Growing Up In Satan’s Backyard (Part 4)
On set with Sarah Marshall from You're Wrong About
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I could see my breath in the entrance hall of the manor house. Even worse, the owner—a slight woman in her early fifties, her brown hair cut into a straight, shoulder-length bob with long bangs—wore a puffy winter jacket and thick leather boots indoors. She offered to give Steve and me a quick tour of the bottom floor of her sprawling home while the rest of our crew unloaded gear in the driveway.
We had booked this location without a scout, and now all I could see were problems. The freezer-like temperature indoors. Dozens of windows that we would have to diffuse or cover to control the sunlight. Did we have enough gear to pull this off? Would everyone be warm enough to work here for the next ten hours? We were flying our subject up from Oregon and didn’t have the budget for a reshoot if the interview didn’t go well.
Built in the early 1900s in a typical Edwardian style, the rooms in this part of the manor were paneled in black walnut and adorned with beautiful wainscoting. The hallway connecting the main room to the kitchen had a long, low ceiling and an aged wood floor that groaned with each step. I don’t usually get nervous before interviews. Yet as we followed the owner toward the open doorway leading to the kitchen, I began to feel all the telltale signs: slick hands, a buzzing sensation in my upper chest, and the lightheadedness that comes from holding my breath for too long.
The owner stopped at the kitchen door. “I was told you don’t need this part of the house. Are you sure?” She shut the thick wooden door before we could answer and moved on to the next open doorway in the hallway. “How about the study?”
Her hand slowly crept toward the door handle, but Steve stepped into the room before she could close it. Why did she seem so eager to shut certain doors? Steve made a beeline for the desk built into the bay window. She followed him inside and stopped halfway into the room.
The furniture—what little there was—was sparse and mismatched: an armchair with frayed edges here, a worn-out ottoman there. From the doorframe, I watched as she observed Steve scanning the shelves above the desk, packed with mass-market paperbacks from the ’70s and ’80s. Their spines had faded into muted pastels: baby blues, creamy yellows, soft pinks. Was a copy of Michelle Remembers in there somewhere? Nothing about this documentary had been normal, and finding that book here would just be another strange coincidence to add to the list.
Steve turned away from the paperbacks and faced the window, clenching his hand into a fist and holding it above the desk to gauge the light falling into the room.
“We should do something with Sarah in here,” he said. Then, to the owner: “This is perfect.”
The owner nodded slowly and clasped her hands together. “Would you like to see the balcony?”
Double doors in the entrance hall led to a massive, columned terrace overlooking landscaped gardens and pastureland beyond the steep driveway. In the distance, clear blue skies over an expanse of open ocean, stretching uninterrupted to Japan.
This was an unusual property for the southern tip of Vancouver Island, more suited to the English countryside than the heavily forested coastline of British Columbia. Steve had found it on a film commission site ten days earlier after the cabin-in-the-woods location we’d originally booked fell through. He was right, of course—the location was perfect. The kind of place you could imagine a satanic ritual happening in during the 1980s, when rumours of stolen babies and intergenerational cults of devil-worshippers spread like wildfire in this part of the world.
As I paced the driveway, our crew worked fast—Blake and Kate strategizing which gear to haul inside, Martin and Graham racing to black out windows before the sun shifted. A hundred tiny disasters waiting to happen, and no time to fix them if they did. We had already lost an hour to travel, unloading gear, and the tour with the owner. The pressure was on.
Our producer, Michael, would arrive with Sarah Marshall in less than two hours. She’s the host and creator of You’re Wrong About, a wildly successful podcast that Steve and I had devoured while stuck inside our apartment during the first year of the pandemic. We were huge fans, and aside from two short, glitchy video calls a few months ago—where screens froze and chunks of conversation were lost—this would be our first time meeting her in person.
When the owner and her family left for their hotel, their staff emerged from the outbuildings—garages, a row of stables, a gardening shed—and gathered among the film equipment. Cars arrived and departed at the same time. Amid the chaos, I mistook our sound recordist, Stephen, for a gardener.
A good director knows when to step back and let everyone else do their jobs. This was one of those times. So Steve and I walked around the property to talk through Sarah’s interview, discovering a staff residence and a guest house in the fields behind the stables. There was even a private chapel hidden further up the property, behind a bank of rhododendrons and a massive Garry oak tree with a rope swing. Its windows were boarded up, and the door was locked. Fascinating and unsettling in equal measure, broken children’s toys had been placed in and around the disintegrating walls of the chapel. It made me think about how the past is never truly gone, how it’s always jutting up into the present, waiting to be acknowledged.
This was a large part of why we were talking to Sarah Marshall in the first place. Her podcast explores moral panics and misremembered pasts. She did a five-part series on Michelle Remembers and was flying to Canada to tell us all about it.
