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Longtime Trav readers know that I am a big fan of what I like to call “time capsule movies”, that is to say movies that only could have been made at a specific time and place. Movies about a short-lived fad while the fad was still ongoing are particularly a favorite of mine. Along those same lines are movies made about a moral panic while the moral panic was still going on. Moral panic movies are especially fascinating because it’s like watching a cinematic adaptation of someone’s delusions. One such film is Mazes and Monsters, 1982 made-for-TV movie starring Tom Hanks about the dangers of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
The 1980s is remembered as a decade of many moral panics. There was the famous Satanic panic, a belief that there were nefarious Satanic cults peppered across the country that were kidnapping and sacrificing children. Related to the Satanic panic was moral panic over heavy metal bands which frequently used occult imagery in their album covers and lyrics. There were two highly publicized lawsuits filed by parents (one against Ozzy Osbourne and another against Judas Priest) alleging that heavy metal music caused their kids to commit suicide. Church ladies spent untold hours playing hit records backwards looking for Satanic messages. There was a moral panic over slasher movies whose graphic and nihilistic violence delighted teenagers while appalling parents. There was great concern over what these movies might do to young and impressionable minds.
In defense of the church ladies, they were in uncharted territory in 1980s. No generation before had ever been exposed to pop songs glorifying Satan, and realistic violence in movies was still a novelty. The first Rated R movies did not come out until the late 1960s and it wasn’t until the advent of cable TV and VCR that children were able to see them. What effect mass exposure to these things would have on people was still anyone’s guess. Who knows? Maybe watching a bunch slasher movies really would turn people into psychotic axe murderers. Maybe listening to too much Motley Crue really would turn people into devil worshippers. No one knew because it had never been tried before. It would not be until later when serious scientific studies on this sort of thing were conducted and found these fears to be largely overblown. Now you rarely hear these kinds of debates anymore. But as late as 1999, people were pondering what role Marilyn Manson and the video game Doom played in the Columbine massacre.
To confuse the issue even further, actual criminals would sometimes feed into the delusions of the church ladies by claiming some movie brainwashed them into committing the crime. One of the better known examples of this was the infamous 1982 “Halloween II Murders” when 24-year-old Richard Delmer Boyer murdered an elderly couple after watching the slasher Halloween II while high on PCP. The incident probably tells you more about PCP than it does about slasher movies but the incident nevertheless seemed to lend some credibility to the church ladies’ “monkey see, monkey do” theory of pop culture.
Another notable example of this phenomenon was when Ted Bundy gave an interview with televangelist James Dobson on the eve of his execution wherein Bundy claimed that an out-of-control pornography addiction caused him to murder dozens of women. He claimed that it started with simple Playboy magazines before graduating to stronger and more hardcore porn until finally merely looking at the pictures was not enough. He had to reenact them in real life!
I remember as a kid, they showed us this interview in my church youth group to scare us aware from pornography. I remember watching and believing that Ted Bundy was being sincere. I watched this interview again as an older and wiser adult and it is much clearer to me that this is a narcissistic sociopath trying to evade blame and make himself look like a hero trying to keep kids from going down the same path he did.
Of all the 1980s moral panics, the one around the tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons appears most the absurd in hindsight. With slasher movies, the idea was that if you watch too many of them, it would turn you into a killer yourself. With heavy metal, the idea was that if you listened to too much pro-Satan music, you would become a Satanist. Neither of those were true but the hypothesis at least sounds plausible. The claim against Dungeons & Dragons was ridiculous on its face.
With Dungeons & Dragons, there was a pervasive urban myth (which was 100% believed by church ladies everywhere) that playing Dungeons & Dragons over an extended period time would cause someone to lose touch with reality and they would start believing that they were in the game. No longer were they roleplaying as Geoffrey the Wizard. They would start believing that they really were Geoffrey the Wizard. As ridiculous as that sounds, it was widely and sincerely believed by many. I remember my sixth grade teacher giving us a lecture about D&D where she repeated the trope that your mind would remain trapped in the fantasy world if you played Dungeons & Dragons for too long.
The origin of that legend has to do with the sad tale of James Dallas Egbert III. Egbert was a child prodigy who entered college at age 16 but despite his bright prospects, he suffered from depression and substance abuse issues. In 1979, he went missing and the family hired a private investigator, William Dear, to find him. In interviews, Dear spit-balled various theories of what might have happened to him. One of these theories was that Egbert went down into the university steam tunnels to play a real life version of Dungeons & Dragons and either got lost or injured. This last theory, despite there being no evidence for it, captured the public’s imagination and endured even after Egbert was found alive in Louisiana. Egbert would commit suicide the next year in 1980.
