![]() In some cases, these cults create entire communities by themselves. Charles Manson, David Koresh the leader behind the Waco siege, Daniel Perez, Keith Raniere – it’s incredible to think these men (and women, there are female cult leaders too of course), have brainwashed thousands of people into abandoning their lives, their bodies, their independence, to give everything they have to one person under the guise of a community. The charismatic man who dupes dozens, if not hundreds, of people into following him. In the same vein as serial killers, real-life cult leaders become macabre celebrities. Lily-Rose Depp plays a popstar drawn into a complex relationship with a cult leader in a shocking tale of manipulation and abuse. Next month comes a fictional take on cults, controversial TV drama The Idol, created by musician The Weeknd and Sam Levison, the man behind teen drama Euphoria(and by the sound of, just as grisly). The recent BBC documentary A Very British Cultoffered a fascinating insight into The Lighthouse, a “life coaching” group funded – often at some considerable cost – by its members, taking over their lives and separating them from their families, apparently to help them realise their dream futures. Our fascination with cults is constant and comes from the same place as our fascination with serial killers and our podcast-fuelled obsession with true crime: we love to gawk at the extremes of humanity from a safe space behind a TV screen or page of a book. Others continue in their sinister path, manipulating members into following their doctrines and rules. Some of these tales end tragically – as with the mass murder-suicide of brainwashed members in their hundreds in the notorious Jonestown massacre in 1978. Truth is often stranger than fiction, and perhaps the strangest true stories of all are those of cult leaders who lure hundreds or thousands to walk away from their lives and follow their often bizarre ideologies.
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