Cult Cinema, now available

So I wrote another book. That's CULT CINEMA: A Personal Exploration of Sects, Brainwashing and Bad Religion in Film and TV. It's notionally supposed to be available on 26th but Amazon pulled the trigger a little early. You can find it on Amazon on most marketplaces, including: 

• UK   
• USA  
• Canada 
• Australia 
• France

I'm going to be doing two launch events. On 26th February, I'll be launching the event with a watch party for The Invitation (2015) followed by talk and a live QnA on Zoom, because that's how we do events like this now. And on 25th of March, I'll be promoting it with the Cultural Institute at Swansea University, of which more details to come.

Cult Cinema #33: Counting to Nun, Part Three

Mother Joan of the Angels (Matka Joanna od Aniołów) (1961)

(Can you actually spoil a historical drama made in 1961? If you can, I do.)

The historical events surrounding the incident of the Loudun Devils have been analysed and fictionalised several times, and while Ken Russell’s version is probably the most notorious for English-speaking film fans, it isn’t all there is. Possibly the most nuanced and interesting version is Polish director Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s classic Mother Joan of the Angels (AKA Matka Joanna od Aniołów, 1961) which might predate The Devils by a good decade but concerns itself with what happens next. Like Russell, Kawalerowicz used a fictionalised account as a portal through which he accessed the story; while Russell worked with Huxley, Kawalerowicz adapted Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz’s novel, also titled Matka Joanna od Aniołów, which, like Huxley, used the historical events of seventeenth century Loudun as an allegory for the present.

Cult Cinema #32: Counting to Nun, Part Two

Flavia the Heretic (Flavia, la monaca musulmana)(1974)

I was going to get to a nunsploitation movie. It was inevitable. Spoilers, of course, and a movie that features stuff that may well ruin your day, given the rapey sort of thing we habitually find in movies like this. Proceed with caution. This is, by the way, an extract from my imminent book Cult Cinema. Stay tuned for more information about that very soon.

Cult Cinema #31: Counting to Nun, Part 1

So. Let's talk about nuns.

Room 207 Press Webinars #12: The Atrocity Tour

Few things are as synonymous with the pop culture idea of the cult as the great cult atrocity stories: the Manson Family murders, the cult massacre at Jonestown, and the siege at Waco have become irresistible gravitational forces of narrative. 

They have defined the idea of what being in a cult is, have become pop culture artefacts in their own right. And they have inevitably influenced film and TV, both in the sense of film adaptations of the stories, and in films inspired by them. 

But of course, the mythology of these stories isn't the whole deal. We talk about “drinking the Kool-Aid”, we talk about Manson and Waco and what happened in those places, but the stories we know aren't necessarily the truth. To what extent then can fiction really give us an in-road to understanding these real-world tragedies? Should we even attempt to approach them?

In this part of the Cult Cinema lecture series, I’m going to look at how these events have become part of the cultural lexicon and how their transformation from fact into legend has been portrayed on the screen, and what this can tell us about the conditions that make these abuses become part of oour mythology. 

The event is going to be conducted via Zoom, as ever, and it is going to be held on Monday 14th September, twice, at 8pm UK time, and 8pm Eastern Time (US/Canada). Although tickets are £10, subscribers to my Patreon, which also gives you access to videos of previous talks and other patron-exclusive content, get in free.

You can become a Patron here. 

Tickets can also be booked here:

Room 207 Press Webinars #11: Evangelical Horrors – the cinematic politics of fundamentalist Christianity

When Jerry Falwell Junior hit the news recently, it came as a surprise to some and no surprise whatsoever to many. The son of the notorious televangelist of the same name (only, you know, Senior) had been the President of Liberty University since his dad died in 2007, but unlike his dad, who as televangelists go was at least some variety of sincere, Falwell Jr has been prone to doing stuff like posting pictures of himself on Instagram with his pants down, and recently it's come out that he was involved in a specific sort of poly triad with his wife and a hot pool boy or something. The evangelical world has predictably been going crazy about this, as you'd expect. 

Don't worry about the Boy Falwell – he's going to be fine, and sure, Liberty have finally managed to get shot of him. But consider this: Falwell was blackmailed about this poly thing in 2016, because when you're a big proponent of family values stuff and hating on queer people, being poly (albeit poly in one of the most depressingly vanilla ways you can be, of course) is not an optic you want to get out there, and Donald Trump's people made it go away. And in return, Falwell did not endorse Ted Cruz – an awful human being to be sure, but a committed and sincere evangelical believer – and instead endorsed Trump. And the evangelical vote went to Trump. 

