Hulkamania & the Satanic Panic: reflecting on two cultural phenomena from the ’80s
It is Sunday night on January 22, 1984, and a wild-eyed Ozzy Osbourne is imploring New Jersey’s metalheads to go wild. Jake E. Lee, Ozzy’s new six-string gunslinger, tears into "Mr. Crowley,” turning Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford into a heavy metal cathedral. Osbourne is 40 shows into his hugely successful Bark At The Moon world tour, which features fellow hedonists Mötley Crüe as the opening act in support of their breakthrough record, Shout At The Devil. The following night, about 20 minutes south of the Arena, Hulk Hogan will defeat the Iron Sheik at New York’s Madison Square Garden for the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) title. Hogan will break out of the Sheik’s deadly camel clutch, drop the big leg, and pin Sheik for the three count. Pandemonium will break out among those in attendance, ushering in the dawn of pro wrestling’s golden age and the birth of an all-American hero. Ringside announcer Gorilla Monsoon will declare: “Hulkamania is here.”
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On July 22, John “Ozzy” Osbourne died at 76 due to complications from Parkinson’s. Two days later, Terry Gene Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, died of cardiac arrest at 71. Both Osbourne and Hogan enjoyed peak stardom throughout the ’80s, electrifying crowds and making headlines on their way to becoming pop culture sensations. Osbourne became conservative America’s poster boy and scapegoat for the so-called moral malaise afflicting American teenagers enamoured with heavy metal music. Hogan, on the other hand, became a role model for young kids who, if they trained, said their prayers, and ate their vitamins, could become a real American, just like him. While news of Osborne’s death inspired a global outpouring of grief and condolences, Hogan’s passing led to both heartfelt tributes and widespread disagreement about his legacy. How their legacies came to be perceived might seem surprising given their career trajectories, but societal mores have transformed over the decades. And 2025 isn’t 1984.
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In 1979, Ozzy Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath for substance abuse and self-destructive behaviour. After wallowing in self-pity, getting drunk, and watching cartoons, he recruited hotshot guitarist Randy Rhoads and released 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz, a huge commercial success featuring two of his biggest hits, “Crazy Train” and “Mr. Crowley.” The latter, an ominous song about English occultist, mystic, and self-proclaimed black magician Aleister Crowley, reinforced Osborne’s reputation as a Dionysian lunatic who dabbled in satanic imagery. Fresh on the heels of Blizzard came 1981’s Diary of A Madman, the album cover of which features Osborne posing as a madman in a medieval castle with an inverted crucifix hanging on the wall behind him.
In November 1982, eight months after Randy Rhoads died in a horrific plane crash, Osbourne released Speak Of the Devil, a live concert album with Brad Gillis on axe duty. This time, the album cover featured Ozzy on a throne, mugging for the camera wearing plastic vampire fangs. To assuage his grief over Rhoads’ death, Osbourne began drinking heavily again, and the Bark At the Moon tour with the Crüe in 1983 and 1984 was a bacchanalian orgy of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll excess. Then on October, 26, 1984, John McCollum, a 19-year-old fan, shot himself in the head after listening to the song “Suicide Solution” from the Blizzard of Ozz album. A lawsuit from McCollum’s family accused Osbourne of criminal negligence, claiming the song urges listener’s to “get the gun and shoot, shoot, shoot.” Osbourne’s camp countered that the song is about a man drinking himself to death (the lyric in question is actually “get the flaps out, Satan, Satan, Satan”). Although, Osborne was exonerated when the case was dismissed by a California court two years later, the Satanic Panic was in full throes, and he was public enemy number one in the eyes of America’s religious right.
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In 1980, two months after Blizzard of Ozz hit record store shelves, Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Pazder, released a since-debunked memoir called Michelle Remembers. In it, Smith claims she was abused by a satanic cult in Victoria, British Columbia, in the 1950s. The book recounts Smith’s “recollections” and is replete with ritual killings, satanic orgies, satanic possession and exorcism, and conspiracy theories. The book drew the attention of law enforcement and the American Psychiatric Association and was taken at face value by the Catholic Church. A visit to the Vatican by the authors prompted Pope John Paul II to launch an investigation into satanic cults, which gave the memoir worldwide publicity and helped it become a bestseller. Thus the Satanic Panic was born.
The use of satanic symbolism and imagery in film, music, and literature did not start in the 1980s; Jimmy Page’s interest in the occult, William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist, The Omen and its sequel, along with a handful of sexually exploitative B-movies about satanic rituals, are all products of the ’70s. But in Reagan’s America, the rise of Christian fundamentalism, combined with Cold War paranoia, penetrated the very fabric of society and resulted in a popular culture saturated in sensationalist media coverage of all things allegedly evil. Books about serial killers, from Charles Manson to Richard Ramirez, filled the true crime sections of bookstores in sinister red and black packaging. Heavy metal bands like Iron Maiden (The Number of the Beast) and Mötley Crüe (Shout At the Devil) used satanic imagery to market their music and get exposure on MTV. Evangelical Christians thought the game Dungeons and Dragons made kids join satanic rituals and commit suicide. Television evangelists and talk show hosts warned parents of child predators and taught them how to check if their teenager worshipped the devil. (I was never into D&D, but I was nine when I bought Shout At the Devil at Music World on Dundas Street West in Etobicoke. When I got home, I sat on my bed and hesitated to remove the shrink wrap, because of song titles like “Bastard” and “God Bless the Children of the Beast.” My parents told me that if I wasn’t comfortable with it I could return the album. Of course, I opened it and loved it.) This was the cultural zeitgeist in which Ozzy Osbourne rocketed to fame as a solo artist and also became a bogeyman of the right. His music may have been harmless escapism for teenage metalheads looking to rebel against authority, but the man who famously snorted a line of ants, urinated near the Alamo, and bit the head off a bat (he thought it was rubber) was persona non grata in conservative America.
