The Rise of the Literal Cult Film: Chatting with The Endless’ Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead
A “cult” is a group defined by its religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and is usually based on the teachings of one charismatic and compelling person. Of course, going by that simple depiction, Christianity could be labeled as such—but there’s something roiling just beneath the exterior of true cults that’s mysterious… dangerous, even.
That’s why, as cinephiles and pop culture chug-a-luggers, we cannot get enough of stories centered on these creepy cliques, from “The Path,” “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the “Waco” miniseries to recent documentaries Wild, Wild Country and My Scientology Movie. These only scratch the surface of the most recent offerings, and no doubt, there will be more to come.
A cult-based horror indie I remember distinctly from my years covering the film festival circuit is also one of the very few helmed by a female director. Elisabeth Fies, was writer/director/producer of the feature thriller The Commune, which, in 2009 was awarded Best International Picture at Bram Stoker Festival and went on to achieve many other accolades. For whatever reason, most female directors choose subjects other than cults—so, for that alone The Commune stands out. Another reason it stands out is, Fies really understands “why” cults can be so scary as subject matter. “Horror is all about the ultimate transgressions of society’s rules,” she says. “Cult leaders live to prove they are beyond punishment and are better than the average person. It’s a pretty natural fit that this character profile would lead to excellent horror movies, genre-bending, and horrific scenes within thrillers. The horror genre attracts more viewers who are interested in psychology and abnormal psychology, for a variety of reasons from exorcising their own demons to identifying with the hero or villain.”
One of the finest cult horror films to come out in the past year is Blake Reigle’s One of Us. In it a young journalist goes deep undercover within a mountain commune and becomes manipulated by a duplicitous cult leader. (Read Dread Central’s review here.) The director does a good job of showing the seductive side of cults, and he told us, “I learned a great deal about the horrific levels of abuse and manipulation members endured; the closer you were to the leader, the more you had to endure. [When making the movie,] I researched testimonies from former members of the Source Family, why they joined, what they endured, and what happened to them after.
“The new information I learned from researching for the film was just how wretched the living conditions would become within these cults; massive groups of people living in squalor, disease running rampant among members, forced intake of drugs and sex, and denial of legit medical services when someone was suffering. Many would recognize the abuse and falsehood of the leader but remain within the cult because they felt they couldn’t survive on their own and/or didn’t want to deal with the stigma of returning home, or to the outside world, having been wrong for placing their faith in the cult.”
When asked what makes us so interested in movies about cults, Reigle says, “We are drawn to them because they’re primal stories of survival. We are aiming to see what to avoid. We understand how we can be swayed and want to witness the horror realized on screen to stow the results in our toolbox in order to protect ourselves and loved ones. They are cautionary tales and today more important than ever due to the level of exposure to media, companies, and individuals seeking to exploit our minds, bodies, and souls everywhere we look and listen. Technology has provided an ever-increasing tsunami of manipulation. Additionally, we are communal people; we need each other and need to be able to recognize the wolves among the sheep and the wolves in sheep’s clothing—to reference One of Us.”
Following a successful festival run, the first set-in-a-cult major indie to come out this year is The Endless, directed by the duo of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Resolution, Spring). (See Dread Central’s review here.)
In The Endless a pair of bickering brothers return to the isolated mountain commune where they grew up in an effort to piece together fragmented memories and perhaps reconnect and repair their fragile relationship. In this case the cult is UFO-based, not unlike the infamous and all-too-real Heaven’s Gate cult (that’s the one in which all of its members offed themselves with poison while dressed in identical black shirts and sweatpants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading: Heaven’s Gate Away Team). The question as you watch the film is: What if this cult isn’t crazy after all?
We caught up with Benson and Moorhead to ask them their motivations behind making their own “cult classic.”
Dread Central: What kind of research did you do about cults in general to prepare for making the movie, and what did you learn?
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead: We didn’t set out to make a movie about cults. Pretty much everything that can be said about them already has been, by far more intelligent people than us. So in researching cults, it was such a shallow dive that any researchers or obsessives will think we’re idiots, but it was on purpose because we only needed to find the hallmarks of what people believe about cults in order to subvert them. We read a lot of Wikipedia, watched a lot of the same Netflix documentaries you’ve watched.