I don't think that this is going to make any difference at all to how evangelicals vote in the US in November. Why is that? Why is it that the only people who seem to think that Falwell Minor feeding his entire faith community to a man who conforms closely to the Biblical descriptions of the actual freaking Antichrist are not the people who you'd think would be bothered?

There's a question. 

It's a subject close to my heart, since I spent several years in the thrall of the evangelical version of Christianity and got to know

On Monday 7th September, I'm going to be looking at the prominence of American evangelicalism and its history through the lens of how modern evangelicalism is presented in cinema and TV, and how that illuminates the power, influence and reach of a faith that can be quite persuasively be argued to have departed from historical Christianity. From Righteous Gemstones and Greenleafs to gay conversion camps and Biblical archaeologists, we'll be tackling the religion of the American Empire, and interrogating its flaws.  

It's going to be held twice at 8pm UK time, and again at 8pm Eastern Time (US/Canada) via Zoom. Backers of my Patreon get in as part of their subscription, but regular tickets can be purchased from this link or via the widget thing below. 

Sects Education #6: The Children Act (2017)

(Spoilers.You know the score.)

In The Children Act, Emma Thompson plays Mrs Justice Fiona Maye, a judge with a reputation for making decisions on divisive and high profile family cases. At the start of the film she makes the call to allow a hospital to separate a pair of conjoined twins, knowing that one will die rather than both, against the parents' wishes. She is called upon to make a judgement about Adam Henry (Fionn Whitehead), a boy of 17, only a few weeks from adulthood, who is sick in hospital and needs a blood transfusion to live. The boy is a Jehovah’s Witness, and neither he nor his parents wish the procedure. The hospital seeks an injunction to enable them to save the young man’s life. Fiona's marriage is however faltering – her husband (Stanley Tucci) announces he's planning on an affair – and in a lapse of judgement she goes to see Adam in hospital. He turns out to be bright and they connect over a song (her passion, it turns out, is music, and so is his). Of course she makes the judgement to save his life. He survives, turns 18, and begins to pursue her, because he has a crush on her. She rejects him eventually, but because of her own emotional state, does not know how to respond appropriately, and the ending is inevitable, tragic and wholly predictable.

Room 207 Press Webinars #9: Sects Education: The Dark-Eyed Stepchildren of Mainstream Christianity

If you've ever walked past the Jehovah's Witness stand, or closed the door on them, ot had a strangely intense conversation with a pair of clean-cut young men with “elder” written on their badges, you know that the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of the Latter-Day Saints exist. And they're not alone. What about the Seventh Day Adventists, the Christadelphians and the Exclusive Brethren? 

How do you feel about them? And what does cinema tell us about these sometimes secretive, isolated offshoots of Protestant Christianity? Can we gain insight through film? 

 This week's Zoom seminar is about just that, as I provide an introduction to Christian Sects and look at how they're portrayed in everything from serious dramas to quirky comedies. Find out what The Children Act has in common with Napoleon Dynamite and Son of Rambow.  

The talk is as ever going to be held twice, on Monday 17th August, at 8pm UK time and 8pm Eastern Time (US/Canada). Ticket cost is £10, but Backing my Patreon for as little as $1US a month not only gets you a season ticket to all the talks, including this one, but access to videos after the fact, along with all the other benefits.  

Sects Education: The Dark-Eyed Stepchildren of Mainstream Religion

Cult Cinema #30: On the Pagan Village Conspiracy

The Wicker Man (1973); Kill List (2011); Midsommar (2019)

(There will be spoilers, as ever.)

Before I even define what one is, I need to say this: outside of works of fiction, there is no such thing as a Pagan Village Conspiracy. Hold that thought.

As a fictional concept, a Pagan Village Conspiracy film has some or all of the following: an outsider protagonist goes to a rural area where they come into contact with a community who turn out to be engaged in pagan or occult practices. Every significant character in this community is part of the conspiracy, which is not usually centred around the pagan/occult practices themselves, but in how they relate to the status of the protagonist. “It was you they wanted all along” is by far the most common twist in the Pagan Village Conspiracy Movie.

Cult Cinema #29: The Art of Obvious Wisdom

Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss by Passing
Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh (2018)

Yeah, it's a mouthful. Let's just move on from that, except to affirm that Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss by Passing Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh is the sort of movie that would have a title like that, a quirky American indie comedy, which is tonally in the vein of something like Little Miss Sunshine, or Life After Beth, or maybe Being John Malkovich, a film which draws its comedy from eccentric people being eccentric, but not eccentric in that curated, stylised way that Wes Anderson has, more grounded than that. The sort of film that chooses a song by The Flaming Lips to play out over the closing credits.That's what we're talking about.

