10 Most Terrifying Horror Movie Cults

Not every cult is full of masked pagan ritual, bonfires and maypoles. In the twenty-first century cults are as likely to come clothed in the paraphernalia of self-help support groups as they are a full deer's head. Such is the case with the eponymous cult at the heart of 2015 indie thriller The Invitation.

Director Karyn Kusama's previous horror flick, the far more mainstream Jennifer's Body, got decidedly mixed reviews, but she is on considerably more unsettling ground with this lo-fi entry into the "awkward dinner party turns into something far worse" genre.

In The Invitation a divorced husband returns to his former home for a dinner invite from his ex-wife and her new husband. As if that wasn't uncomfortable enough, the dinner turns out to be an excuse for the ex to promote the New Age spiritual philosophy which she has discovered to help handle the grief over their son's death (the thing which led to their divorce in the first place).

Much like the dinner party itself, The Invitation cult starts out as some mildly uncomfortable evangelising for the power of mystical healing and descends into something much more horrific with the realisation that all it's really interested in is spiritual peace through death.