Our fascination with cults goes deep. It’s hard to watch crime shows, read thrillers, or horror without a cult or two popping up somewhere along the way. It’s become cliché, a trope, a predictable element of how we scare ourselves. We joke about tight-knit clubs, gyms, friend circles as being cultish, and we laugh. The psychology isn’t too hard to figure out: what is horror except a way to play out all the possible terrors that might occur before they actually do? It’s why we watch scary movies, why we devour true crime. In the back of our heads, there is a little voice that whispers over and over it can’t get you when you’ve seen its face.
But cults are not the exclusive territory of the disturbed and deviant. They consist of people much like any of us, people who walk every avenue of life, and consist of every possible combination of human attributes. That is where the scary lives: if a seemingly normal person can be lured into a cult, then how do I know who to trust? Read more
