Minor Horror #02-10: My Sweet Satan
This is the tenth in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’m going to be publishing here throughout October. For more information, please see this post from last year, when I first did this.
My Sweet Satan (Jim van Bebber, 1994)
“All we’d do is sit around, get high, work on gettin’ high, and everybody hates everybody for no reason, nobody has any ideals or any ambitions, I think this country sucks, I just, this time next year I’m gonna be in Europe…”
One night in the summer of 1984, a kid named Ricky Kasso stabbed another kid named Gary Lauwers to death in a small, wet patch of woodlands on Long Island. Both of them, as well as their two friends that were with them, were on LSD and PCP at the time. Everyone in their social circle was on drugs a lot of the time, especially Ricky, who was living on the street and called himself the Acid King, sometimes dealing but mostly just using, and using a lot. Gary had stolen some bags of PCP from Ricky while he was passed out at a party a while back, which is as good a motive for a senseless crime as anything, but Ricky liked Black Sabbath and Anton LaVey and doing weird stuff in cemeteries, so naturally rumors quickly spread that he was the leader of a Satanic cult, and Gary had been Satanic ritual murdered. That he had reportedly demanded Gary say he “loves Satan” as he was stabbing him didn’t exactly discourage the notion, to be fair – and then Ricky hung himself in his jail cell, and that was that. His friend had been arrested and charged, but was acquitted at trial; it was pretty clear he had no idea Ricky was gonna pull that shit. These events serve as the basis for My Sweet Satan in the same way a jazz standard can serve as the basis for a band’s improvisation – this is a movie about “Ricky Kasslin,” not Ricky Kasso, but it’s the real kid, the real crime, which gives the fiction its shape and its color. It reaches for a truth beyond factuality, for the spirit of the thing, its essence. It believes itself capable of this because Jim Van Bebber, its director, believes he understands the Acid King’s world, its logic, its dynamics, the horizons of its possibilities. He builds a convincing case. Possibly he does not understand the world of the real youth named Richard Allan Kasso Jr., but he understands the world of the Acid King, and he would like you to understand it as well. He would like you to spend about 20 minutes living in it.
