Horror fans especially remember the Satanic panic of the ‘80s and ‘90s. We got hassled for playing Dungeons and Dragons. Innocent goths like the West Memphis Three (and many more less publicized cases) got wrongfully convicted in the Satanic panic. Geraldo Rivera even did an “expose” on secret Satanic cult rituals. It’s part of the backstory of Penny Lane’s Sundance documentary Hail Satan?, about The Satanic Temple’s recent fights for separation of church and state and religious pluralism. Lane has faith that The Satanic Temple’s efforts will not bring about a new Satanic panic, but rather have the opposite effect.

“I think the opposite actually because I think the more they’re out there getting their message across, the less likely we are to be able to say, ‘Oh, there’s this secret Satanic network,’” Lane told us at Sundance. “No, they’re not secret. They’re out in the open. It’s harder to ascribe these evildoings to them because they’re there doing highway cleanups. It’s difficult to say, ‘Look at this horrible group. Look how evil they are.’”

In addition to proposing to erect a Baphomet statue to counter the State of Arkansas’s Ten Commandments monument, The Satanic Temple does community service like roadside cleanup. They use pitchforks to pick up trash. You can’t deny they’ve got showmanship. As pointed out in Hail Satan?, while everyone was scared of Satanists, the Catholic Church was covering up and continuing sexual abuse.

“It was never the Satanists,” Lane explained. “I think that’s such a huge misconception that again, it goes into the list of 10 deeply held misconceptions that my film is begging people to at least reconsider. Most people that I know, Satanic panic was part of our childhood. Those people that I know take it absolutely for granted that there were, in fact, Satanic cults all around the country who were doing these horrible evil things in the ‘80s and ‘90s and everyone knows that’s true. I’m like, ‘But how do you not know that there weren’t?’ No one knows that because we’ve never, as a culture, taken the time to stop and think what was that all about? It was just this embarrassing, humiliating thing that we’ve shoved down the memory hole because it’s so embarrassing.”

Even films that debunk false accusations only focus on debunking one particular case at a time. And maybe Hail Satan? can’t free everyone falsely accused of Satanic crimes, but at least through this film and through the rise of the Satanic Temple, more awareness can be brought to a multitude of injustices.

Lane explains, “The Paradise Lost films and also Capturing the Friedmans… not to dis those films, they’re great films, part of the canon. [But] they don’t do the kind of work of situating those individual cases as being simply one out of 100s of similar cases that happened constantly, all around the country for more than a decade, right? So you can watch those films and feel the outrage of those individual cases, but these were just isolated events that were happening everywhere. There are still people rotting in prison unjustly for these fake Satanic crimes.”

The Satanic Temple has spread to include worldwide chapters. What began as a way to troll Christians by endorsing Rick Scott became a place where real social outcasts could find each other. That is how Satanism will become an accepted religion, Lane feels – when people see that Satanists are really just like everyone else.

“In their own words, they tend to be kind of loser, weirdo, outcasts who never fit in,” Lane noted. “I found it so moving to think about how those people could be collected together into something. To see them find each other and find communion and to remember how deeply important that is for us as humans, to find people who understand us and love us and understand and can be part of the same world. It’s just really meaningful. I wasn’t expecting to end the project with this newfound respect for and appreciation for religion and what it does and how it functions for human beings in society. That’s what I learned. It was a very surprising outcome, because starting where we start with this troll and satire, to land in a place of feeling so much love and warmth and that kind of stuff was a big deal for me.”

“The movie is about the birth of a new religion,” Lane continued. “That’s one way you can frame it. You can look at any, and I mean any religion that now exists, that we now take for granted as being normal, and look at its origin story and tell me it’s not insane. Tell me the miracles of Jesus are not publicity stunts and scams or jokes or hoaxes. Look at Joseph Smith finding those golden tablets and having this crazy story that’s actually bonkers if you hear it. If you look at Scientology, whatever, this only looks weird to us because it is new. If you get a time machine and you flash forward 100 years, my prediction is Satanism will be just another one of these weirdo American religions that we will just take for granted.”

Hail Satan? opens this April from Magnolia Pictures.