In 1981, two fictionalized versions of the Egbert legend were published, both playing on the idea that role playing games make one lose touch with reality. One was Hobgoblin by American horror writer Scott Gardiner. The other was Mazes & Monsters by Jewish author Rona Jaffe. CBS acquired the rights to Jaffe’s novel and set to work on a TV adaptation.
The 1982 TV adaptation of Mazes and Monsters was hotly anticipated. Not only was the Egbert story still fresh in the public’s mind, earlier in the year had come the release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (the highest grossing film of all time until it was surpassed by Jurassic Park) which featured a scene with kids playing Dungeons & Dragons.
The movie opens with police looking for a missing college student at some local caverns and a reporter informing us that this is the result of a game of Mazes and Monsters gone horribly wrong.
The movie then flashes back to the eve of college fall semester. We are introduced to two of the four main characters.
First, is Jay-Jay Brockway played by former child star Chris Makepeace (Meatballs, My Bodyguard). Jay-Jay is autistic, as evidenced by his tendency to wear a different and often comical hat in every scene. Jay-Jay is something of a false protagonist. When you first see him, you would think that he would be the one to lose his mind playing Mazes and Monsters but plot twist, it’s actually Tom Hanks’ character, the most seemingly normal of the bunch.
The next is Daniel, the least essential of the characters. So inessential that the writers did not even bother to give him a surname. The film opens with him arguing with his parents about his future. He wants to become a video game designer while they want him to do something more substantive.
The third is the token female Kate Finch played by Wendy Crewson. When we first meet Kate, she is lamenting to her mother about how she is too brainy for most guys to handle.
Finally, we meet Robbie Wheeling played by Tom Hanks. At the time, Hanks was best known for starring in the sitcom Bosom Buddies. Mazes and Monsters would be his first starring role in a feature-length production. Robbie Wheeling’s story is that he flunked out of his previous college because he spent too much time playing Mazes and Monsters. Arriving at his new school, he promises his parents that he will never play that confounded game ever again. Alas, shortly into the new year, Robbie meets Jay-Jay who introduces him to his friends Kate and Daniel and together they peer pressure Robbie back into playing Mazes and Monsters.
Back on the sauce, Robbie strikes up a romance with fellow player Kate and we learn more Robbie’s backstory. Robbie talks about his brother who ran away from home to New York and how Robbie is guilt-ridden for having loaned his brother the money to do so.
It is Jay-Jay who gets the idea to take Mazes and Monsters into the real world. He rigs up a local cavern with traps and other decorations to give it a Dungeons & Dragons vibe. However, once the gang are inside the cavern LARPing, Robbie starts hallucinating monsters from the game. The hallucinations only get worse with time. He starts having visions of a character named Great Hall who tells him that he must become his character and live with total accuracy. Given that Tom Hanks’ Mazes and Monsters character is a cleric named Pardeu, being true to his priestly class means taking a vow of celibacy. As such, Robbie breaks up with his girlfriend Kate so as to be more faithful to his LARP. She then starts dating Daniel, to Robbie’s indifference.
The LARPing only gets worse. Robbie starts wearing his priest costume 24/7. The Great Hall appears to him again and sends him on a quest to find his brother in New York. Robbie goes missing and there is an extensive search to find him.
Robbie arrives in New York now fully immersed in his Mazes and Monsters character. When he encounters some muggers, at first he tries to cast a spell on them. When that fails, he uses his dagger, killing one of the muggers. This act snaps him out of the fantasy just long enough to call his friends and let them know where he is. This lucidity is short-lived and he returns to character and continues his quest to find his brother.
Jay-Jay, Daniel, and Kate arrive in New York and finally track Robbie down to the top of the World Trade Center where they are able to quite literally walk him off the ledge (Robbie was intending to cast a flying spell). Robbie once again snaps out of the fantasy, begins weeping and asks “Jay-Jay, what am I doing here? Why can’t I remember?” He has total amnesia of everything he did while in his Pardue persona.
Mazes and Monsters is not just a silly movie, it is a very bad one. It is only of interest for sociological reasons. That said, if there is any part of the movie that was well-done, it was the ending. The gang arrive at Robbie’s parents’ house to visit him. His mother takes them outside where Robbie is appreciating nature. You would think that now that he is back home, no longer playing Mazes and Monsters, and under the watchful eye of his parents that he would be back to normal. You are expecting a happy ending. But after exchanging pleasantries, they discover that he is still stuck in his Pardue the cleric persona, presumably forever. The friends are heartbroken that Robbie’s mind has been destroyed by the game they lured him back into playing. But at last, they resign themselves to this fate and rather than try to reason him back to reality, join him for one final LARP.
