GNC
King-Sized Canary
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2001
- Messages
- 33,634
Just read the whole of this thread, and nobody mentions the 1980 book that started the SRA ball rolling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers
I read about it in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell book, which is an overview of the horror paperbacks boom of the 1970s and 80s. Michelle Remembers was very much in that lurid tradition, breathlessly detailing an 81 day ordeal for 5 year old Michelle Smith which was recovered in therapy when she was an adult (with a shrink she was having an affair with, it turned out). The trouble was, as the book climbed the bestseller lists, none of it was true.
But thanks to the popularity of the horror genre stamped on the pop culture landscape, with horror movies blamed for all sorts of psychological problems despite no evidence for it (see the UK's video nasties scare), there were plenty of religious types who adapted the shocking setpieces of these fictions to what they wanted to believe was real life. Again, no evidence whatsoever. It was like the fundamentalists needed their horror stories too, but they had to be tailored to their beliefs.
And all because one shrink saw the success of The Amityville Horror and thought, hmm, I could make a lot of money out of this (and did).
So... anyone read Michelle Remembers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers
I read about it in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell book, which is an overview of the horror paperbacks boom of the 1970s and 80s. Michelle Remembers was very much in that lurid tradition, breathlessly detailing an 81 day ordeal for 5 year old Michelle Smith which was recovered in therapy when she was an adult (with a shrink she was having an affair with, it turned out). The trouble was, as the book climbed the bestseller lists, none of it was true.
But thanks to the popularity of the horror genre stamped on the pop culture landscape, with horror movies blamed for all sorts of psychological problems despite no evidence for it (see the UK's video nasties scare), there were plenty of religious types who adapted the shocking setpieces of these fictions to what they wanted to believe was real life. Again, no evidence whatsoever. It was like the fundamentalists needed their horror stories too, but they had to be tailored to their beliefs.
And all because one shrink saw the success of The Amityville Horror and thought, hmm, I could make a lot of money out of this (and did).
So... anyone read Michelle Remembers?