SATANIC PANIC! It was a craze in 80’s and 90’s that legitimately played into numerous crime stories throughout the United States, with outside parties saying that suspects involved were in league with dark occult forces which drove them to commit the crimes they were accused of. This is on display in several documentaries from the period including the must-see HBO series ‘Paradise Lost’. Now some of this may be laughable in retrospect while others take this SATAN business very seriously, but it’s something media outlets certainly jumped on and the stories grew taller than reality in most cases.

AV Club’s Katie Rife reported this week on the planned series that Hulu is developing that will use the entire true crime issue as an inspiration for a scripted drama.

Called Demons, the series will be an anthology focused around two characters: A manipulative psychiatrist named Bennett Lewis and his wife/star patient Marilyn Jones, who will become involved in a different Satanic Panic case each season; as THR puts it, “each season of Demons would explore a twisted crime affected by the couple’s dark exploration into the fragile nature of memory and guilt.” The series is inspired by the obsession with uncovering repressed memories that preoccupied psychologists of the period, some of whom used hypnosis and other heavy-handed methods of suggestion to lead patients to “remember” acts of sexual abuse by nonexistent Satanic cabals.

The cries of ‘SATANIC PANIC’ even somehow where laid upon the fantasy role playing game ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ during the whole issue. New York Times covered this with the disappearance of a college student.

The best ‘devil’ in alternative will always be Dave Grohl in a ‘rock-off’ against Tenascios D in ‘Tribute’.