You are in the Credits maze.

The Labyrinth-LENS podcast series was built out of interview materials collected as part of our research project. As anthropologists and scientists, part of our work involves talking with people about the topics we study, and often we record these conversations, with the consent of the people we talk with. Current practices (governed by Institutional Review Boards at all universities) generally require that such conversations be anonymous and confidential. When we publish any such material, therefore we try to remove any identifying information and use pseudonyms where possible. In audio material we do the same. Any questions about the use of this material can be directed to the UCLA IRB (see the methods section for more detail).

Researching this podcast was a blast. There is a fair amount of information about the Process Church of the Final Judgement, some harder to get than others. Above all the Neil Edwards documentary Sympathy for the Devil is one of the most enjoyable such sources, full of information about the church that we couldn’t include here: https://www.theprocessmovie.com/

If you go down the rabbit hole of Lori Lieberman’s “Killing me Softly”, it is really quite an adventure. Not only has it be covered hundreds (thousands?) of times, but it is a somewhat contested and bizarre story of a young songwriter’s success and the sordid history of attempts to steal/borrow/re-make its origin story (supposedly about Don Mclean). The song has a nice resonance here though because if you listen askance, it can sound like its actually about Satan.

Using music from The Exorcist (d. Friedkin, 1973) was also important to us for this episode (specifically, Penderecki’s “Polyrhythmia” and Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”) because they simply scream Satan! William Friedkin’s story of his choice of music really makes clear just how important it was (and subsequently turned out to be) for the cultural resonance of the movie.

There also turns out to be a lot of material available from various preachers, pastors, amateur theologians, and famous folks (Falwell!) about Satan and animals going to heaven. Not sure how they feel about copyright infringement, but I figure their goal, like that of us scholars, is just to get their message out there. You will be reunited with your pets in heaven, is the current wisdom from the internet.