Cult Classics: Best Modern Movie Cults - Final Part

Welcome to the final part 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 final installment we'll study the cults in Baskın (2015), The Invitation (2015), The Endless (2017), The Empty Man (2020) and The Bone Temple (2026). 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 SPOILER EVERYTHING. Here we go!

Baskın (2015)

While out relaxing at a restaurant, a group of Turkish policemen are called in for a raid in a creepy and remote old house, but discover that it is inhabited by a hellish cult. Once they arrive they are trapped, until one of them escapes.

The cult: The cult in the abandoned house is lead by a charismatic leader named Baba. The actor playing Baba, Mehmet Cerrahoğlu, lives with the GAPO syndrome, means he has an unusual appearance which is traditionally perfect and welcome in horror cinema and makes a very memorable cult leader in Baskın too. (The history of actors and actresses with genetic disabilities in horror is complex and definitely leaves an aftertaste of freak show exploitation. Of course, it is not an authentic reflection of disabled people in general but as probably the only genre to do so, horror included disabled and different looking people and gave them a chance to play in pivotal roles, thus let them share privileges only pretty skinny people enjoyed before.)

Anyway back to the cult; Baskın relies heavily on imagery and nightmarish, hellish visuals rather than a substantial narrative and I don't really know where to place or how to interpret some imagery, such as the stone baby. An exception to the surface level functioning of the movie is the speech from Baba, in which he repeats over and over that "things end and begin again", foreshadowing the loop that will occur at the end of the film, giving it a somewhat philosophical note. There is no closure here, violence will happen and happen again, there is no way out. Quite dark, right?

Can Evrenol is a filmmaker who gives his audience lots and lots of space for interpretation and would neither agree nor disagree with anyone's takeaway from his movies. As someone who grew up in the same place, having pretty much the same background as him, Baskın was to me above all a reversal of the Turkish police trope (the Turkish police is worldwide notorious for reasons I won't cite here). I may have mentioned before that the time we were born and grew up in is the post-military coup era in which we were told every kind of horror story of the outrageous things police and army did with protestors from the left as well as the right. One of them is that sometimes, more important prisoners like journalists, intellectuals, or politicians would not be thrown into regular jails, but taken to remote houses with their eyes bound so they wouldn't remember the way there. Unlike in regular prisons, where a registration of prisoners was needed, there was no registration of the people brought here, so that should anyone die, there would be no accountability. And there they would be tortured, sexually assaulted, electric shocked, anything really. Can's film reminds me of that story and I thought it would be a neat reversal of that narrative for the police to be called into such a house and those same things happening to them. I might be right or I might be wrong though, the director won't tell.

The Invitation (2015)

Will accepts an invitation to a dinner party hosted by his ex-wife. In the past, they have lost their child which led them to go separate ways and move on with new people. But when Will and his girlfriend Kira arrive at what was his old home, he is overwhelmed by old memories and it doesn't exactly help that his ex and her new husband announce that they joined a cult in Mexico. And then want to raise a toast with them... And then are surprised when Will is suspicious of them... But he is right - he has been observing them and observing the right things all evening and that ultimately saves his life, allowing him to witness a very eerie final scene when he takes a look out of the balcony of his old home in Hollywood Hills. 

The cult: So, of course a cult addressing the richest people in the world will be a New Age cult, and this one here called "The Invitation" is founded by Dr. Joseph in Sonora in Mexico and focuses on death and grief. Naturally, it targets people dealing with trauma of death or terminal illness, and promises them inner peace through accepting death. And what better way to accept death than dying, and taking a couple of people along with you?

The ritual is that members hold dinner parties and try to manipulate their friends into joining the cult. It turns out in the end that many rich and famous people are in on this game.

I think that of all the cults we have looked at here, this one is the silliest one, as its only goal is for people to die. I love the movie, but the cult is ridiculously nonsensical. I mean, nothing is impossible, but what's the point, really? Don't you need to be alive to reap the fruits of what you sow? I think of death as a thing of an isolated individual, we all die alone, so why do it in a group? 

The Endless (2017)

After receiving a curious video tape in the mail, the brothers Justin and Aaron decide to visit the alleged death cult that they have grown up in because they want to find some answers as to why their lives are kind of messed up. While Justin is reluctant, Aaron adjusts well, even considers going back, since life outside of Camp Arcadia never offered them much anyway.

After a couple of days they find out that the camp and its surroundings are a kind of playground, a theme park for some kind of god or extraterrestrial entity that can warp time and space. And they need to leave asap.

The cult: Camp Arcadia is home to a commune that believes in UFOs, and despite Justin remembering a suicide pact, they firmly refuse the idea now in the present. Strange things are happening in and around the camp: the inhabitants didn't get much older since Justin and Aaron left as children, so they don't seem to age at a normal rate, time loops play a great role, there are multiple moons, and you can play tug-of-war with the entity in the sky. 