The word “cult” has such a nebulous definition that almost any organization can be loosely defined as a cult. There’s a common cynical phrase that the only difference between a cult and a religion is attendance numbers. There are some broad strokes to it: commonly they’re religious, there’s a single idol of worship, and they’re on the fringes of society.
Things we could subvert that come from well-known cults like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate:
• A charismatic leader (there’s no leader in Camp Arcadia)
• Poison drinks (they brew beer, but it’s for economic gain)
• Uniforms (only Smiling Dave wears one, and he’s nuts)
• Castration (a lie)
• Living in isolation (there’s a very literal reason for this in our film that would be a spoiler)
• Hoarding weapons (they have no more than anyone else who lives in a rural area would)
• Free-love/polyamory (just loosely alluded to but not a rule)
• Worshiping a deity that doesn’t exist (…ours does)
DC: What types of personalities are drawn to wanting to start and/or lead a cult?
JB and AM: A lot of the time the cult leader feels like they have some kind of hidden or special knowledge and uses an already-existing religious group to splinter from rather than creating a belief system out of whole cloth. Occasionally you’ll get an LR Hubbard who tried to find the truth in his sci-fi musings and blend it with psychology, but most start from an established religion. They probably don’t intentionally form a cult, but when it becomes one, they like what it does to their ego so it keeps going.
But frankly, one of the biggest common grounds cult leaders share is sexual. So god damn many of these male leaders contort their religious views every which way in order to justify why they should have a hundred wives and they should all be 14-year-old virgins. It’s one of the most fucked up parts of cults, and it’s consistent. Even if a cult doesn’t have that aspect to it at first, it’s a matter of time. That amount of attention from adoring female acolytes seems to inevitably lead to their penis. The very few cults we’ve heard of with female leaders can do this, too, often the leader being seen as a reincarnation of some kind of fertile goddess.
No one ever believes they’re in a cult. They often think they’re in a commune (something we mention in The Endless), which totally do exist as harmless non-cults. And/or they believe they’re still part of a larger church rather than being an isolated cult: the Branch Davidians were offshoots of the Shepherd’s Rod, which was an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, an offshoot of Protestantism. The only people that call a cult “a cult” are those not in it.
We had a lengthy discussion when writing The Endless about exactly that: Why on earth would anyone return to a cult, knowing it’s a cult? And we knew the answer deep down, that one of them didn’t view it as a cult, but didn’t have the word for what he did think it was if it wasn’t a cult. When we landed on the word “commune,” it was cause for celebration. Then we watched that Netflix doc about cult deprogrammers, and an ex-cult member explicitly says he’s not in a cult, he just lives in a commune, and we realized we’d accidentally hit the nerve for what’s so seductive about cult for people that want a family.
DC: Movies and shows set in cults are typically negative in some way, and they usually fall under the thriller genre. But there are a few that qualify as horror, and regardless – it seems horror fans are drawn to them. Why, in your opinion, is that the case?
JB and AM: We’re not frightened of cults because we fear joining one. We fear them in nearly the exact same way we fear zombies — except cults actually exist. Groups of determined people who truly believe in the supernatural in a way that justifies violence are a threat to anyone near them.
There’s an inherent tension in cults which lends itself so well to horror. Who here is sane? Who here is dangerous? Am I able to leave? What are they all going to do?
Spoilers: The cult we designed in The Endless plays on the fears that tug at our fight-or-flight sense, but ultimately isn’t a danger. In fact, they’re in the same danger that our protagonists are. There was still a little more fertile ground left in cults we found, a tiny niche corner where we could take the tropes of what we believe about cults and subvert them.
Directed by Benson, who also wrote the film, and Moorhead, The Endless stars the directing duo alongside Callie Hernandez, Emily Montague, Lew Temple, Tate Ellington, and James Jordan. It begins a limited theatrical rollout in April from Well Go USA (click here for more info and to pre-order tickets).
Synopsis:
Two brothers receive a cryptic video message inspiring them to revisit the UFO death cult they escaped a decade earlier. Hoping to find the closure that they couldn’t as young men, they’re forced to reconsider the cult’s beliefs when confronted with unexplainable phenomena surrounding the camp. As the members prepare for the coming of a mysterious event, the brothers race to unravel the seemingly impossible truth before their lives become permanently entangled with the cult.
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