The Top 10 Best Cult Movies
These Cult Movies will Give You the Creeps.
If you’re looking for a list of cult classics, then you’re in the wrong place, because this is not that kind of cult movies list. Instead, this list is tackling films that feature cults or in which cults play a large part in the plot. Putting together a list like this turned out to be harder than I thought because it’s kind of hard to determine where organized religion ends and a cult begins. Not to get all high school valedictorian speech on you, but I felt like the definition of a cult would be a good place to start. So, these films will feature “a relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.” With that in mind, I gathered together a list of the best cult movies to ever hit the silver screen over the years. Be warned though, this list might contain some spoilers for a few films.
10. The Wicker Man
Now I’m sure that Nicolas Cage screaming “Beeeeeees!” is the first thing that pops into your mind when I mention The Wicker Man. While the remake is so awful it’s amazing, that’s not the version I’m putting on this list of cult movies. I’m referring to the 1973 version starring Edward Woodward as a police Sargent looking for a missing girl. His search leads him to Summerisle, an island inhabited by a group of Pagans (gasp!). Woodward’s character is a devout Christian, so he’s greatly offended by the practices he sees occurring on the island, such as the malevolent use of… A maypole? Of course, there’s more to the Islanders than meets the eye and soon he finds himself stuffed inside of, you guessed it, a wicker man.
9. Apostle
Typically I stick to movies that get theatrical releases for these lists, but Netflix released one of the better cult movies I’ve seen in 2019. Apostle is from director Gareth Evans who brought us the incredible action flick The Raid: Redemption. He brings that same chaotic and brutal energy to this movie about a man (Dan Stevens) in search of his kidnapped sister in the 1900s. His search brings him to an island inhabited by a cult (what is it with cults and islands?). There he finds that the cult has ransomed his sister because they can no longer afford the animals that they regularly sacrifice to the deity they worship in order to have a bountiful harvest. Once he learns the truth, he’s forced to fight his way off the island in the most brutal ways possible.
8. The Invitation
Turns out sometimes there’s a good reason not to stay in touch with your exes. The Invitation starts off about a man (Logan Marshal-Green) who reluctantly agrees to go to a dinner party being held by his ex-wife and her new husband. There he runs into a lot of old familiar faces there who bring up painful memories he’s tried to leave behind. As the night goes on though, he becomes suspicious that not everything is what it seems to be. He becomes more and more worried that something terrible is going to happen, but no one there wants to believe him because of the baggage he’s carrying from when his marriage ended. The Invitation might seem slow and boring, but it has one of the most shocking endings of all the cult movies on this list.
7. Hot Fuzz
Not all cult movies are creepy and scary. Edgar Wright tackled the subject matter with a dark sense of humor in the middle movie of his Cornetto trilogy, Hot Fuzz. The film follows a hot shot big city police sergeant who is transferred to a small village which threatens to kill him with boredom. That is until he discovers that while the village might have an incredibly low crime rate, it’s got an absurdly high rate of accidental deaths. Turns out the peaceful village is far from what it seems and he’s in for the fight of his life against the quaint country folk he’s greatly underestimated. Hot Fuzz stands out amongst the cult movies on this list thanks to its wonderfully absurd premise and keen sense of humor thanks to stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as some of the best buddy cops of all time.
6. The Endless
The first rule of cult movies is that you never go back once you get away from the cult. The Endless though follows two brothers who revisit the UFO death cult they were a part of when they were children. Their return brings up a lot of memories and as adults, it becomes clear that nothing is quite what it seems there. The longer they spend there the more they encounter stranger and stranger occurrences, including a second moon in the sky and even time loops. It soon becomes clear that the cult might not be as crazy as they once thought and the entity they worship might actually exist, which is bad news since it’s supposed to kill everyone. It’s an incredibly trippy movie that cast a shadow of doubt on whether all cults are as crazy as they seem.