I am currently reading Manly Wade Wellman for my Witches of Appendix N. He has a lot of occult investigators and talks a lot about dangerous occult texts. There is a strange magic to being told a book is dangerous.
Not real magic. Not the kind the pamphlets warned us about. Not the sort of thing that appears when you mispronounce something in Latin while standing in a chalk circle at midnight. I mean the older, more human kind of magic. The kind that happens when an adult lowers their voice, points at a book, and says, "You should not be reading that."
For a certain sort of kid, that is not a warning.
It is an invitation.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately while working on my Advanced Witches & Warlocks and Jackson, IL projects. I have also been going back through some old Satanic Panic videos, both vintage and retrospective. Some are from the era itself. Some are modern looks back. One or two are modern warnings that feel like they could have been broadcast in 1986 with very little editing.
I am not here to dunk on them. Well. Not entirely.
Some of this material is ridiculous. Some of it is unintentionally hilarious. Some of it is sad. Some of it is built out of real grief aimed in the wrong direction. Some of it comes from people who were clearly frightened by a world changing faster than they knew how to handle.
But all of it circles the same idea
The fear was not really just about Dungeons & Dragons. It was not just about heavy metal. It was not just about horror movies, Smurfs, He-Man, E.T., or some plastic wizard in the toybox. The fear was about children having access to an imaginative life that adults could not completely supervise.
And that, I think, is where the forbidden book gets its power.
I have written about the Satanic Panic before. Back in 2024, I said I was fascinated by it because I had lived through it and, as someone who was not religious, the whole panic was confusing to me. I also admitted something else that still feels true: my own teenage reaction to all of it absolutely influenced my early D&D games. Lots of undead. Lots of demons. And, yes, lots of witches. Immature? Sure. I was a teenager. That was practically my job. But it was also fruitful. Some of that old material has never really left me. It just waited for better books to live in.
The Panic in the Toybox
One of the great artifacts of the era is Turmoil in the Toybox. If you have never seen it, it is one of those videos that feels like it was assembled in a church basement, a public access studio, and a fever dream all at the same time. Gary Greenwald and Phil Phillips seem convinced that the devil is hiding in every toybox, or at least making a pretty serious attempt to franchise there.
- The Smurfs? Suspicious.
- Masters of the Universe? Dangerous.
- E.T.? Worth a second look.
- Dungeons & Dragons? Obviously trouble.
The whole thing is amazing because it does not merely worry about D&D. It worries about the entire imaginative ecosystem of childhood. Toys, cartoons, commercials, fantasy symbols, magic words, Saturday morning television, action figures, and role-playing games all become part of one invisible machinery. The toybox is no longer a toybox. It is a grimoire with plastic hinges.
That sounds like a joke, but that really is how the panic worked.
The D&D section is especially perfect. The game pieces, they tell us, include witches, wizards, necromancers, clerics, evil magic-users, and all the usual suspects. Good versus evil becomes white witchcraft versus black witchcraft. Someone even claims that when game pieces are burned, screams come out of the fire because spiritual forces have inhabited them.
Now, look. That is nonsense. But it is also myth-making.
The panic did not merely misunderstand Dungeons & Dragons. It mythologized it.
That is the funny thing. The adults who wanted to make the game smaller made it larger. They turned rulebooks into occult manuals, dice into ritual objects, miniatures into idols, character sheets into dangerous documents, and the Dungeon Master into some sort of suburban necromancer with graph paper.
For the average kid, D&D was a game. A weird, wonderful, sometimes confusing game with too many charts and not enough hit points at 1st level.
But after the panic got hold of it?
Now it was forbidden. And forbidden things glow.
The Book They Told You Not to Read
The Satanic Panic did not create the fire of D&D’s mystique, but it poured gasoline on it.
The books already looked strange. The Monster Manual was full of demons, devils, dragons, undead, and things with names that sounded like they had crawled out of some medieval marginalia. The Dungeon Masters Guide felt like an occult textbook even when it was mostly explaining initiative, treasure tables, magic item creation, and why you should never let the players get away with too much.
Then the grown-ups started saying these books were dangerous.
Well. That certainly did not make them less interesting.
In the 1980s, D&D books became contraband grimoires in the popular imagination. They were passed from hand to hand, argued over in churches, hidden from certain relatives, discussed on television, condemned in pamphlets, and defended at kitchen tables by kids who were absolutely certain that none of the adults understood what was actually happening.