What hits me about Mazes and Monsters is not so much that a movie so farcical was ever made, but the knowledge that millions of people watched it when it came out and believed that it was an accurate reflection of reality. My sixth-grade teacher certainly did.
23 comments
I enjoyed your review. Speaking of movies about moral panics as they are happening, did you see HBO movie about the McMartin trial?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment:_The_McMartin_Trial
Too bad there was never any “moral panic” over rap music, the foulest, most degenerate, music genre in history, but blacks have never been held responsible for their actions. Great article! 🙃
Not only that, but rappers use samples of other people’s music, music that they didn’t create.
I think there was, but they lost out to music industry (((lawyers))) who were busy dismantling laws against obscenity.
I think I like when Trav talks movies the most! I guess the movie is also remembered bc tom hanks later got famous. I am pro D&D and all, but I was watching this true crime expose about a young guy who killed a woman for sexual reasons, like a serial killer who had only one victim, but they brought up the fact that the killer was an avid rpg player. The investigating cop said something interesting. He said you wouldn’t believe how often Dungeons & dragons or that sort of culture is connected with scenario type murders, by which I assume he meant sexual killings. He said he feels convinced that there is some connection between the two! I thought that was very interesting. I wonder if that could be true, or if the cop is some sort of hold over from that age when there was D&d hysteria? What do you guys think? Did you know that the FBI was also investigating Gary Gygax, the creator of dungeon and dragons, actively, and they had a file on him that had the most ridiculous allegations. It called him “highly dangerous and creative.” lol. Or does law-enforcement have some sort of vendetta against gamers? Also I read interestingly, that one of the things that held up the Ted Kaczynski Unabomber investigation was that the investigators were fixated on this group of gamers in Chicagoland area. They just wouldn’t give up the idea that these rpgers had something to do with it!
I would guess that the police have some type of bias against D&D or at least did at one time. I had read that about Gary Gygax. I think a lot of that was a type of culture shock on the part of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Previous generations never had to deal with D&D, heavy metal, and other aspects of popular culture.
There was another big brouhaha in which the glowies went after Steve Jackson Games, best known for GURPS and Car Wars. What a bungle!
OMG, I read about it! What clodpolish law-enforcement we have! They thought the cyberpunk game manual was really about hacking?
Great essay.
I had similar thoughts when after the Charlie Kirk shooting the Utah Governor, Spencer Cox blamed mean keyboard kids hogging social media for the actual assassination, and then he gave some kind of Boy Scout motivational speech about turning off the smart phone once in awhile and “touching grass.”
Ann Coulter commented on the Internet moral panic too:
“ Yes, apparently, what really incited Kirk’s confessed assassin, Tyler Robinson, was not his left-wing politics, his confused sexuality or his romantic relationship with a male “transitioning” to female, but, said Cox, “those social media, those dark places of the internet where conflict entrepreneurs reside who are preying upon us.” ”
[LINK]
Coulter makes the point that you might as well correlate the presence of atmospheric oxygen to the causality of these assassinations.
I used to have Heavy Metal posters like Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden on my room’s wall in the dormitory when I was a freshman at an LDS private college now called BYU-Idaho, which I graduated from.
Despite the ultra-Conservative Christian environment, I never got any Flak for it. Literally nobody thought that these musical groups were really Satan worshippers or that the bands were doing anything other than mythology and Doom æsthetics ─ maybe some drugs if you diced some of the lyrics too closely.
I’m not an expert on the McMartin Preschool case or the subject, but my understanding is that the moral panic wound down pretty quickly when the FBI simply refused to believe what the Christian Evangelical-focused police departments took as a given, i.e., that there were real Satan worshippers afoot.
When I borrowed my Dad’s car to go see Rush and Uriah Heep in concert in Pocatello with some friends in 1978, my Dad was a little concerned. He had heard something about the revival of the 1967 Broadway Musical Hair which was known for Rock music and nudity on stage. I just shook my head and took the car keys. “We are not seeing nude performers, Dad.”
🙂
Rush is one of my favorite bands. Definitely lyric-wise. Neel Piert is a true poet. I can’t find anything not completely salutatory in his lyrics.
Rush is one of my favorite bands as well. They just reunited and have got a female, German drummer. They have a tour scheduled for 2026.
