Cult

to Halloween cult horror viewing. The community aspect of Halloween, the sense of gathering (and also the possibility of threat) that defines the celebratory aspect of the season, is echoed in ritual viewing practices and the ‘horrorthon’ format. In this paper, I seek to explore horror binge-watching and marathon viewing through an analysis of cult horror spectatorship during Halloween: the specific rituals of viewing, the context in which the films are viewed, and the influence of cult horror…

portrayal of this sub American hero greatly attributes to the movie’s cult following. Among all films, “El Topo presented itself as a spiritual initiation […] speaking at once to the counterculture’s love of the arcane and its collective paranoia” (Hoberman 98). As we approached the 70s, the counterculture lost its excitement and started to experience privatism, until El Topo came out. What El Topo did was “[it] directed against both an…

Cults use the psychological methods normative social influence, groupthink and foot-in-the-door to manipulate individuals and control their thoughts as seen in the cults Jonestown and The Branch Davidians. Cults are defined as an ideology of religious worship and adherence directed toward a particular figure or object. Cults are everywhere. Some are normal and widely accepted. Others are isolationist and hide from investigation. Some cause great suffering while others appear very helpful and…

jaguar shifter, is an ex-sergeant in the Army Rangers. He and his long time friends from Two Spirit Ranch have spent the past six years dealing with a vicious cult called the Will and the Word. As a last-ditch effort to destroy Cody and his shifter crew, the cult destroyed the nearby town of Sage, Wyoming and left it in a heap of rubble. The cult is now gone, but their legacy lives on, leaving Cody and crew the task of rebuilding Sage and helping the cult's victims pick up the pieces of their…

The Roman mystery cults were cults dedicated to different gods or goddesses depending on the cult. They were called mystery cults because the initiation process was often a mystery. Some common characteristics of these cults were fasting, the promise of personal immortality, and prayer like recitations. In the reading Initiation into the Cult of Isis written by Apuleius he speaks of what followers said during the final part of the…

Mithraism contains elements of Hellenistic cosmology but the complexity of this relationship remains unclear as there exists a limited selection of primary sources detailing this masculine cult. There is no surviving text detailing the myth of Mithras making it difficult to discern and understand Mithraic culture and its perspective of Hellenistic cosmology. What has survived includes the tauroctony, an iconic depiction of Mithras wearing a Phrygian cap slitting the throat of a bull with one…

financial success proves Prince to be nothing short of an icon. If the person is given an elevated status, the meaning that they carried and the things that they stood for will continue long after they are dead and gone. According to Till, most join cults in order to receive spiritual guidance, as well as to gain…

Aum Shinrikyo, also known as Aum and currently as Aleph, is a cult from Japan that combines tenets from Buddhism, Hinduism, and has an obsession with the apocalypse. The cult’s founder Shoko Asahara, claims that he is the first "enlightened one" since Buddha. Despite claiming to be enlightened, he incorrectly claimed the end of the world would happen in 1996 or between 1999 and 2003 (Fletcher 2012, para.2). Asahara claimed that the United States could be lured into a war with Japan and the…

Shoemaker, H. Stephen wrote an article entitles, “ Cults and Religions Have Important Differences.” In this article, he attempted to iterate key dissimiliarities between widely established religions, and the smaller manifestations of religious belief, to which we designate the term cults. He often insinuates that Christianity is a model religion that has never exhibited any cult like traits, and that the lines between these followings could be easily defined by terms as simple as the leadership,…

quality is poor and is not as realistic as the other paintings. 
 Religious shrines were popular amongst households. The Roman culture did not practice monotheism, but rather worshiped many deities such as Venus, Apollo, and Jupiter. Within the imperial cult of Rome existed many temples that had been dedicated to these Greco-Roman Gods. However, to more common people existed shrines called lararia which existed in households. Whereas the temples were geared more towards showing loyalty to the…