Welcome to part two of Cult Classics! It seems like cults 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 phenomenon and the way it is represented in recent horror movies. In this installment we'll study the cults in Son (2021), Midsommar (2019), Hereditary (2018), Mandy (2017) and The Ritual (2017). The titles are linked to their respective imdb pages for full film information and stills.
I do presuppose that you watched the movies discussed here, so I will only give the shortest plot summary. It would make sense to watch the movies before reading my cult descriptions, as I SPOIL EVERYTHING.
If there is one movie that tirelessly makes a point of the pervasiveness and omnipotence of cults, it is Irish filmmaker Ivan Kavanagh's 2021 horror film Son. As we follow Laura (Andi Matichak), who got Rosemary-babied, ran away, raised her resulting son, and watched him become seriously ill, we also witness how far-reaching the influence of her cult is. The members are everywhere; in your child's bedroom, at the hospital that is supposed to take care of you, in the police who is supposed to protect you, in the diner, on the street, e.v.e.r.y.w.h.e.r.e.
That, combined with the underlying philosophical question "How far will you go for your loved ones?", despite some plot holes that would be spoilerous to reveal here, offers an entertaining couple of hours, but ultimately gives a half-baked horror mystery. The cult is quite uncanny though, so here it is.
The cult: Even though the cult operates very much within the scope of a classical satanist cult, there are differences. The cult members have the ability to summon a sort of nature demon/ incubus who has fallen in love with the way main character Laura sings, and her voice is what beguiles him, almost turning her, the victim, into a sort of siren, the supernatural seducer. It is also a powerful, gaslighting entity which attaches importance to have his agents everywhere all the time, especially near things/people it considers its own to be able to seize them when it considers fit. I'm so sick of entities like this... I first thought this is about a Satanist cult, but the worshiped demon has horns and seems rather like a nature demon kind of thing. The movie itself is kind of repetitive and the story is familiar, though I love the atmosphere and the ending is indeed quite striking and although the cult predictive, the movie is still worth a watch.
I have previously reviewed Midsommar, one of my all-time favorites, but never really seriously from the perspective of the cult, so let's go there, right off the bat.
The Cult: What we have here is a remote Nordic European cult with lots of brutal rituals and pagan customs - all these make up the folk horror which follows closely in the footsteps of the 1973 classic The Wicker Man. The path of Dani (Florence Pugh) who tragically looses her entire family and third wheels her boyfriend who intends to leave her to be free for other women during an excursion to Sweden, leads to a cult which, as outlandish, repulsive and odd it may be, unexpectedly provides her answers and everything she wants and needs.
The visions Dani experiences during the intake of hallucinogenic drugs (e.g. growing grass and roots through her feet into the earth) during her trip suggest that with the loss of her family, she has been uprooted also, and there is potential she can find a home here with the Hårga commune. This is a typical aspect of cults, to prey on vulnerable people, the vulnerability, in this case, being mirrored, emphasized, and thus driven out in strange and frankly creepy rituals of catharsis. The cult gives security, stability and most importantly the empathy that Dani literally thirsts for, but which her boyfriend is incapable to provide for her. It becomes the family she has lost. The cult gives, but the cult takes too. As in the ättestupa ceremony, which has its roots in real Pagan Nordic tradition and during which older people altruistically take their own lives as a sacrifice to the society they live in when they can't sustain their lives on their own anymore.
If, so far, you think ättestupa is a disturbing practice, hold on, there's more to come. Take, for instance, the mating ritual where Dani's boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) is encouraged to mingle into the commune, since they need fresh blood every now and then to avoid incest. He refuses, so they just take what they need from him in an unsettling scene of sexual assault. There are sacred texts too, which are strictly off limits, lots of subconscious-purging through hallucinogenic teas, a dancing competition, a May Queen, and to crown it all, of course the offering of human sacrifices to ward off evil.
The genius of the Hårga cult's horror is in director Ari Aster's skill to turn what is conceptually as well as visually beautiful into something terrible; empathy, solidarity, family, a fresh, sunny nature straight out of the ad of a laundry detergent turning into a murderous, cruel swamp in which you will be raped, skinned, thrown off a cliff, drowned, betrayed, put in a bear's carcass and burned - all by shiny pretty people ready to include you in their family. What a bliss.
The most horrible, treacherous mother of modern cult films surely must be Hereditary (a movie I have now and again reviewed and mentioned, so just follow the link), which orbits around a cult hiding in plain sight. A cult with an affinity for decapitations, nudity and creepy grins. Let's jump straight to the children of Paimon.
A family grieving for their secretive and strange grandmother is haunted by increasingly tragic and disturbing occurrences in this intense film.
The cult: So a group of people were promised riches if they can conjure Paimon, one of the eight kings of hell, and place him into the male body of Peter. The poor thing had to endure being a girl (Charlie/Milly Shapiro) for a whooping 13 years and couldn't stand it, so an intrigue was woven around Grandma Leigh (Kathleen Chalfant), who was knee-deep into the cult; apparently Paimon's bride, she first tries to place him inside her own son, but when he commits suicide, she tries her granddaughter, and from there her primary target, grandson Peter (Alex Wolff).
In three fictional ritualistic steps, satony, liftoach and pandemonium Paimon is summoned, the words combined mean "resurrect from the dead, invoke the demon, release chaos". And I'm sorry to let you know that they make it.