Most of the time, the kids were right.
The game was not teaching us how to summon demons. It was teaching us how to imagine consequences. It was teaching us how to map darkness. It was teaching us that monsters had names, rules, weaknesses, treasure types, and armor classes.
That is powerful. Not Satanic. Not corrupting. Powerful. And power is always frightening to someone.
Or as my mom once so eloquently said about D&D, "This is nothing but Mythology and math!"
The Wrong Demons
One of the more painful parts of looking back at the Satanic Panic is realizing how often adults named the wrong demons.
There were real kids in pain. There were real families struggling. There were real cases of depression, isolation, abuse, grief, mental illness, and fear. But instead of asking harder questions, too many people blamed the game, the records, the horror movies, the toys, the novels, the black t-shirts, the dice.
That is the actual horror.
Not that adults believed in demons. I write about demons all the time. My newest book, Codex Qliphothica, is full of things no sensible person would want crawling out of the wrong side of creation.
The horror is that they named the wrong demons.
That is something I touched on in my 2022 A-to-Z post. In the real world, there is no worldwide Satanic conspiracy. There are no secret armies of Satanists trafficking children through every daycare, pizza parlor, and game store. But in a horror game, there can be demons, devils, evil spirits, and worse. The trick is not to make the panic true. The trick is to understand that people are often looking in the wrong direction. Sometimes the evil is not a cult at all. Sometimes it is perfectly ordinary people who use fear to hurt the "undesirables" in their own community.
That idea matters a lot to me, especially for Jackson, IL. In a town like Jackson in 1986, it is easy to imagine a parent seeing a TV preacher or a warning video and suddenly looking at everything in their kid’s room differently. The D&D hardback. The heavy metal cassette. The horror VHS tape. The plastic skeleton warrior. The fantasy paperback. The notebook is full of strange names. The girl at school who wears a triple-goddess necklace and knows too much.
Most of the time, the adults are wrong.
But this is Jackson. Sometimes they are wrong in the direction of something true.
That is the sweet spot for horror.
In the real world, the panic was destructive because it mistook imagination for corruption. In fiction, though, we can ask the more interesting question: what if the panic was wrong about the cause, but not wrong that something was there?
- What if the book was just a game book, but the thing watching from the closet was real?
- What if the record was harmless, but the voice on the blank tape was not?
- What if the toy was just plastic, but the child was right when she said it moved after midnight?
That is not the Satanic Panic being correct. That is horror using the emotional vocabulary of the panic and aiming it at better targets.
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This is where it stops being only media history for me.
I grew up in a small town in Central Illinois. In 2024 I wrote about a moment from around 1985 or 1986 when someone supposedly found a "satanic altar" in a cornfield south of my high school. I remember the panic ripping through the school. I remember being fascinated and horrified by it. Fascinated by how fast everyone reacted. Horrified by how quickly it changed people. The next day, people wore homemade "Satan Busters" armbands featuring an inverted cross within a red buster circle.
That is the kind of detail no amount of research can invent better than memory.
I was already a D&D kid. I was already interested in witches, monsters, demons, horror, occult books, and the kinds of things polite adults thought you should probably not be reading. I was also an atheist in a place where the average person on the street did not know, or care to know, the difference between atheist, Satanist, witch, gamer, metalhead, or just "weird kid."
The assistant principal, who was a decent guy, told me and some of my gamer friends that we should keep our D&D books at home until all this stupid shit blew over. He was probably right. I still hated it.
I hated the idea that something I wanted to read had to be hidden because a mob of scared idiots had decided books were dangerous.
That feeling has never really left me.
And yes, as I wrote before, my love of psychology was probably strengthened then. So was my love of witches. No one was trying to burn me, not literally, but they were trying to burn the things they feared. And there were book burnings in town. Real ones. People on the conservative religious side burning D&D books and other things they did not understand.
That matters.
Because once you have seen people burn books, you never look at forbidden books the same way again.
Heavy Metal, Horror Movies, and the Forbidden Shelf
By 1986, the forbidden book was not alone. It had a lot of company.
