“This case is the last gasp of the Satanic ritual abuse panic.” So says Debbie Nathan, a journalist and author of Satan’s Silence, and one of the many experts called up in the documentary Southwest of Salem to explore the case of the San Antonio Four. In 1994, four women were accused, tried, and convicted of the heinous sexual assault of two young girls—as one newscaster puts it, “the modern version of the witchcraft trials.” Twenty years later, the four women have maintained their innocence, insisting that the accusations were entirely fabricated, and borne of homophobic prejudice and a late-’90s mania about covens, cults, and child abuse. Southwest of Salem is a riveting and layered true crime story that explores the web of prejudices in a contentious trial and the interrelated political and personal forces that work to convict those thought guilty that perhaps trample the innocent in the process.

—Cara Cusumano

Directed by

Deborah S. Esquenazi