The movie basically announces what it will do pretty much in the beginning, during the classroom scene. You have to love the trope of classroom scenes in horror movies lecturing us on some seemingly random subject, but actually leaking the gist of what the audience will be watching for the next two hours or so - it's so corny, yet useful in a funny way. In the fewest of cases do we go back and think, "Oh right, that's basically what the teacher was saying in the beginning of the movie!". But we should. And in the case of Hereditary, not once, not twice, but a whooping three times are we being given a message in a classroom. First off, in Charlie's classroom, we see banners promoting critical thinking; something people caught up in cults must be lacking to be in the situation they are. Second is, Peter's teacher talking to them about Sophocles' play Women of Trachis, which is a tragedy about the hero Heracles and his wife Deianira who uses a poison-laced cloak in order to win him back, but tragically causes his death. The teacher asks the classroom what Heracles' fatal flaw is which causes him to come undone, and the answer, according to one of the students, is arrogance, because he refuses to see all the signs handed to him. This exactly will be the guiding thread through the movie, and Heracles' arrogance will become the viewer's arrogance (and ignorance). Aster plays with this implied arrogance of his audience; the very clues as to the existence, omniscience of the cult, and the mental health illnesses it is standing as a metaphor for (DID, dementia and possibly schizophrenia) have been deliberately hidden during the promotion of the film, the entire campaign, in fact, being one big red herring leading us to believe this being about younger sister Charlie, who was nothing but the poisoned cloak.
In the last classroom scene, the infamous classroom scene which sees Peter struck by the demon, the teacher incidentally teaches about Iphigenia - who is a human sacrifice, just like Peter, and just like mother Annie (Toni Colette) and just like grandmother Leigh (both of whom, in cruel visualization of the hereditary mental illness, quite literally as well as metaphorically "lose their heads"). So if the tea leaves, doormats, Ouija boards, light, reflections, mirrors weren't enough clues for you, it's your fault and you deserve the punishment that brings wisdom. Paimon the God of Mischief will see to it.
Here too the cult preys on the weak of society in grief self help groups - that's admittedly a solid way to find more miserable and vulnerable people to add to the cult. They are a weird bunch, the children of Paimon, lurking in the bushes while in the nude, walking on parking lots expelling people from their own bodies, to finally organizing a grotesque, yet serene and soft welcome party for one of the Kings of Hell.
Cluck!
The plot is simple; the lumberjack Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) seeks revenge against said cult for murdering his girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). She was just randomly walking to work when she catches cult leader Jeremiah Sand's eye, so he unleashes his demon biker gang to kidnap her and tries to seduce her. But she mocks his taste in music, his naked body and his attempts at seducing her, so he tortures her boyfriend and kills her by burning her alive, after which Miller goes on a revenge rampage and, of course, demolishes them. All of them. And all of this in slow motion. Quite beautiful visuals. Specifically, there is a scene in which Jeremiah talks to Mandy and their respective faces merge in a psychedelic way and that scene is incredibly strange and beautiful at the same time.
The Cult: They're called "Children of the New Dawn" and they're basically a bunch of douche bags who act like they are family, do lots of drugs, especially LSD, listen to psychedelic music and above all, can unleash a certain biker gang named Black Skulls upon their enemies. The Black Skulls are cannibalistic and are said to have turned broken because of their excessive drug consumption, they only come out at night, growl like animals, love pain. They give intense Cenobite and Silent Hill vibes.
Let us be so very special together.
Obviously the most interesting side of this cult lies within its collaboration with the supernatural. They also constitute a deviation from the cults we studied until now, in which the members were socially powerful people, people who could take your job and your apartment and your life from you if they wanted, people who are omnipresent and omnipotent, and not some jerks with small penises who need drugs to endure their own lives.
To make clear sense of this particular cult construct, it is important to know the director's feelings for the Baby Boomer generation. According to Wikipedia, he "believes that the Boomers' search for alternative belief systems led them to dabble in the occult, corrupting their pursuit of spiritual enlightenment and creating a reactionary conservative backlash in the 1980s." Wow. Well it looks like he couldn't stop himself after his first movie Beyond the Black Rainbow, where he openly explores that sentiment, and continued his jab in Mandy.
See this is the beauty of films - I don't agree with the world's hate for boomers (they produced David Gilmour and Ian MacKaye, ffs!), but I really appreciate and even enjoy this film's so very creative vent and ability to bring across a certain atmosphere and feeling.
Finally, one of my favorite films of all time (despite my hate for the book); David Bruckner's The Ritual from 2017, in which a group of friends reunite for a hiking trip to Sweden, and find a hidden Norse cult that exchanges sacrifices for immortality.
The Cult:
We're going for a hike on the King's Trail which is on the Swedish - Norwegian border to meet another Nordic cult who found a way to collaborate with the supernatural. The ancient Norse cult in question hides in the woods and has a deal with the devil, or rather with God, a Nordic "jötunn", a mythic creature which can take many forms, and here it is a giant elk, which guts its haul and impales them on the tall trees of this particular forest.
The cult lives in a small settlement inside this forest that the jötunn with the name Moder cannot leave, that's as far as its power goes. What we know concerning its powers is that it grants the cultists a very long life so long as they feed him (But unfortunately gives them no new clothes, as they all look like they have last worn their garments in the Middle Ages).
Before burning the settlement down, main character Luke finds an attic full of mummified people and I wouldn't have known that these are the very first ancient people to make a pact with Moder, if I hadn't read the otherwise tedious and dull book. The movie doesn't explain their presence. This is an interesting notion, as, wishing for immortality, we never think that our own material, our flesh can wear down and we may become disgustingly old, yet still unable to die. Like the broken record that I am, I will repeat the wise man's words which echo in my head; sometimes dead is better (than slogging one's way through the Nordic wilderness just to be eviscerated by an elk with human hands).
Stay tuned for the third and last part of the most interesting movie cults after the year 2000. Next up: The Void (2016), Last Shift (2014), Kill List (2011), The House of the Devil (2009) and finally, my nightmare, Martyrs (2008). Start watching so you'll know them when I post the third installment.
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