Back in the 1980s, when Dungeons and Dragons was fairly young, it was frequently attacked by religious nutjobs (along with pop music, dancing, etc.) as a gateway to the occult, or at least something likely to brainwash your kid into believing he really was an adventurer!
Today, this sounds kind of bizarre, but it really was a Thing. Two pieces of pop culture ephemera survive to tell the tale: Rona Jaffee’s terrible 1981 novel Mazes and Monsters, which was turned into an equally bad made-for-TV movie starring Tom Hanks a year later; and the inevitable Jack Chick tract first published in 1984, “Dark Dungeons“.
Seriously, take a minute and click through to read the TERRIBLE TALE of an innocent young co-ed seduced into the occult via polyhedral dice and graph paper!
Don’t you sort of wish there was MORE to the tale? Well, wish no more, gentle heathen, because someone’s turned that tract into a movie — with Chick’s blessing, amazingly.
(H/T: MeFi.)