Cult Classics: Best Modern Movie Cults - Part 1

Cults! It seems like they are everywhere right now; in the independent news, in conspiracy theories, in media we consume, in movies we watch... Whether an organized group of powerful extremists controlling our lives really exists, or it is the mere paranoid fear thereof mirroring into horror fiction, it is worth to take a look at this fear and the way it is reflected in recent horror movies. 

A cult is a group of people who have an unusual, even abnormal or extreme, socially deviant religious or spiritual, in any case a numinous belief, combining a set of particular elements such as devotion to a particular person or object, rituals and practices, a secret or forbidden knowledge that they either covertly use to gain advantages in life, or are chasing the opportunity to put into use to reach their goal. And as is well known, knowledge is ultimately power. In Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems, Alexandra Stein makes a point of comparing cults to miniature totalitarian political systems, and they generally symbolize a new form of society. Add to that a couple of supernatural elements, what's not to fear in that?

So it's no wonder horror fiction picked that fear up and made cults a staple subgenre. From extraterrestrial deities of Lovecraftian type, to amputation-al rituals, to fungi, to the end of the world, to vampires, to beauty practices, to old Earth deities, and above all, Satan himself - the rituals and worships of cults have an immensely wide range. Fairly recent books such as Last Days, Within These Walls, Sorrowland, Just Like Mother, The Cabin at the End of the World, A History of Wild Places, Nestlings, Agents of Dreamland, Experimental Film and Rouge have picked up on the trend, but the real explosion seems to take place in the cinematic genre, as recently there is some sort of cult at the heart of every filmic horror story.

We may not be reliving the 80s satanic panic, but there's no doubt that a certain fear of cultish powerful rich people with ulterior motives prevails in our times too. So I'll skip classic cults like in The Wicker Man (the Pagan Cult of Summerisle), Silent Hill (The Order), and The Omen (the Disciples of the Watch) by giving them a mere honorary mention, and will concentrate on modern cinema takes on cults. The only exception to that is the Tannis Root Coven from Rosemary's Baby, because I'll be reviewing its recently made prequel, Apartment 7A. To that end I filtered cult movies from the 2000s on and here I am presenting you the results: 15 contemporary films with particularly interesting and creative interpretations and representations of cults, part one.

As usual, I spoil a lot of things, so please watch the movies before reading if it bothers you to read spoilers. 

Bring Her Back (2025)

After the death of their father, Andy and the partially blind Piper are sent to a foster home, to former counselor Laura, who already takes care of the mute Oliver. She's a weird kind of person and when I say weird, it is not to describe some eccentric kook, she's seriously strange, scarily so. Oliver is even weirder in that he basically lives like a feral child, barely dressed, constantly outside, dirty, eats cats and knives, yeah, you heard me right. Laura's late biological daughter was also blind, but in a tragic accident drowned in the swimming pool in the backyard.  

A game of gaslighting against Andy begins, who, by the way, will soon be 18 and can thus legally adopt his sister, and things resume in an even more tragic ordeal airing all the deadly grief and helplessness of all participants.

One of the best horror films of 2025, this is one of the rare genre flicks that uses the right dosage of drama without overdoing it. Plus, it has the most nauseating and - I assume - real-like depictions of dead people, it looked so real it was disgusting.

The cult: But where's the cult in all this? Well, Laura finds a VHS tape from a Russian cult on which the ritual for reviving dead people is being described. You need to preserve the body of the person you want resurrected, the demon Tari needs to be summoned (this is a made up demon as there is no mention of him in any other religion or myth - not to say that demons in religions and myths aren't made up) who then eats the corpse and regurgitates the soul into a newly dead body. The thing is that Laura needs time for her plans to resurrect her daughter into Piper's body, but Tari is getting hungry by the minute.

The film doesn't provide much background about the Russian cult and the VHS tape that engenders the incidents. We see Laura, whenever she needs guidance, resort to the tape as some kind of user's manual, and interestingly, the movie opens with the written words "this is not a cult". But it is a cult that possesses over combined occult knowledge about demonology and necromancy, which would speak to someone whose pain of losing a loved one seems too big to bear. The cultists are thus luring vulnerable people.

But, as a wise man once said, sometimes dead is better. 

Together (2025)

Tim and Millie are going through a rough patch in their relationship, in that Millie is more into Tim than he is into her. They still move together into a big house in the country, where they find the source and traces of some kind of cult, which apparently already infected them; Tim is inexplicably and forcefully attracted to Millie, but whenever they touch, they start to physically merge into each other.

