Date Thesis Awarded

5-2024

Access Type

Honors Thesis -- Open Access

Degree Name

Bachelors of Arts (BA)

Department

Anthropology

Advisor

Adela Amaral

Committee Members

Kelebogile Zvobgo

Joseph Jones

Abstract

This thesis intends to outline how cults—commonly defined as “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object”| “a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs of practices regarded by others as strange or sinister (Oxford Language Dictionary)”—are created through popular films and documentaries. Cults may be defined as highly regulated and organized social groups with religious and political affiliations. Many create idiosyncratic languages of terms members know and understand, rituals, initiations, and punishments. There are leading scholars in sociology, psychology, and anthropology that do not capture the gaps in the definition of cult. They have written about how why the word cult is pejorative, what leaders do in cults, depersonalization, and the truth about why young people join cults(Richardson, E. Levine, S. Levine, Eister). More holistic accounts of cults that include their inception, political influence, attraction to new members, or how extreme such groups are, how the news—both textual and visual—describe them, television, and documentaries. It is, therefore, particularly important to examine how cults are represented through media, which has perhaps become our main source of information. This project examines representations of cults in film and television that follow the journey of (ex-)members of cults, who critically and pejoratively view their respective group as a cult, and the eventual demise of these groups that were used for this thesis specifically. Focusing on the demise offers readers perspectives in how extreme the information in the group can make members.

“How Film and Television Create Cults” is a scholarly analysis, by Kami Vigilant, of the fictional and non-fictional film and television representations of cults. It is an argumentative essay based on watching television, series, films, and movies and taking notes on how they show and display cults. It is a comparison of these two types of media—nonfiction and fiction. I also review academic literature on cults. I compare my academic research (which itself creates a representation of cults) to films and documentaries, and compare the latter two with each other. Just as written research is not entirely holistic, television series and films simply do not create critical views of what cults are, their relation to political participation and voting habits and choice issues because such topics are not discussed or displayed as they in written research. Moreover, the idea of cults is clearly impacting our culture.

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