Spoilers, as usual, from the start.

Sects Education #5: Praise Be To He

The Righteous Gemstones, Season 1 (2019)

(This is largely a discussion of televangelism, prosperity preaching and American evangelicalism, using the recent HBO series The Righteous Gemstones as a lens. Needless to say, there are spoilers galore.)

So when I ran with the Evangelicals, I spent every Easter for the six years from 1996 to 2001 as a volunteer steward for the evangelical festival Spring Harvest. Every year for about three weeks, usually either side of Easter, Spring Harvest still takes over the Butlins holiday camp at Minehead (not this year, obviously, but as William Cowper put it, God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform).

Imagine a Christian convention.

The Room 207 Press Summer Webinar Series – a mid-season relaunch

So towards the start of the lockdown season, I started thinking about what I could do workwise. It's a brutal time for a freelancer. But then I got asked to do a talk for a lovely place in Nashville, and then I thought, you know what, I may not be good at everything but I do have a way with a useless but fascinating fact. So I thought, I'll have an online seminar series. And this has been fun, if exhausting. So far I've explored folk horror, faked ecctoplasm, explained how to brainwash someone and invented a whole genre of horror. But we're not quite halfway through the series, so there's a lot more to come.

The Details

When?
Seminars run on Mondays, and each one runs twice: the first is at 8pm, British Summer Time; the second at 8pm, Eastern Daylight Time (which is 1am BST). If you're in the UK or in a similar time zone, you'll probably want to book for the BST session; if you're in the US or Canada, you'll likely want the EDT session. But anyone can go to either if they can make it.

Where?
The seminars are going to run online, using Zoom, because that's what everyone uses, and honestly, it's about the easiest way to do this. Before the talk I'll mail everyone with meeting links and passwords (because there will be passwords).

How much?
Backing my Patreon not only gets you a season ticket to all the talks, but access to videos after the fact, along with all the other benefits. If you don't want to commit to a subscription, each class is available on a Pay-What-You-Want basis (input how much you want to pay in the checkout box), and is limited to 50 attendees, because bandwidth (so please register, even if you decide to come for free). Suggested range for a ticket is £5-10, but seriously, if you can't afford it and you want to come, there's no guilt attached.

Here's a schedule of what's to come. 

Room 207 Press Webinars #3: How They Get You: a primer on cults, brainwashing and deprogramming in film

We're afraid of cults. We're afraid of our kids and our friends getting tangled up with them and winding up joining. We're afraid that they might get us too.

But what does that even mean? What does it mean to be brainwashed? What's the difference between getting brainwashed and a legitimate religious conversion? Does brainwashing even exist as a thing? Can it be undone? Do you even want to?

Well, hang in there because I've spent literally 23 years writing about this sort of thing — and longer even than that experiencing it first-hand.

This seminar ran twice on Monday 15th June, at 8pm UK time and 8pm Eastern Time (USA).

It referenced:
Get Out (2016)
Our Man Flint (1966)
Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss by Passing Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh (2018)
Doomsday (2016)
American Horror Story: Cult (2017)
The Invitation (2015)
Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
The Path (2016-2018)
Sound of My Voice (2012)
Safe (1995)
Ticket to Heaven (1981)
Split Image (1982)
Holy Smoke (1999)
Faults (2014)

...and sex-cult leader Keith Raniere's YouTube, but you can Google that, because ew. 

For more talks, go check out my Patreon, where you can get a dirt-cheap season ticket, as well getting access to the other content over there or see the list of upcoming talks.

Room 207 Press Webinars #1: The Scam From Atlantis

Madame Blavatsky will never not be judging you.

The Scam from Atlantis, Monday 1st June 8pm BST and 8pm EDT

So I've gotta eat. And more specifically, I've been asked a bunch of times if I'll be doing more talks, because talks are a thing I do. Hi, by the way. If you've not come here before, I'm Howard David Ingham, and I've written professionally about occult history, religion and, most recently, movies for twenty years, and a couple of years ago I wrote a book called We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror (obligatory Amazon UK link) which got nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, which is nice.

I'm starting on 1st June with The Scam from Atlantis: the occult roots of fake archaeology, which deals with an abiding lifelong obsession of mine: Atlantis.