As Millie too is infected during a visit to her mysterious neighbor, who shows her pictures of his seemingly deceased husband, their increasingly drastic and even gory attempts at resistance against a fusion and becoming one turns more and more futile. Will they give up on their individuality to become one entity?

The cult: Even though the cult in Together seems to aim at ensuring family values and monogamist order, it is in fact a New Age church based on an Ancient Greek creation myth, Aristophanes' theory of the nature and origin of eros, which sees humans much like the Chinese philosophy of Yin Yang, as one divided into two, ever looking for their counterpart to "complete" them. In fact he talks about humans as spherical creatures who wheeled around, and completion between various sexes, male, female and hermaphrodite was possible in various combinations. It was, of course and as usual Zeus who chopped them in half due to some selfish reason, it's always that bastard who destroys nice things. 

It is interesting that the movie includes another couple, the missing Simon and Keri, whose fusion went wrong and who ended up as some kind of abomination, a deformed mass. Whether that is because they resisted the fusion or they weren't meant for each other from the beginning anyway, is unclear.

I really don't see much difference in the institution of modern marriage to what is happening in this movie and I'm not sure if the message is one I can embrace, it was a fun movie to watch anyway. 

Longlegs (2024)

I already wrote an in-depth review for this movie which was one of my favorites of the past year, here is the link. Let's jump directly to the cult aspect!

The cult: Well, the ending suggests that we're dealing with a good old Satanist cult, although I have my doubts about the nature of this cult, which I have discussed in my review from before.

There are two ways of understanding Satanism, and I want to clarify right off the bat which one I don't mean, namely the political movement who uses Satan as a symbol of individualism and resistance against authority, as in the Church of Satan or The Satanic Temple. The satanist cult I'm talking about is the "criminal, antisocial group engaging in harmful acts (like ritual abuse or violence) that justifies them with a belief in a real Satan", as Wikipedia nicely puts it.

The Satanist cult in Longlegs is for me too religion-like and bears too many resemblances to Christianity in that it talks about a "church", has nuns, abuses children, and is of a sacrificial nature. It is a mock-version of a religion, which is demonic in itself, but is ultimately a cult in that there's all sorts of riddles, codes acquired through some mysterious calculations, thus a hidden knowledge, and even a sort of black magic, almost Voodoo-like doll animation skills. Not to say that any of these elements can't be at the same time applied to religions, but that would open the lid of a whole new barrel of finding the differences between religions and cults and some might argue, there really are none.

I guess religions are established, while cults are rather isolated, they are like illegal little religions, but I'm not sure and not an expert at all. Speaking about isolation, Longlegs operates more like a lonely serial killer who uses the pretext of Satan to kill children since he acts alone until he meets main character Lee's mom who then joins him in his quest, albeit due to extortion. Until the "Hail Satan" and "Happy Birthday" part, which in the film goes on for 24 minutes apparently, I didn't even think this movie had a cult character, but ultimately, if we talk abut Satanism, we talk about a cult.

Apartment 7a (2024)

While I'm not including the literal mother of all cult films - Rosemary's Baby - into my list, I couldn't pass the opportunity to introduce its prequel, a movie that I think is top-tier horror, and maybe more importantly a really well-made prequel - and that's rare - that didn't get enough recognition and love. 

Remember Terry Gionoffrio, the young woman that Rosemary meets in the basement washroom of her new home? The dancer who was given an apartment by the infamously hilarious Minnie and Roman Castavet after having lost everything in life, looking for a way to stay in New York City? Well, this is her story. To be precise, this is the story of how she has been Rosemary-Babied by the very same Satanist Cult of the Tannis Root, which before her tried to impregnate previous tenant Joan Cebulski and after her, as we all know, poor Ro Woodhouse. 

The cult: Well, this particular cult isn't new, it is "all of them witches", although they are not really witches, they are Satanist magicians, and they are not really a coven, but a cult. To have clarity on these terms, we would need to expand the discussion and talk about the lines between the terms religion, cult, and coven as well as witch, Satanist, magician, and to me those lines are blurry.

The definition for coven goes "formal groups of practitioners who gather for religious ceremonies and practices, serving as a local congregation for a broader faith", and is mostly associated with Paganism or Wicca. I 'm ready to stand corrected, but for me, a coven always has been the gathering of three or more women who are witches, no men included, so I guess I might have been wrong? It's confusing, and anyway, there's something more important going on here than throwing around with wording, mainly the feminist nature of this story.

