The Great Satan

Dimitri Simakis's 2018 film was cut from more than two thousand old video tapes. The material comes from eighties satanic panic broadcasts, religious programming and cheap horror. The film sets those images inside a new narrative. The aim is not to document an archive; joining the pieces shows how manufactured the fear of that period was. It is the work of the collective Everything Is Terrible! The editing is fast and built on repetition, and the narrative is deliberately exhausting. Screenings were mostly staged with live performance. Who it's for: those who like found-footage cinema and collage work. Who it's not for: viewers expecting an orderly narrative; the film is fragmentary throughout.