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A troubled patient, a pumpkin-headed monster and a one-eyed madman are among the subjects in this month’s scary streaming picks.
Stream it on Tubi.
I usually only recommend fiction films in this column. But I’m making an exception for a chilling nonfiction movie that unfolds with the same deeply disturbing scares as the best scripted horror.
Written and directed by Steve J. Adams and Sean Horlor, this documentary explores the controversy over “Michelle Remembers,” a 1980 memoir by Dr. Lawrence Pazder, a Canadian psychiatrist, and Michelle Smith, one of his patients. The book outlines how Pazder’s recovered-memory therapy helped Smith come to terms with a horrific childhood in which she claimed to have suffered ritual physical and emotional abuse by Satanists. The book was a best seller, making Pazder and Smith talk show regulars and helping kick off the satanic panic, a wave of conservative-led attempts to find black magic and child sex crimes around every corner.
Adams and Horlor employ documentary conventions — archival news footage, talking heads, re-enactments — to make what feels like a seat-grabbing found footage thrill ride. The scream-heavy sound design, fueled by audiotape excerpts from Smith’s sessions with Pazder, made my skin crawl, as did the twists about the lurid nature of their relationship. By examining traumas both real and imagined, the film is a reminder of how the marriage of misinformation and religious hysteria remains a recipe for all-too-real suffering.
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
A lithe, pumpkin-headed monster is the menace, and the heart, behind David Slade’s new film, an adaptation of Norman Partridge’s 2006 coming-of-age novel about the evils that lurk in a small town’s secrets.
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