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With his kid-friendly slogans and clownish kayfabe—a term used to describe a wrestler’s staged performance—Hulk Hogan, clad in his signature red and yellow, was as American as McDonald’s. The Hulkster (a name which unironically autocorrects to “huckster”) was just one of a stable of colourful WWF characters including Junkyard Dog, Big John Stud, King Kong Bundy, Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, and “Macho Man” Randy Savage. But when Hogan beat the Sheik for the championship title, he became the face of the company. At 10-years-old, I was in complete rapture of the ring antics and promos staged by WWF wrestlers, and Hogan was my favourite. I drew pictures of him and had his poster on my bedroom wall.
It would be an understatement to say Hulk Hogan made professional wrestling a household name: he helped turn the WWF into a highly profitable business worth billions and a staple of American pop culture. In the process, he became one of the most recognizable figures in America, if not the world. Marketed as standing six-foot-seven, weighing three-hundred pounds, and having twenty-four-inch biceps (which he referred to as “pythons”), Hogan look and acted like a caricature. With his straw hair dyed blonde and handlebar moustache, yellow boots and trunks, and red or yellow top, the Hulkster was the good guy (or “babyface” in wrestling lingo), a tanned cartoon hero drenched in baby oil who showed up just in time to save the day.
The image of Hogan puffing his cheeks and staring wide-eyed into the camera while tearing off his ‘Hulkamania’ tank top was ubiquitous in the 1980s. He was not a particularly agile or dynamic wrestler, and in the prime of his career, he was always closer to being flabby than ripped. But he had personality and charisma, and his catchphrases (“Whatcha gonna do when Hulkamania runs wild on you?”) could captivate kids as effectively as any slogan from a Saturday morning cereal commercial. The WWF capitalized on Hogan’s star power, releasing trading cards, toy action figures and, in 1985, The Wrestling Album, which featured “Hulk Hogan’s Theme” and “Real American” by Rick Derringer, the latter of which became more intimately associated with Hogan than the synth-heavy theme song.
The video for “Real American” is a prime example of ’80s kitsch. It begins with a black-and-white clip of John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what you can do for your country” speech before showing childhood photos of Hogan framed by stars emerging from the American flag. When the verse kicks in, footage of Hogan head-butting the Soviet flag and waving the stars and stripes are spliced with images of Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Martin Luther King. Undoubedtly, the most ridiculous parts of the video feature Hogan, wearing sunglasses and strumming a Telecaster with an American flag paint job, superimposed over or next to key American monuments and locations including the Capitol Building, the Liberty Bell, Rose Bowl stadium, Mount Rushmore, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Hollywood sign, and the Statue of Liberty. During the guitar solo, and after military footage of a missile being fired and American soldiers emerging onto a beachhead carrying supplies, Hogan is seen riding his motorcycle alongside footage of John Wayne on his horse. As the song fades, a shirtless Hogan stands in front of the American flag and recites his mantra: “Train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins. Be true to yourself, true to your country, be a real American.” As corny and banal as the video is, it cemented Hogan in the American consciousness as an American patriot who fights for your rights and a hero who stands up to the bad guys, whether the bad guy is Big John Stud or the Soviet Union. In the face of the Cold War threat from abroad, and the satanic panic at home, It was precisely the panacea conservative America needed.
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Whereas Hulk Hogan benefitted from the Cold War paranoia and jingoism he helped create, Ozzy Osbourne was excoriated by fundamentalists and politicians seeking to target albums for sexually explicit and violent content (among them were albums by Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, W.A.S.P. and Judas Priest). American conservatism in the 1980s rejected heavy metal as vile, degenerate, and dangerous. Osbourne, the flag-bearer of metal, was despised for bringing this noxious subculture into white suburban homes and upsetting the status quo. As culture writer W. David Marx notes in Status and Culture:
“Not surprisingly, mainstream society reacts with outrage upon the appearance of status groups, as these groups’ very existence is an affront to the dominant status beliefs. Blessing or even tolerating subcultural transgressions is a dangerous acknowledgement of the arbitrariness of mainstream norms. Thus subcultures and countercultures are often cast as modern folk devils. The media spins lurid yarns of criminal destruction, drug abuse, and sexual immorality—frequently embellishing with sensational half-truths.”
