Many Australian talents have strolled down the Croisette during the Cannes Film Festival over the years — whether representing blockbusters like Mad Max: Fury Road and The Great Gatsby, or independent productions like Samson and Delilah (winner of the Un Certain Regard Award in 2009) and Snowtown (which screened in competition at Critics' Week in 2011).

Just last year, Cate Blanchett headed the jury, and Melbourne filmmaker Charles Williams took out the Short Film Palme d'Or.

In 2019, only one Australian filmmaker was invited to screen their film at Cannes: Melbourne-born artist Pia Borg (Silica, Abandoned Goods), who has brought her genre-bending "documentary-horror" film about Satanic panic to the Cote d'Azur resort city, where the 72nd edition of the world's most famous film festival is currently in full swing.

Borg's Demonic, which premiered at Adelaide Festival in 2018 having been funded by its HIVE initiative (a partnership with ABC TV Arts, Screen Australia and the Australia Council for the Arts) made its international debut on Thursday evening as part of Cannes' Critics' Week program.

Angie Christophel plays Michelle Smith, author of the book Michelle Remembers, in Pia Borg's 'documentary-horror' film Demonic. ( Supplied: ABC/Pia Borg )

Critics' Week (or Semaine de la Critique) is an independent showcase that runs parallel to Cannes and is dedicated to emerging directors — many of whom go on to compete in one of its official streams.

Borg's 28-minute film was part of a 'special screening' that also featured similarly spooky shorts by Canada's Brandon Cronenberg (son of director David Cronenberg), and the UK's Moin Hussain, with all three filmmakers in attendance.

Pia Borg was one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film of 2015. ( Supplied: Pia Borg )

Borg, who was previously at Cannes in 2004 with her short film Footnote (which screened in the Cinefondation program for student films), says: "It's one of those dreams that I think most filmmakers have, to be able to screen your work here."

"Especially because my work is more on the experimental spectrum, so for me to be able to screen here with a wider audience was a thrilling surprise."

Demonic explores the so-called "Satanic panic" that spread throughout North America, and then internationally, in the 1980s.

The widely-reported phenomenon was fuelled by numerous allegations of Satanic ritual abuse made by women and children — allegations that were ultimately proven false.

It's subject matter that seems like a Netflix docuseries waiting to happen.

"I find it interesting that a film hasn't already been made about this," says Borg. "I feel like the Satanic panic is something that people are a little bit ashamed of … something that was swept under the rug."

In Demonic, Borg pairs generic horror tropes with domestic settings and the banal and everyday sound of cable news. ( Supplied: Pia Borg )

Far from sensationalistic expose, however, Demonic is a meditation on the psychology of false memory, and on moral panics themselves.

Borg points out that true crime documentaries often rely on "the talking head," whose job it is to say "here's the truth, here's the story."

"That's something I'm trying to avoid," she says. "I'm trying to make the viewer come to their own conclusions."

Those who came forward as victims of ritualistic abuse at the time "really believed that they had this experience," Borg explains.

"It wasn't a case of fabrication, it was a case of a true belief; a kind of memory that wasn't reliable — and I think that that's really fascinating to explore in a cinematic context."

In Demonic, she fuses archival footage, re-enactment, and slickly hyperreal CGI in such a way as to blur the boundaries between them, and so demonstrates the malleability of perception.

The viewer gradually learns to decipher between these elements over the course of its runtime.

Borg used computer-generated animation to evoke visually the "almost real" sensation of false memory. ( Supplied: Pia Borg )

Borg describes her film as "documentary-horror".

"It's taking these two things which are absolute opposites: documentary is supposed to be this representation of reality, and horror is associated with fantasy. That was one of the things we tried to play with stylistically — to have the audience experience it in the present tense, and to feel the fear."

Borg got the idea for Demonic from a footnote in an essay she was reading, which cited the 1980 book Michelle Remembers. ( Supplied: Pia Borg )

The film focuses on two major events in the satanic panic timeline: the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers (a case study co-written by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient Michelle Smith, and the first book to detail satanic ritual abuse), and the McMartin preschool trial — a six-year long legal saga sparked by allegations made by hundreds of children against staff members at the Californian pre-school. When all the charges were eventually dropped in 1990, the case was the longest and most expensive in US history.

But there's much more to the Satanic panic phenomenon than Borg was able to fit into a half hour — and she plans on expanding the short into her first feature-length film.

"There were cases in New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, the U.K., Canada … It was a global hysteria," she says. "And it says so much about the era itself."

Borg highlights the advancements in media distribution made in the 80s: namely, the introduction of the VCR into the home, and of cable TV and the 24-hour news cycle.

With all this airspace to fill, she says, "they were kind of building the hysteria".

"I'm hoping, without having to really spell it out, to make the viewer really think about how our own fears and frenzies are conditioned by the dissemination of media in the current moment. … Being able to understand the history helps to give a kind of perspective on the present."

Watch Demonic on ABC iview.