This is personal to me, has been since I was a kid, and my dad used to keep his books on the occult on a high shelf and one day I balanced on a stack of wobbly chairs and got them down, and there was this one about Atlantis, only I'm not talking about your Plato Atlantis or your Robert E Howard Atlantis, your Graham Hancock Atlantis or even your Doug McClure Atlantis, I'm talking about the dream Atlantis of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, William Scott-Elliot and Charles Leadbeater. The Hyperborean age of the Lhas. The Lost Lemuria.

This was a world invented by and for psychics. Mystics. Dreamers. Not filtered through any lens of pulp fantasy, either. I wouldn't read the American writers who riffed on this stuff until well into adulthood, and that was probably a good thing.

I was about eleven, and I'd discovered Dungeons and Dragons about the same time (I still have the box, purple sides, Erol Otus dragon, acquired second hand from some older lads down the road who couldn't make head or tail of it, at a time when everyone else had the Elmore dragon), and in my lonely head the blurry second-hand fragments of theosophical imaginations turned into lost ancient worlds full of psychic three-eyed beastmen who domesticated dinosaurs (and when you are eleven nothing catches your imagination like a giant with a dinosaur on a lead. Nothing), and tribes of sad blue giants who walked through lands scoured by the depredations of airship fleets commanded by crazed tyrant witch-kings. This was in the books. This was all there, I swear to God, with Chris Foss paintings of Sky-Chariots and diagrams of the concentric islands of Poseidonis and discussions of cosmic memory and theosophical root races. All there.

From my Dad's Atlantis book.

But the problem is, the more you read about it, the more you see the problems with it. As time went on, the magical Atlantis of my childhood began to exist in tension with horrific undercurrents. When you realise that the root races of man corresponded with the late 19th/early 20th century orthodoxy that humans had subspecies, and that the Lemurians were Black, and the Atlanteans were Asian, and they were replaced by the fifth race, and the fifth race are the Aryans... and that the history of Atlantis was tied up with this, it gets a little concerning.

Click to see the big version of this. It's from a family encyclopedia, dated 1927.

The Atlantis that mystics like Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce invented came from Ignatius Donnelly, and he had this whole “pyramids in Egypt and pyramids in South America – what are the chances?” thing going on, a basic error of misapplied imagination that has inspired a whole history of wannabe archaeologists – Graham Hancock, Erich von Däniken, and the others – who all work on the assumption that the Black and Brown people who yet live in the places where these awe inspiring monuments were built couldn't possibly be the descendants of the ones who built them, and that they must have been built by people from Somewhere Else.

This seminar ran on 1st June 2020. 
 
You can buy tickets for all the seminars in the series on the main seminar page.

Cult Cinema #27: The Ninth Rule

Fight Club (1999)

The single easiest and laziest thing in the world right now would be to start an essay about this movie with a gag about the First Rule of Fight Club, and the Second Rule of Fight Club, and the juxtaposition of the two and whether they're amusingly the same or amusingly not the same.

The second easiest and laziest thing in the world right now would be to make some point about how it would be the easiest and laziest thing in the world right now to joke about the First Rule of Fight Club. Which is to say, I'm beaten before I start whatever I do because this movie has, in the more than twenty (twenty!) years since its release, sewn up all the discourse. Everyone knows what the first two rules of Fight Club are, even the people who have never seen it. And the film is firmly in that peculiar category of movie which is undeniably great but shouldn't ever be anyone's favourite movie.

Obviously there are spoilers, but the likelihood is that if you get any distance into this, you've probably seen it (or read Chuck Palahniuk's book, or both, but let's face it, it's more likely you've seen the movie) so there we are.

Sects Education #4: Straight is Great

But I'm a Cheerleader (1999)
The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

(Given that this is about gay conversion therapy movies, it's going to deal with some bad stuff. Discretion is as usual advised. Spoilers abound, as ever.

On a less serious note, as this is the last of my Sects Education pieces, I only think it's appropriate to mention that the Sects Education title came from my pal Jon Dear, who rode in as the Dad Joke Cavalry and saved me when I was looking for something sectsually explicit for a title. Ta, Jon.

This post is Cult Cinema #26.)

The sort of evangelicalism that gave us the genesis of apologetics ministry grew out of a feeling of somehow losing control, that since the end of the 19th century, the world was no longer in the shape of the white Christian. If a certain category of Christian – a technocratic, economically and socially privileged category of Christian – did not feel that control was lost, it would not be so desperate to assert control. Apologetics ministry exists because science and history, the external realms of facts, are not doing what the evangelicals want them to, and must be domesticated.