You can never tell how a podcaster—or any media creator, really—will be when a camera starts rolling. How much of what they do comes from writing and performance? Will they be able to think and speak articulately on the spot without a script or notes? I’ve learned over the hundreds of interviews I’ve done—both in front of the camera for my 2000s reality show and now behind it as a director—that these are two separate talents. Not everyone can do both.
From her podcast, I could tell Sarah was a great writer and performer—whip-smart with a dry sense of humour. On our last Zoom call, she reminded me of Margaret Atwood—a playful but formidable intelligence—and this was the true source of my nerves. My way of coping was to over-prepare.
Usually, I prepare the night before and the morning of an interview, then go with the flow once we start rolling. I keep a one-pager of notes on my lap in case I get lost, but I rarely need to look at them. But for Sarah, I had pages and pages of notes—typed, handwritten, drowning in yellow highlighter. This interview was crucial because Sarah was doing double duty: commenting on the book and reading passages from it in case we couldn’t find all the archival material we needed. I had estimated four or five hours of talking over two days, plus two more hours for inserts and portraiture of Sarah podcasting and researching. It was a big commitment with an hour-long commute to and from the hotel each day—and now, everything was on me.
I reviewed my notes one last time while Steve, Blake, Kate, and our sound recordist made final lighting and camera adjustments. The buzzing sensation from that morning was back in full force. I stared at my notes—pages of frantic highlights, underlines, and annotations—wondering if I had prepared the wrong way entirely. What if she wasn’t what I expected? What if I was trying to lead an expert instead of letting her guide the conversation?
Then, a voice: '“Hello!”
I looked up. There was Sarah, contorting herself around a lighting stand in a faux cheetah-print flannel coat and a white linen dress.
“I brought my recording gear and a change of clothes.” She gestured to her dress and smiled. “Is this okay?”
She had the same West Coast voice I knew from You’re Wrong About, with a slight Californian drawl. When she set down her side bag and pulled out a dog-eared copy of Michelle Remembers, I saw every page was marked up in pen and highlighter. She had a yellow journal filled with colour-coded notes.
“This is what I used for the series,” she explained.
Instantly, the tension in my shoulders dissipated. Seeing her level of preparation made me realize I had gotten too far into my own head. Sarah knew everything. My job was simply to guide her.
She sat down, smiled, and asked, “So, where do you want to begin?”
A short excerpt from the transcription of our interview with Sarah Marshall on Vancouver Island on Thursday May 12, 2022:
SEAN:
Okay, everyone. How are we feeling? Are we ready to go?
STEVE:
I think we’re good to go. Okay, let’s roll camera.
KATE:
Rolling.
BLAKE:
Rolling
STEPHEN:
Sound speed.
STEVE:
Scene one, take one. Mark.
SEAN:
Okay….First, are you okay temperature-wise, Sarah?
SARAH MARSHALL:
Yeah. No, this is fine. Yeah.
SEAN:
Awesome. Well, let's start with the book in question. What book are we here to talk about today? What is it about?
SARAH MARSHALL:
All right. I'm going to try and have less of a giant smile on my face. And should I look at you?
SEAN:
Yes.
SARAH MARSHALL:
Okay, great. All right. We are talking about Michelle Remembers, which some say, including me, is the book that began the satanic panic.
SEAN:
What is your connection to the book?
SARAH MARSHALL:
My connection to Michelle Remembers is that I have been interested in the satanic panic for years. I've researched it for years. I've done podcast episodes about it. I feel like my mind is not free of it. And once I read Michelle Remembers, which is referenced by a lot of people as the starting point for all this, I could not get it out of my head. It's hard to get any of the Satanic Panic out of your head, but this one is just inescapable.
SEAN:
What is Michelle Remembers about?
SARAH MARSHALL:
So the book begins when our title character, Michelle, returns to the therapist that she saw for many years when she was younger, after what the book calls her extremely severe grief following a miscarriage. She comes to him first with a dream about spiders pouring out of her. After she scratches an itch, she tears a hole in her skin and spiders start coming out. So her therapist, Dr. Lawrence Pazder, according to the book, immediately recognizes this dream as quite symbolic. So they begin sessions again. She keeps coming in with a feeling that there's something she needs to tell him, but she can't say it. She doesn't know what it is.
SARAH MARSHALL:
He's completely mystified over what could possibly be bothering her because they've already gone over her entire life. He knows about her childhood. He knows about her difficulties with her parents. He knows that she had an unhappy upbringing in many ways. But his theory is, well, we've already gone over that, so what could be left to be bothering you? He uses a therapeutic technique, which the book does not fully explain, to lower her into her depths. She begins in the voice of a child to tell him increasingly...and with his aid, with his steering of it…increasingly violent and disturbing stories about her being tortured by the satanic cult that her mother gave her to when she was five years old. And that's most of the book…Michelle's remembering.
This is the fourth story in a series about the Satanic Panic that will jump back and forth between the 1980s and the present day. Thanks for reading and you can check out the first post in the series here:
You can listen to Sarah Marshall’s series on Michelle Remembers via Spotify or Apple Podcasts
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