The Satanist Cult in the Rosemary universe, as Ira Levin wrote it, has a pioneering quality for the surge of satanic panic following it, despite the existence of black and white films such as The Black Cat (1934) or The Seventh Victim (1943) that used the cult trope years before. Using the oppressing, manipulating, controlling elements of a cult to stand for the oppression, manipulation, control and violation patriarchy exerts over women's bodies is a genius move on the feminist Levin's part and makes a document of its time in that it thematizes both the sexual revolution as well as the satanic panic, despite the movie's director being tainted due to him sexually oppressing, manipulating, controlling and violating a young girl's body without her consent. That does nothing to the movie's genius, though.  

A new element the Rosemary Cult brings to the table is the idea of a hidden upper class society, an almost fraternity-like, guild-like organization that seems to have unlimited financial and societal power. Levin brings the "class" element into the game, it's them against us, the rich and powerful against the poor and helpless, making it an easy set-up for a Faustian bargain, especially for people in the entertainment business who lust for stardom, grandiosity, sparkle, admiration, fans, and all that jazz. Pride is a sin after all.

What is most perfidious about Rosemary' story is that the bargain doesn't even take place between Rosemary and the cult, it is her husband Guy Woodhouse who seals the deal without her knowledge, and she has to swallow that bitter pill. He pimps her out. Her fertility becomes a commodity to deal with, a bargaining chip, and something that Guy, as the man in the marriage, owns. It is the ultimate betrayal both from her husband but also from her body's side as her hormonal post-partum state forces her to care for this "baby", all against her will.

Terry faces a similar fate, as the cult's goal and trajectory are the same. The difference is that she is a modern woman by every definition; she works as a dancer, she is independent, has one-night-stands, follows her dream of making it in New York and making it by doing something she has a passion for. When asked to humiliate herself during an audition she's powerful enough to say no. And when faced with the reality that she was violated and tricked into conceive the spawn of Satan, she is proud enough to end her life. I'm not judging Rosemary and her easy-going, gullible nature, you don't expect to be betrayed in ways she has been played. They are both women, that's important to mark; we come in different shapes and colors from different backgrounds, but the ways evil works, the ways patriarchy works are all the same for each of us. That's an important and powerful takeaway from this duology. 

Late Show With the Devil (2023)

Here's my full review! 

Now that we made the jump to the trope of rich and powerful cult people buying people for their dreams, making bargains left and right, and demanding sacrifices, let's look at a film who found a very creative and entertaining way to showcase that. The live late night TV show 'Night Owls' broadcasts on Halloween night 1977 a special episode in which unexplained, creepy and outright terrifying supernatural things happen as we slowly discover the events behind the show's anchorman Jack Delroy's success.

Of course, he has made a deal with some dark entity, not with Satan though. Delroy surrendered to the divine Gnostic entity Abraxas whom he encountered during an occult ceremony at an elite California camp for wealthy and powerful men and made a pact with. Now, I don't think it is further important what or who this deity or demon is to understand the movie - although I'm open to suggestions and further input. The sacrifice he made for success was his wife's life, with which he doesn't seem to cope well, as he had to take a long break instead of enjoying his newly gained prospect of success. Whether it was his grief or bad conscience that kept him back, we don't really know. What we do know is that he is cursed and things go wrong for him, very wrong. He ends up ruining it all by killing his guest Lilly on live TV during a hallucinogenic fit induced by the night's events.

Sacrifice is a very Christian theme, beginning with Jesus going on in the mentality that "nothing is free" and it does not hold the same weight in, for instance, Islam, which, on the other hand, has a super strict sense of justice and punishment. So while until now we have had only movies based on this idea of sacrifice, with the exception of Together, but even there you have to sacrifice part of yourself, I will also discuss in this series cult movies that don't follow that pattern, such as Can Evrenol's Baskın, which takes a different path. 

I was going to make a post of "15 Best Modern Movie Cults" in one go, but as I started writing, I realized that it takes me a lot of time as I'm enjoying discussing these movies a lot, and when I enjoy something I talk a lot, but anyway, having now presented the first five cult movies, I will stop here. There will be two more installments à five films, at least. If I find more movies I might continue the series, let's see where we're heading.