While Ozzy and others like him were being crucified, Hulk Hogan was deified by mainstream media as an American hero for espousing the “correct” lifestyle and values, regardless of whether he was practicing what he preached. After going on the Arsenio Hall Show in 1991 and saying that he didn't know anything about growth hormones, he testified under oath in 1994 that he’d used steroids since the late ’70s, exposing the hypocrisy of his ostensibly wholesome “say your prayers, eat your vitamins” mantra. Into the 1990s, Hogan’s star power began to fade as a new generation of more technical and athletic wrestlers began to eclipse him. Peers who acknowledged Hogan’s imprint and impact on the business lamented that he never pulled anyone else up and only looked out for himself. Hogan left the WWF in 1993, but returned sporadically over the years as a main attraction. In 2007, Hogan sued the website Gawker Media after it published a tape of him having sex with his friend’s wife. In July of 2015, the WWE (formerly WWF) terminated his contract after leaked audio surfaced of him saying n——r multiple times in describing his concern over his daughter dating a black man. In 2024, Hogan endorsed Donald Trump and stumped for him at the Republican National Convention, triggering many on the left. In January, Hogan made his final appearance at WWE’s Netflix debut on Monday Night RAW in Los Angeles and was mercilessly booed. It was a decidedly unscripted response to an entirely scripted event.
It isn’t surprising that Conservative America was unbothered by Hogan’s steroid use, infidelity, racist rant, and support of Trump, because for the so-called Moral Majority, values have always been contingent on cultural forces and malleable for the sake of convenience. But Ozzy Osbourne’s unlikely acceptance by the American mainstream took many by surprise.
After his successful No More Tears album in 1991, Osbourne released a live album in 1993 and called the subsequent tour—his first failed attempt at retirement—No More Tours. Then, on March 5, 2002, the first episode of The Osbournes reality TV show debuted on MTV, and Osbourne was reincarnated as a lovable and unintentionally hilarious celebrity Dad. Metal fans already familiar with Osbourne (or anyone capable of thinking critically) understood that “Ozzy” was a persona and that the satanic imagery was performative. In reality, he was still a mess, but he was down-to-Earth, a ham, more clown prince than Prince of Darkness. But for those who genuinely believed Osbourne worshipped the devil, seeing him interact with his family in their Beverly Hills home was eye-opening. Performing mundane acts like sipping Diet Cokes and struggling to operate a TV remote, or stuffing six-hundred dollars worth of English chocolates into a kitchen drawer, or peeling potatoes with his daughter, humanized him and endeared him to the millions who tuned in. Conservatives grew to not only tolerate Osbourne, but adore him. Two months after The Osbournes debut episode, President George W. Bush, a Republican voted into office by Evangelicals, name-dropped Osbourne to raucous applause at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “The thing about Ozzy,” Bush began, “is that he’s made a lot of big hit recordings. ‘Party with the Animals.’ ‘Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath.’ ‘Face in [sic] Hell.’ ‘Black Skies’ and ‘Bloodbath in Paradise.’” Bush pauses before delivering the punchline. “Ozzy, mom loves your stuff!”
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When celebrity icons die, people are compelled toward hagiography. Overcome with emotion and stirred by nostalgia, fans post comments on social media threads using superlatives to describe the icon’s impact. They craft sanitized narratives that buttress their legendary status and gloss over, or omit, their character flaws. Fans of Ozzy Osbourne lauded him as a pioneer of the heavy metal genre, for battling and overcoming addiction, and for being a doting father and husband. They don’t want to be reminded of—and would rather not be aware of—unsettling facts that complicate the biography and taint the legacy, such as the time he shot 17 cats in a paranoid, drug-induced rage, or the time he attempted to strangle his wife. Fans of Hulk Hogan praised him for helping to turn the WWF into an entertainment spectacle and juggernaut, and for making pro wrestling mainstream. They (and let’s face it, we’re talking about men, for the most part) get angry when people question his character, because it complicates their memory of him as the hero they worshipped as a child.
Unlike Osborne, who was universally mourned, and whose funeral procession was live-streamed for fans online, Hogan was not insulated from criticism of his character. Perhaps it’s unfair; after all, it would be foolish to believe that Osbourne, being one of the world’s biggest rockstars, never engaged in sex outside of his marriage. The difference, however, is that more people can identify with Osborne who, despite his fame, was just a bumbling, friendly bloke haunted by existential dread. He spent the prime of his career dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous accusations and self-inflicted wounds while still managing to come across as authentic. Hogan, on the other hand, made a career in a profession built on fake authenticity. He was never burdened by the intrusive media coverage Osbourne experienced in the ‘80s, because Hulkamania played to the dominant culture. He wanted us to believe that Terry and Hulk were indistinguishable. But the dawn of digital media made it apparent that Terry Gene Bollea could never live up to the character he played. As a kid, I easily saw through Ozzy’s satanic façade, but I didn’t see through Hogan’s patriotic bullshit. In the end, people saw Hogan for who he really was. Maybe they could look past his infidelity, or his selfish refusal to do a job (lose a match). But his racism (“I am a racist, to a point,” he said) combined with his support of Trump, were character-defining traits that made it crystal clear what he meant by Real American.