There was the forbidden record album, especially if someone claimed the lyrics meant something different when played backward. There was the forbidden horror movie from the video store, the one with a cover more dangerous than the movie itself. There were forbidden toys, forbidden cartoons, forbidden symbols, forbidden bands, forbidden fantasy novels, forbidden magazines, forbidden games.
The whole shelf was glowing in an evil Satanic light.
That is why a movie like Trick or Treat is such a perfect artifact of 1986. It takes the heavy metal panic seriously enough to turn it into a horror plot. A dead rock star comes back through a record. The music really is dangerous. The adults' warning about Satanic rock is, inside the logic of the movie, kind of right.
That is hilarious. It is also revealing, and wonderful for my games.
Horror loves taking the thing adults are panicking about and saying, "Fine. But what if it really was haunted?"
- What if the record really does speak something backward?
- What if the toy really does know your name?
- What if the book really does open a door?
- What if the game really does teach you something you were not supposed to know?
That is not how the real world works. But it is absolutely how good horror works. It is very much how Jackson works.
The Satanic Panic Never Really Went Away
The funny thing is, the Satanic Panic did not completely vanish. It changed clothes.
In 2022 I wrote that if you think this "corn-filled nugget" was left behind in the 1980s, I had some news. The panic’s old shape involved Satanists, daycare centers, trafficking, cannibalism, and ritual abuse. Later versions involved Pizzagate, QAnon, and other conspiracy nonsense that kept recycling the same fears in new packaging.
That is why a modern Christian response to D&D can still feel so oddly familiar. The video is new. The anxieties are old. Role-playing as spiritual danger. Spellcasting as a gateway. Tiamat as proof of pagan contamination. D&D books as corrupting objects. Christian parents being warned to keep the game out of the house. It is all there, just with better lighting, HD resolution, and modern YouTube pacing.
I do not say that to mock people’s faith. I know plenty of Christians who play D&D, write horror, love fantasy, and understand perfectly well where the game ends and the real world begins.
But the panic itself? That old habit of flattening every strange symbol into “Satanic”? That is still with us.
And honestly, from a horror writer’s point of view, it is hard not to be fascinated by it.
The Witch Was Always There
Here is the part that matters most for Advanced Witches & Warlocks.
The panic kept pointing at the Witch.
Even when people were talking about D&D generally, the real charge was around magic. Spellcasting. Divination. Necromancy. Enchantment. Demons. Spirits. Symbols. Curses. The old gods. Forbidden knowledge. Books that teach you things.
Again and again, the panic caught sight of the Witch's shadow and recoiled.
I want to do the opposite. I want to look directly at her and say, "Yes. You belong here."
The Witch was always part of fantasy gaming, even when the game did not quite know what to do with her. She was there as the evil enchantress, the village wise woman, the hag in the woods, the priestess of the old gods, the herbalist, the oracle, the charm-worker, the necromancer, the woman everyone feared and visited anyway.
- She was there in the margins.
- She was there at the edge of the village.
- She was there in the spell list.
- She was there in the panic.
The mistake was reducing her to "evil spellcaster" or treating her as merely a monster. The Witch is older than that. Stranger than that. More useful than that. She is better than that.
The Witch belongs to the place where folklore, religion, fear, healing, social suspicion, forbidden knowledge, and personal power all overlap. Which is to say, she belongs in D&D perfectly.
That is what Advanced Witches & Warlocks is about. Not making the panic true, but reclaiming the imaginative territory the panic could not stop pointing at.
High School Is the Real Haunted House
The Satanic Panic also helped sharpen something else for me: the horror of being a teenager and having adults decide what your symbols mean before you get to explain them.
I came back to that in my Monsterhearts post, where I talked about Larina in 1986. High school is already horrifying. Add the Satanic Panic, a sleepy Midwestern college town, and a girl everyone already suspects is out in the woods sacrificing animals and calling up demons, and you have something that feels very close to the emotional center of Jackson, IL. The truth, of course, is smaller and stranger. Larina is more likely to be in her attic room listening to her dad’s Yes albums than leading a coven in the cornfields. But rumor has never needed truth to grow teeth.
That is the Jackson mood. I talked about this in detail last week.
The town does not need every parent to believe there is a demon in the toybox. It only needs enough of them to wonder. Enough to whisper. Enough to throw away a book, forbid a game, search a bedroom, call a pastor, or look twice at the quiet girl with the strange necklace and the too-old eyes.
