Our film opens with an old farmer leading his cow into the barn for the night, where an assailant brutally stabs him to death with a pitchfork. Meanwhile, Jodie is a young man travelling alone in search of himself during a cross-country road trip. Stopping beside a small pond in the California countryside, he meets Melissa, a captivating young woman who invites him back to her family's farmhouse. Melissa's parents are not pleased to play host to a stranger, especially once senile but murderous grandmother Lucinda begins leaving her room. To his horror, Jodie soon discovers that Melissa and Lucinda are actually witchcraft-practising sisters hundreds of years old. Melissa had made a satanic pact to save Lucinda from being burned alive by angry townspeople, allowing the former to remain eternally youthful while the latter ages horribly and becomes increasingly homicidal. Such is the bizarre story of The Touch of Satan (1971), a minor exploitation film distributed by Futurama International Pictures in an attempt to capitalise on the earlier success of Rosemary's Baby (1968).

At first glance, this is not an instance of a film that would seem to be a likely candidate for cultural remembrance but, like many other lowbudget exploitation films, it has proven remarkably resilient against the forces of obsolescence, in part because it has moved across a range of material sites – from theatrical exhibition to VHS to television to DVD – and garnered a variety of uses by fans along the way. These different material sites include not only a shift from theatrical to non-theatrical spaces but also encompass each distinct video format as well, since each can be invested with mnemonic value. Though, for example, The Touch of Satan would have probably played at drive-in theatres and urban grind houses upon its initial release, the film's continuing fan following today derives largely from having featured in a 1998 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988–99), the cult television series that features hosts offering sardonic running commentary on the perceived aesthetic shortcomings of substandard genre pictures.

At the same time, however, not all contemporary fans of the film necessarily want to keep its memory alive through the reductively ironic lens of mockable ‘badness’, instead tempering an awareness of the film's datedness with a straight-faced appreciation of its relative effectiveness even today.