My friends and I would wear various heavy metal, T-shirts in high school, especially after attending a concert. This included Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Dio and others. The teachers never said anything to us, but from the look on their faces, it was obvious that the imagery on those T-shirts disturbed them. We weren’t trying to upset them; it was just a consequence of that metal scene. In that respect, I was an unintentional foot soldier of the satanic panic of the eighties.
Scott, you have good taste in music.
Scott: October 9, 2025 at 11:20 pm…Ann Coulter commented:
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“Yes, apparently, what really incited Kirk’s confessed assassin, Tyler Robinson, was not his left-wing politics, his confused sexuality or his romantic relationship with a male “transitioning” to female, but, said Cox, “those social media, those dark places of the internet where conflict entrepreneurs reside who are preying upon us.”
Perceptive lady. Almost “one of us.” Almost. I believe it was Ann who said youngsters were attracted to the alt-right because they enjoyed being called “Nazis.” How did that work out for them?
I try to stay in touch with reality so have never been attracted to what’s discussed in Travis’s essay and the comments under. Call me an old fogey, but I’m reminded of various ways folks can avoid or escape the reality of our cause.
Most movies about moral panics fall into the category of exploitation. I recently watched a 1980 slasher movie called Terror on Tour which capitalized on the moral panic around the band KISS. Time capsule rating is off the charts.
But that’s a different thing to Mazes and Monsters which takes an urban myth and presents it with sincere earnestness. It’s not exploiting the moral panic for shock value but treating it as a serious issue.
Travis, I know where you are coming from. It was my seventh-grade teacher who warned us about Dungeons and Dragons. I’ll add a few more things about the satanic panic of the eighties, like I pointed out, I was a foot soldier in it, at least unintentionally. Starting in the eighties, fundamentalist churches would have bon fires and burn heavy metal albums and cassettes. This was aimed at teens. You might find footage of this on YouTube. In 1988 Heraldo Rivera had a TV special on satanic cults, he even interviewed Ozzy Osbourne. It got high ratings but was mainly sensationalism. Also, some of these evangelists would have part of their program devoted to the evils of heavy metal. Quite often, this consisted of playing certain rock songs backwards to hear satanic messages, this was known as “backward masking”. It really just amounted to noise and gibberish when this was done. They would also point out the evil covers of many rock albums. These same evangelists would also have programs devoted to the evils of D&D. You might remember those ridiculous religious tracts left in public places. One is called Dark Dungeons, it has a similar theme to this movie with regards to role playing games like D&D. It can be found on the internet. One of the points that I’m making is that certain members of the religious establishment made this hysteria worse by adding fuel to the fire. Occasionally, you would have a lone sociologist pointing out that the satanic panic was mainly a form of urban legend and hysteria. They would be the voice in the wilderness.
I think there’s a dash of moral cowardice in many moral panics. It’s easiest to work up a mass of righteous fury against people who can’t fight back. Some kids are playing Dungeons & Dragons in the attic? Moral panic time! Rich, influential, powerful, and extremely well connected Jews are destroying the nation? No moral panic about that. It wouldn’t be prudent.
Another moral panic that I have always found interesting is Halloween Trick-or-Treating and product tampering.
I was taught ─ everyone drilled it in ─ from about the 1960s that your bag of Halloween goodies was going to be filled will LSD, razor blades in apples, and marshmallow popcorn balls made with extra detergent, and so on.
Our Mom had to inspect everything when we came home before we could eat any of it.
Trick-or-Treating is probably a lot less fun for the kids running around the neighborhood ringing the doorbells than for the homeowners stuck manning the door until it all dies down.
I can remember a lot of elderly people who had painstakingly made things like candied applies and popcorn balls, and these just weren’t going to be eaten. If it wasn’t in a sealed wrapper, the Halloween candy was going straight into the trash. That inluded homemade cookies, pieces of pie, cake, or anything else.
The local hospital and doctor offices made it known on the TV news that they would be at the ready all night to X-ray your Halloween haul and check for contraband like hidden needles and razor blades.
Some of the older kids turned Trick-or-Treating into a military operation, hitting as many houses as logistically possible in the time available. Rarely were windows soaped or houses toilet-papered if somebody didn’t answer their door; that takes time away from the candy haul.
But increasingly all anybody ever parted with for the Halloween kids were Smarties or something really cheap like that (and I don’t particularly care for those). What, you thought that you were going to get a 1 cent mini candy bar like it was 1929? LOL.
Anyway, fast forward to today, and to my knowledge there has never been a documented case of Halloween candy tampering, at least not by a stranger. None. Zero.