Cult Cinema #25: Sects Education, Part Three

Don Verdean (2015)

(Today, I'm looking at Jared Hess's interesting, misunderstood and antisemitic 2015 comedy Don Verdean. There are spoilers, but it's not like you're going to watch this movie, so don't sweat it.) 

Could it be fair to call the most vocal and temporally powerful branch of English-speaking Christianity a sect? It's easy to point out all the ways in which American evangelicalism decades ago departed from historical Christian orthodoxy. It has its own media, its own ways of speaking. It has peculiar obsessions and fears that it has superimposed over actual traditional belief – abortions, sexuality and gender, evolutionary science – and doctrines that are in most traditional readings literally prohibited by Scripture, but which somehow have become normative, like the Rapture, and Prosperity Teaching. And it is partisan in its politics, for since the 1980s, the fortunes of American evangelicalism have been tied tightly to those of the Republican Party, and so we've seen this particular take on the faith metastasise into something hard-edged, and warlike, and, to outsiders frightening and fascist.

Cult Cinema #24: The Atrocity Tour, Part 4

American Horror Story: Cult (2017)

The premise of American Horror Story is simple enough. Each season, a fairly consistent ensemble of actors stars in a serialised long-form tale of terror, which is complete in about eleven episodes, and which deals with one of the big tropes of American horror: a malevolently haunted house, an asylum, a coven of witches, the backwoods, a freak show, the Apocalypse. Occasionally references are made to characters and events in other seasons, but the stories stand alone, and (with the exception of Apocalypse) you can watch any one season of AHS on its own and not miss anything. The seventh season, then, is the Cult season, and since it's explicitly called a horror story in the title, and since AHS is heavily invested in using classic tropes, we know from the beginning that we're going to be approaching the great cult atrocities.

And we do.

Spoilers, all of them, as usual.

Cult Cinema #23: Subsocieties of Control

[This essay will go in my section about deprogramming, along with Faults, Holy Smoke and Ticket to Heaven. It refers closely to the last of those, as Split Image and Ticket to Heaven are based on the same source material. It's one of the last entries in the Cult Cinema series; there's maybe a couple more to fill out an obvious gap or two, but essentially it's more or less ready to be a book.]

Split Image (1982)

Canadian writer Josh Freed's book Moonwebs: Journey into the Mind of a Cult was published in 1980, based on his 1977 involvement in the abduction and deprogramming of a friend, named Benji Miller in the book, who had fallen into the Unification Church's clutches. Freed frames his narrative with a thorough outsider investigation into the history and influence of Sun Myung Moon's religious, political and financial activities. It hit the zeitgeist – Jonestown hadn't long happened, and the Moonies were at their peak – and Ticket to Heaven, the “official” film adaptation, came out in October 1981, which is a pretty swift lead-in for a theatrical film. It shows, frankly. I wonder how Josh Freed felt about it. On the one hand, his book got a new tie-in edition off the back of the movie's release. On the other, the film sticks closely to the narrative part and ignores the background. And of course in Ticket to Heaven, while its cultists call their distant, absent leader “Father” as the Moonies did, and while the cult members (like the real ones) don't know that they're Moonies, we don't know that they're Moonies either, because the filmmakers, presumably afraid of litigation, don't ever mention the group by name, which arguably defeats the point of the whole thing.

Ted (Wake in Fright) Kotcheff's Split Image, also made with Canadian money, released twelve months after Ticket to Heaven did. In a lot of ways it is pretty much the same film, and shares a lot of details with Ticket to Heaven, at least on a superficial level. They're just too close together for Split Image to have been plagiarised; but Split Image was absolutely inspired by Moonwebs. In fact there are details from Josh Freed's book that appear in Split Image and which don't appear in the “official” adaptation – for example, the distressing anecdote that the Moonie women in the 70s groups became so malnourished and sleep-deprived that they stopped having periods (framed by the cult as a good thing), which Freed mentions, comes up in dialogue in Kotcheff's film, but not in its predecessor.

Cult Cinema #22: Sects Education, Part Two

Gentlemen Broncos (2009)

Gentlemen Broncos bombed when it came out. It had almost entirely negative reviews and nearly ended the career of husband and wife team Jared and Jerusha Hess (of Napoleon Dynamite fame). Its cast of apparent eccentrics and nerds was not embraced by the filmgoing public at large, and in fact AICN (remember them?) even accused the film of being “bully porn”, designed to make you laugh hard at the homespun, poverty-stricken weirdos, just as you might have done at school. For my part, all I saw in the film was affection for its subjects, and a meditation on creativity that hit a chord with me.