 

In order to keep people trapped in its theme park, the Entity created many small areas of time loops of differing magnitude. The residents of Camp Arcadia are caught in a ten year time loop that resets with every apparition of the third moon.

 

Even though the brothers need to run away from the cult camp at the end because of an upcoming reset, I think this cult is really the one cult that I find enjoyable and would maybe even consider joining. Despite all the eerie things happening. 

The Empty Man (2020)

The film starts with a past episode that took place in Bhutan, where a group of American tourists find a weirdly human but not human skeleton in a cave. One of them, Paul, falls into a catatonic state, later whispers something into another one's ear in the mountain cabin they take refuge in from the bad weather, and the next day they're all dead except for Paul.

About twenty five years later in the USA, we follow lonely former police detective James who is grieving the deaths of his wife and son. When his neighbor's daughter Amanda is lost, he starts investigating but then all Amanda's friends are found dead with the sentence "The Empty Man made me do it" written on the wall. Apparently they were playing a game where you go on a bridge and blow into a bottle and call for the Empty Man. James finds out that all of this is somehow connected to a secret society called the Pontifex Institute and goes there to meet their leader. After some chasing and running and starting to hallucinate, he finds that Paul is in a coma at a hospital and being revered by the members of the Institute as a kind of vessel for the Empty Man. Amanda is waiting for him in this hospital and tells him that Paul is dying and James himself is the next designated vessel, and he was in fact created for this one specific purpose, his memories fabricated and implanted in his head. He needed to go through all the feelings generated by these memories because The Empty Man needed the anger, grief and fear to be able to connect to his vessel. So James goes to the hospital, kills Paul and takes his place.

The cult: It's called the Pontifex Institute, and it is based on a philosophical, nihilistic organization whose headquarters and methods slightly reminisce of the church of Scientology (or what we know about it, preying on vulnerable people and all) and their followers worship a cosmic entity that needs a specific vessel. Their leader Arthur Parsons is an otherwise neither charismatic nor remarkable person, but the interesting thing about this cult is, unlike Baskın above, is not its leader, but its philosophy.

The making and recruiting of James the vessel is nothing but a mirror image of what this cult preaches, a kind of nihilism, that existence is meaningless and suffering has no purpose. I find similarities of this philosophy to Richard Dawkins' study of memetics (in his book The Selfish Gene), namely ideas using people to multiply and spread, depending on people imitating others and copying ideas. The Pontifexes believe in a reality where knowledge can't be communicated, people are transmitters, or in the terms of Tibetan mysticism, "tulpas", or thought-forms. Thus the circle closes in on the beginning of the movie set in Bhutan. The Empty Man is a cosmic entity that spreads existential dread and nihilism.

Now, I can't say I fully understand all of what's happening and it seems to me there are some gaps in here that don't make sense. What does The Empty Man-entity get out of all of this? What does the vessel tell the followers? Why do they keep whispering creepily? I'm sure I would go to one of the meetings to learn more about this cosmic entity. 

 The Bone Temple (2026)

It wasn't that long ago that I wrote a detailed review on this movie and I don't think I'll repeat that, so please read it here if you want to, otherwise go straight to the cult.

The cult: The Jimmies cult is a kind of Satanic cult that is heavily relying on a hierarchy which puts Sir Jimmy Crystal played by Jack O'Connell on top of each one of his seven so-called fingers. The fingers are poor sods he collected from the streets during the Zombie apocalypse to fight and slaughter and flay for him, in the name of his father. The Jimmies are in fact the only cult among all of those I've mentioned in this series that is at the same time a gang, a mob, but that's possibly more due to the post apocalyptic environment than anything else.

It is nevertheless still a cult despite the protection the leader offers his followers, which is prevalent in mobs, but he also spins a mythic story involving a numinous element to tie them to himself and keep them under his control. And that story is bat shit crazy, but considering his past, and the elements he used to put together his story, it is at the same time pretty consistent in itself. From the outfits inspired by Jimmy Savile, whose habit of sexually assaulting children was unknown in his lifetime (and thus would be unknown to Crystal), to the religious undertones he picked up from his father the pastor, to the Zombie pandemic he interprets as demons overtaking the world - each of them makes sense.

He is traumatized but also evil, thus his wish to organize in bigger groups and his aspiration to become a worldwide fascist movement out of his little gang which operates violently and theatrically. Doctor Ian Kelsey realizing his ambition, knows how to put an end to it with even more histrionic and lots of Iron Maiden. A crazy and very dynamic organization, the Jimmies show us that cults can come in many forms and shapes and above all, colors. 

Well, that's it, folks. Since new horror material about secret societies and cults comes out by the minute, I thought I'd draw a line under this subject with this post, because I have more and better things to do than chasing cult movies and reviewing them. Hope you enjoyed this.

And no, I haven't been threatened by anyone and I'm not suicidal.