Hell yes, Hulu's developing a series based on the Satanic Panic of the '80s
Looks like development executives at Hulu heard our suggestion that the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and ‘90s, the closest thing to an actual witch hunt we’ve had in contemporary America, would make for compelling TV. As detailed in The Hollywood Reporter, though, the idea the streaming service is running with won’t be an American Crime Story-style “based on a real story” docudrama, but a looser, and equally intriguing, fictional interpretation of the phenomenon.
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.