This whole “witches with a warped sense of humor” claim ─ that you hear every year ─ was and is nothing short of a lie. But it illustrates how urban legends and nonsense can spread, and by people in positions of authority who should know better.
This reminds me of the Tylenol cyanide poisonings back in the early 1980s. Back then ─ it might be hard to believe today ─ but the Tylenol bottles were not sealed in any reliable way to reveal any product tampering.
There was just a pill bottle inside with a newfangled safety cap designed to make it frustrating for Seniors to open, with a cotton ball and some pills inside. There was no seal that indicated that the bottle had never been opened.
So all anybody had to do was carefully open the cardboard package, open up the pill bottle inside, and put in a similarly-looking capsule filled with a cyanide salt, and then carefully glue the cardboard package shut again with some school glue, and then go put it back onto the store shelf inconspicuously. Nobody would be the wiser until somebody bought the product and tried to use it at home.
Perhaps I have an unusual imagination, but I literally wondered about this before 1982 when the shocking Tylenol incidents of Chicago actually occured, leading to at least seven deaths (LINK).
Then the drug manufacturers redesigned the medicine bottles with a plastic or cardboard cover so that they could not be tampered with undetected. This is the standard today, of course, and anything else is unthinkable.
Countermeasures like tamper-resistant packaging should have been thought about before, even when we thought we lived in a high-trust society.
One other thing which is a litmus test for the kind of neighborhood you live in. Are your Amazon deliveries still there when you get home from work? Porch Pirates are directly corelated to the Diversity that your community has on tap.
Another litmus test when investigating potential living arrangements is to check on a weekend for how much Diversity strengthens the community swimming pool.
🙂
Again, a few sociologists would be the voice in the wilderness about harmful Halloween candy. Occasionally one of them would be on TV explaining that it was an urban legend. One that started in the late eighties was one about people being mugged, then having one of their kidneys stolen, and then waking up in a dark alley without a kidney. That one drove me crazy. I knew people that swore that it was happening but couldn’t show any proof. I saw a news special about that years later. They did an investigation and traced that rumor to a group of black women in inner-city New Orleans.
Here’s an idea: how about if the Dissident Right starts publishing its own role-playing game (RPGs)?
Say, set a RPG in a dystopian near future where dissidents are arrested for putting up stickers on lamp posts, people lose their bank accounts without any due process, law enforcement stands down as rioters torch a city, organized sex slavery gangs operate with impunity, and middle of the road conservatives are assassinated while speaking on campus.
Then have various characters whom the discerning player can LARP:
* Cuckservative: Your goal is to make as much money as possible even as your country sinks beneath the waves.
* Antifa: Drugs! Bags full of ca$h! Nose rings! Chucking pieces of pavement at the cops! It’s all yours with legal cover as well!
* Good Cop: You obey stand-down orders even as criminals wreck a city; hey, it’s all about your pension!
* Bad Cop: You do not “just follow orders” but instead use your skills to take down globalists while maintaining the facade of go-along to get-along.
* NGO Marching Member: Boat trips to the Mediterranean! All-expenses paid trips to prestigious international conferences! Wow! And paid for by USAID funds.
* Keyboard Warrior: Hey, you have a great online handle, you repost Pinochet videos daily, you got the cutting edge emojis…but are a little too busy watching 500 channels of telescreen to take part in an organizers’ meeting or street protest.
* IT Overlord: Your goal is to set yourself up as a interplanetary techno-satrap and will support whichever faction gives you the best deal…and would align Right if approached intelligently.
* Real True Nationalist: You’ve lost your social media account, your job and Lib relatives…but you continue to fight for your nation just for the glory points and a vision of the future.
Such a RPG could be self-published as a book, or placed online as a pdf download. Dress it up with some eye-catching graphics and it just might go viral. The anticipated hysterical reaction from the Left Establishment would be worth the price of admission.
Just sayin’…
I’ve long advocated something like this. Minus the last one, all would be enemies like the legendary Streets of Rage 2 which I thoroughly enjoyed as a kid. If one guy can create Stardew Valley with gender-fluid characters in four years, why can’t one of ours do a 2d beat ‘em’ up? Or better yet, instead of Pavel Durov moping on telegram, use some funds to either fund a proWhite international law firm or pitch in to make such video games that’ll definitely attract the kids.
I got my Edgelord up to level 7 and had a +3 redpilling sword but I rolled a 1 on a 3d10 saving throw that was that.
Antelope Hill Publishing sells two dystopian board games set in the near future. One is called Civil War Two and the other is called Portland Occupied Zone or POZ.
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