From the elusive transcendental logic of Mulholland Drive, to Showgirls’ sly satirical embrace of exploitation and excess, to the assumption in Southland Tales that its audience has already read the six-volume source material, some films are simply more “cruel” on their audiences than others. So, please, lie back and let The Cultists be your guides through the paralyzing and perplexing void of arthouse, experimental, avant-garde, "cult,” and otherwise just generally weird WTF cinema.
Because some films just beg to be annotated.
Twitter/Insta: @CinemaOfCruelty
Reddit: /r/CinemaOfCruelty
THE NINTH GATE (1999) — There is no Hell, There is only Toledo.
*NEW!* On this episodes annotated deep dive, The Cultists present Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999). A slow and cozy burn of paranoia through warm-lit and dusty streets, The Ninth Gate tells that classic tale of a bored and bitter book dealing mercenary who happens upon an ancient esoteric puzzle concealed in the pages of the text — a one shot, all-consuming mystery that many a mad man has tried to solve for centuries — but that Johnny Depp’s Robert/Dean/Lucas Corso might happen to solve instead through sheer divine apathy. (Albeit with a heavy green-eyed stalker assist). Curiously based on only half of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel, The Dumas Club, (and on the B plot of the novel at that), Polanski’s adaptation transforms Reverte’s postmodern parable about the dangers of of looking too closely at a text, into a modernist love letter to the practice of… looking too closely at a text.
Topics Include: Comparisons to The Dumas Club and the details from the novel that help shape the more esoteric parts of the film; the book market value of all those old tomes; the abstract tradition of Grimoires; the occult golden age of Prague; fallen angels, The Grigori , and other lesser diablos; the paradox of making a modernist film out of a postmodern source, and a (somewhat brief) history of the devil, or how satan(s) became Satan.
Episode Safeword: Salvation
11 Sept 2025
EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)—Thus Spoke Stanley Kubrick (Part II)
**REPOST** On this week’s annotated deep dive, The Cultists continue to present Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
***THIS IS PART TWO OF A TWO PART EPISODE***
Deep Dives Include: production history; comparisons with the film’s “Dream Story” (1926) novella source material ; the Gustav Klimt color pallet; the meaning behind those neon Eros/Thanatos street signs; secret societies and other occult inspirations (from the Freemasons, to the Illuminati, Hellfire clubs, and Alister Crowley); Ovid’s Art of Love; what it means to “reach the end of the rainbow”; and how the film’s seemingly abrupt and hollow end comes straight from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”....
Episode Safeword(s): “the morning after”
(REPOSTED Episode from 2021 that traveled over from the old Anchor platform with a broken link).
12 Nov 2023
GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) — I ain’t afraid of no IRB review
The Cultists are back! And in honor of The Resurrection, on this week’s annotated deep-dive, The Cutlists Present Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984). A humble little film of grandiose origins (including a writer born into a family tree of generations of ghost hunters, a un-producable fever dream of a first draft, a 13 month time budget, and a die hard commitment to keeping the SNL and Second City comedy players as the B-plot to the film’s one true core purpose of introducing the doctrine of Spiritualism’s main tenants to the youth of the 1980s), Ghostbusters is one subtle but wild trip.
Notoriously simultaneously a film about everything and nothing, the finished print of Ghostbusters has prevailed through the decades as a largely nostalgic comedy. So much so thusly remembered in the larger cultural zeitgeist that it can be all too easy to overlook just how deeply rooted nearly every line of the script is in esoteric references to over a century of real world Spiritualist practices and lore…
Deep-dives include: The history of parapsychology; J.B. Rhine, Zener cards, the Milgram experiment, and other such ways to gaslight undergraduates in the name of quantitive research; Hittite vs. Sumerian myth (and where our lovable otherworldly gods of Gozer to Zul falls); Dan Akroyd’s real life family business of talking to ghosts; the plight of the EPA; Theosophy and the ethereal vs the etheric; Institutional Review Boards (and the film’s violations therein); Ivo Shandor Revival style cults and the occult appeal of selenium; the film’s myriad folklore references from the 1943 Philadelphia experiment to the Tunguska event; turn of the century cheese cloth regurgitation (or how you get ectoplasm); the film’s offhand references to trepanation, hypnotic dentistry, and menstrual psychosis; the special effects and the unapologetic cocaine-fueled frenzied genesis of everyone’s favorite childhood ghost; and how ultimately this film is, above all else, an esoteric love letter to a new turn of the century Spiritualism.
Episode Safe Word: James Randi
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76 ratings
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