And the kids? The kids know the adults are wrong. Mostly.
These Are the Books You Were Warned About
So here is my cheeky little sales pitch, and I am only half joking.
These are the books you were warned about in 1986.
Codex Qliphothica is on the way out, and it is very much a demon book. But it is not a "everything dark is Satanic" book. That was always one of the dullest parts of the panic. It flattened everything. Devils, demons, pagan gods, witches, ghosts, occult symbols, fantasy monsters, and rock music all became one big smear of "darkness."
Good horror does not flatten. Good horror names things.
The Qliphoth are not generic devils. They are not just demons with a different coat of paint. They are shells, refuse, wounds, corruptions, anti-creation, things that should not have survived the making of the world and yet did. They are what happens when the cosmos has a scar and something learns to live inside it.
That is much more interesting than "the devil is in the toybox."
Advanced Witches & Warlocks comes from the other side of the same forbidden bookshelf. It asks what old-school fantasy gaming looks like when the Witch is not a joke, not a monster, not an afterthought, and not simply a reskinned magic-user. What if she had been there properly all along? What if the game had made room for occult magic as something distinct from arcane study and divine authority?
And Jackson, IL is where all of this comes home.
Jackson is 1986 as a haunted town. It is school lockers and church warnings, mall bookstores and strange kids, rumors and records, public access panic and real shadows behind the gym. It is the place where adults blame D&D, heavy metal, horror movies, and witchcraft because those are the monsters they know how to name.
But Jackson has older monsters. Jackson has quieter monsters. Jackson has the things that were listening while everyone argued about the wrong books.
The Secret Appeal
The secret appeal of forbidden books is not that they are evil. It is that they promise the world is larger than you were told. That is the real danger.
A forbidden book says there are secret doors. It says names matter. It says monsters can be known. It says the dead might speak, the old gods might stir, the map might continue past the edge, and the strange kid might not be strange for nothing.
That is why the warnings failed. They told us the books were dangerous. We believed them; we just understood danger differently.
For some of us, danger meant possibility. It meant mystery. It meant there was something behind the ordinary world, something the adults were either too frightened or too tired to see.
That is the heart of fantasy gaming. That is the heart of occult horror. That is the heart of every witch story worth telling.
In 1986, that promise might have been sitting on a bookshelf with a dragon on the cover.
- Or in a toybox.
- Or in a record sleeve.
- Or on a VHS tape from the back room of the video store.
- Or in the hands of the quiet girl at school who knew more than she should.
And if someone told you not to open it?
Well...You were probably going to open it.
I feel like I have talked about this one a lot already. Partially in posts here and all weekend at EGG Con. In "Am I Evil," the Satanic Panic comes to Jackson, but not in the way the town's folk expect. It is in the form of Moria Elizabeth Zachary. She looks like a nice girl. She wears fuzzy sweaters. She is polite. She has an ugly dog she holds. And she is utterly evil.
Darren Vale acts evil, but he is really sort of a joke. Sylvia Velasco is evil, but not the way everyone thinks she is. People even think Faye Thorne is evil, she isn't, but her family is.
As my co-creator of NIGHT SHIFT, Jason Vey, commented this past weekend, the Satanic Panic in Jackson takes on new dimensions.
And of course I have my own real-world history from the real-world Jacksonville. Sure, it is not as dramatic as some other tales of the Satanic Panic, but it has the advantage of being mine.
There is just too much material here to use. Really...there is too much material NOT to do this.
Links
Videos
- D&D is Satanic, from the classic "Turmoil in the Toybox." A must-watch!
- Trick or Treat (1986) The Satanic Panic of the 1980s (Retrospective)
- The Satanic Panic: A Brief History. A great retrospective and overview of the Satanic Panic and D&D's place in it.
- KSTP Twin Cities Live August 1986: Satan is in your Child’s Bedroom. From the day, the Satanic Panic sealed in amber for us to enjoy.
- Christian Concerns about Dungeons & Dragons, newer, but it shows that 40 years later, people still keep making the same nonsensical mistakes.
My Posts
- Satanic Panic!
- A to Z of Witches. O is for Occult Panic and Obeah. Links to Turmoil in the Toybox
- AtoZChallenge2022: S is for Satanic Panic
- AtoZChallenge2024: S is for Satanic Panic
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