FULL TITLE: Hungry For Monsters: A Tale from a New Age Witch Hunt

HUNGRY FOR MONSTERS depicts a nightmare of persecution and injustice as it traces one family's encounter with recovered memory therapy and the implantation of false memories. A mysterious medieval quality haunts the lives of the people in this New Age danse macabre that emanates from a decade of news stories about repressed memories and Satanic ritual abuse.

HUNGRY FOR MONSTERS is a step by step account of a Pennsylvania family’s ordeal after 15-year-old Nicole Althaus tells a teacher that her father has molested her.

(Synopsis)

An epidemic of false accusations gripped American society through the mid-1990s, wreaking havoc in the lives of individuals and families—people trapped by the missionary zeal of helping professionals trying to save children. In 1990 and 1991, 15-year-old Nicole Althaus accused her father, mother, and a couple she had never met of molesting her in bizarre ritual circumstances. Filmed over five years, Hungry for Monsters examines the story of a Pittsburgh family’s ordeal when accusations of satanic ritual abuse are made by a daughter who believes she has recovered memories of heinous crimes. The film traces the personal experiences of Nicole Althaus, her parents, and other participants in the saga, through arrests and trials to eventual reconciliation. In the end there are some disturbing questions that may never be resolved.

FESTIVAL SCREENINGS

Bermuda International Film Festival (March 2004) -- two screenings
•
57th Locarno International Film Festival (August 2004) – two screenings in the Human Rights Section
•
Three Rivers Film Festival/Film Kitchen (November 2004)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

REVIEWS

"Hungry for Monsters, a new wonderfully spare, almost Bressonian feature documentary by George Csicsery, is more riveting than 20 action films put together. All of its violence is imagined, and it's all true to life. It's an amazing bit of Americana as gothic as a tale by Ambrose Bierce--a sharp and unrelenting portrait of the American system of justice run amok.”

-- Milos Stehlik, WBEZ/NPR

“At 69 minutes, Csicsery’s cautionary case study is as spare as it is gripping, at its center “a perfect victim” who, Csicsery says, reflected whatever ideas or attitudes her would-be saviors shone her way. Despite some underlying causes older than the witch hunts the film’s subtitle references, the abuse-hysteria epidemic is a decidedly contemporary brew, born of a weird ferment of sexual politics, new-age therapeutics, the training of social workers and public-safety workers, and the core beliefs of feminists as well as Christian fundamentalists.

“It was somehow a confluence of forces that are usually opposed to each other,” says Csicsery. “It’s easy to push buttons when you have parents worried about their children. But there was no perspective. … People trying to solve a problem, imagined or real, often get carried away with their own beliefs.”

--- Bill O'Driscoll, Pittsburgh City Paper