Cults

Cult horror is the fear that the group is right. An outsider arrives, is welcomed, is fed, is told everything, and gradually realizes that every answer was true and the welcome was real, and that neither will save them. The form rarely has a villain. It has a consensus, and the horror is in watching a room full of reasonable people agree on something terrible.

The rules are communal. A group with a belief system, often isolated, often sunny, often kind. A leader, or a founder, whose absence can be as frightening as their presence. A ritual, usually a sacrifice, that the group has built its calendar around. An outsider, invited in or stranded, who asks questions. And a turn, where the outsider either becomes part of the group or becomes its purpose, and the film is honest that for some of them the first is worse.

The form's defining film is The Wicker Man (1973), a Scottish island, a pagan harvest and a policeman who never once understands the joke. The 1970s gave it a real-world shadow in Jonestown, and the form's second life has been about that kind of charisma: Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), Ti West's The Sacrament (2013), Faults (2014). Kill List (2011) turned a hitman thriller into something older, and The Invitation (2015) put a cult at a dinner party. Then the form had its decade: The Endless (2017), mother! (2017), Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), each about grief and the group that offers to hold it, and Apostle (2018), The Lodge (2019) and The Empty Man (2020) at the edges. Cults turn up in the last act of more films than any other subgenre, because they are where a plot goes when it needs everyone to have been in on it.

The signature techniques are about hospitality. The feast, photographed as a feast. The explanation, delivered plainly by someone who means it. The long shot of a landscape with one figure in it. The ritual filmed as ethnography rather than spectacle. And the villagers who tell the outsider exactly what will happen and are not believed.

Occult is the nearest neighbor, where the ritual has a book instead of a congregation, and Rosemary's Baby is the bridge. Witchcraft shares the old ways and the village. Possession is where Hereditary's cult ends up. Cosmic horror is the neighbor when the group turns out to be right about something vast, as in The Endless. Psychological horror shares the grief-driven revival, and survival is what the form becomes when the locals have no religion, just a grudge.

For deeper cuts, try Kill List (2011), a British hitman thriller that turns, without warning, into something older; go in knowing nothing beyond that. The Sacrament (2013) is Ti West's found footage retelling of Jonestown, with Gene Jones as a Father who is frightening because he is so reasonable. And Faults (2014) is a small film about a washed-up cult deprogrammer hired to rescue a young woman, which turns inside out in its last twenty minutes.