If there’s one thing that reviews of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves would seem to generally agree upon, it’s that the movie is a lot of fun. There’s plenty of humor to be found in the film, which is actually one of the ways that the D&D movie best represents its source material; the actual games tend to get quite silly now and then. It’s a very different tone than would have been attached to the game decades ago, considering there were people who thought the game was satanic.
Dungeons & Dragons has been around since 1974, but it is probably more popular now than it ever has been. Part of the reason for that may lie in the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, where a couple of high-profile incidents resulted in a stigma that the game was driving its players into literal Satan worship. Interestingly, the panic is apparently far enough in the past that actors in the new D&D movie weren’t even aware of it. Chris Pine was clearly surprised when speaking to Yahoo about the fear around the game. He explained…
I remember rap music being feared. Metallica was feared, death metal was feared. But I don’t remember Dungeons & Dragons ever being on the most wanted list of cultural artifacts. That’s wild.
As Pine points out, it always seems that there is something that parents are afraid is corrupting the minds of children. At various points, it’s been rap music, heavy metal music, first-person shooter video games, or just video games in general. But Chris Pine, being born in 1980, is just a tad too young to remember this as it was all happening while he was a baby.
For her part, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves co-star Michelle Rodriguez at least understands where this perspective comes from. She grew up in a strongly religious household and so seeing attempts to suppress something that is seen as going against religious principal’s doesn’t surprise her. She says…
I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness. So when it comes to suppression of some sort, I get it. But that's weird that was a thing [with D&D]. Maybe people confused it with an Ouija board.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a couple of incidents where kids who played Dungeons & Dragons committed suicide. While it’s understood now that those teens had mental health issues, at the time many rushed to blame the game. It was claimed that D&D introduced children to the occult and that magic spells and curses placed on characters in the games were seen as real by the players. There was even a 1982 made-for-TV movie, starring a young Tom Hanks, called Mazes and Monsters, based on a novel, about a young man who begins to lose his grip on reality after playing a D&D-like game.
Of course, for those of us that have actually played Dungeons & Dragons, such a response to the game seems wild. Pine himself, who was introduced to D&D as part of coming on board the film, knows firsthand what playing the game is really like, he continues…
What’s surprising to me about that is D&D is super-imaginative. It’s really collaborative and positive. There’s always a lot of laughing when you play.
Anybody who has ever come up with an intricate plan in a D&D game, only to have it completely fall apart, knows just how much laughing there can be around the table. It’s certainly good that this stigma didn’t last long. A lot of people have found community around the game, and now we all get to go to the theater together and enjoy a movie based on the game because so many people have embraced it.
