling's claims, evangelical groups jumped on the bandwagon, demonizing D&D because of its inclusion of diverse gods, witchcraft, and worse things.
Throughout the 80s, the Satanic Panic continued. In addition to D&D and rock music, the old reliable company Procter & Gamble was accused of using its profits to support Satanism. Leaflets were passed around churches, demonizing the logo, and I remember searching for the fabled hidden 666 with my friends when we saw a leaflet at school. The company would eventually abandon its old logo and replace it with a boring P&G logo. It didn't matter that the logo originated in the 1880s with a wholesome theme -- that P&G's products could follow people through every phase of their lives. Satanic Panic was spreading like hellfire, and talk show hosts like Geraldo, Donahue, & Sally Jesse, as well as news shows like 20/20 and 60 Minutes, were fanning the flames.
So it was not entirely surprising that when my mom heard about a connection between D&D to Satanism, murder, and suicide, she was concerned for me. I totally understand why, especially since I hung out with Noel and some other bad neighborhood kids and drew nothing but monsters, weapons, and rock n' roll logos. Rather than freak out, however, my mom did what any rational parent would do. She talked to me. She asked me about D&D, how it was played, and how we played it. I answered her questions honestly, and she seemed a little surprised by the innocence of our gaming. In the end, she explained what the news was saying (that children could lose their sense of fantasy vs reality). She warned me to be careful and to heed my awareness of right and wrong. Simple, right? Although my mom died in the late 80s, she would have been impressed by what D&D taught me about teamwork, imagination, creativity, design, diversity, world religion, ancient history, and economics. She would have also noted that it improved my math abilities, penmanship, vocabulary, and writing skills. I also like to think she would have enjoyed my published works.
How it's Going
Unfortunately, conspiracy theories are commonplace and wilder than ever. I've known about David Icke's conspiracy books for a couple decades, but his wild claim of undercover reptoids always seemed a little out there, even to me, who loved the TV show V in the 80s (starring Beastmaster and Freddy Kreuger!). But to hear of a vast rich and famous network of Satanic children-eating lizard people is just bonkers, and it was being spewed on social media by people I grew up with. And they believed it.
And there are more wackadoo conspiracies every day. How I wish we could go back a few years when Flat Earthers were our strangest conspiracy theorists!
The internet is filled with patterns, and our brains are wired to see connections. The Brainstorm/Green Needle sound test proves this, I think. We're weak-minded fools, susceptible to suggestion. That's why claims of backmasking were so easily accepted. When the illusionist tells the audience what they're about to see, they see it. This weakness is exploited by social media, the internet, fundamentalists, talk show hosts, and politicians, not to mention Q. There is a wonderful article written by a game designer who likens QAnon to a video game with no ending (read it here). The point is, while we're doomscrolling, we're highly likely to believe a zinger headline rather than reading the article, much less verifying that it comes from a trustworthy source. We fall for clickbait over and over.
We're in dangerous times, people. Twitter is the Devil's playground if ever there's been one.
But what can we do when truths are hiding amid a sea of bullshit? I can think of a few rational things. We can ignore it all. That's easy. The harder path, however, in this highly politicized climate, is to find neutral sources for information. They might be our only unbiased islands. Don't share an article you haven't read. Never ever read the comments. Don't be an asshole. For instance, when a person posts that they loved something, don't demean them. It's okay to keep your negative comment to yourself. Avoid sources of hate, no matter which way they lean, and don't spread hate, even when it's disguised as humor. Instead of campaigning against other groups or beliefs that are different than yours, just on the say-so of political, news, religious, or talk show personalities, try to learn about those groups instead, as my mom did with D&D. Wouldn't that be a better universe to play in? Give me the Hellfire Club any day.
A few weeks ago, the trailer for a promising new D&D film just dropped, and it made me grin ear-to-ear like that kid watching The Hobbit. Thanks to staunch defenders like Gary Gygax and Michael Stackpole, D&D is off the moral hook, but sadly there are other targets now. The same groups that attacked Led Zeppelin, D&D, and P&G, for their supposed opposition of the Bible, are now damning science, climate change, vaccines, masks, abortion, books, text books, history, race theory, gay rights, gender diversity, and on and on. It's Satanic Panic all over again. Have we learned nothing? Instead of sweeping history under the rug, which is trending, by the way, we should be learning from it. That's one of the first things I figured out by playing D&D when I was kid. You don't blunder into the same traps twice.
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For more info on the Satanic Panic of the 80s, here are a few interesting unbiased sources:
Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s edited by Kier-La Janisse & Paul Corupe
