“I Was Watching Midcentury Hollywood Biblical Epics, Anti-Communist Propaganda Films, and 1970s B-Movies about Devil Worshippers”: Penny Lane on Hail Satan?

“Blasphemy is not free speech” reads a protest banner on the Little Rock statehouse lawn in a scene from Hail Satan?, the latest from Sundance vet Penny Lane (Our Nixon, Nuts!). The sign is emblematic of the ludicrous (and too often unchallenged) falsehoods that The Satanic Temple — fighting to place an elaborate statue of goat-headed god Baphomet alongside a local legislator’s equally ostentatious Ten Commandments monument — is up against. Luckily Lane, never one to shy away from provocative subjects, is right there on the ground, providing an intimate look into the group’s wild rise.

By seamlessly alternating interviews with members of the Salem, MA-based “nontheistic religious and political activist group” (think The Yes Men of religious pluralism, but with a punk rock flair) with a vast amount of startling historical footage, the notion of what it means to be a “Satanist” is upended in every frame. As The Satanic Temple tackles our nation’s oppressive Christian supremacy — in a manner not unlike other modern-day nonviolent movements such as Occupy, which challenged the supposed “bedrock American value” of capitalism — Lane herself uncovers and obliterates every diehard assumption we might have. (That Ten Commandments monument? Birthed quite unbiblically in a Paramount Pictures publicity stunt.)

Lane spoke with Filmmaker about what just might be the “least experimental” of all her works prior to the doc’s January 25th Park City premiere.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.