Note: A special message to all Scriptophobic readers. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, writing Holy Horror unfortunately had to be put on the back burner while my employment situations changed. This column will continue, and hopefully will come out in a more normal schedule in the next month or so. I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that you and your loved ones are staying safe during this difficult time. Thank you for sticking with all us here at Scriptophobic
– Rachel
Content Warning for discussion of suicide.
Hello all! For our second edition of Holy Horror we are going to veer away from traditional organized religions and take our first took at a cult, albeit a fictional one. Cults are often staples of horror movies. Enter Karyn Kusama’s 2015 thriller The Invitation, and this one plays the element straight. The film is a slow burn about an average dinner party that slides into something truly evil.
Told from the perspective of Will (Logan Marshall-Green), The Invitation follows he and his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) on a visit to Will’s ex-wife Eden’s (Tammy Blanchard) dinner party. Eden is hosting with her new husband, David (Michiel Huisman). The intent of the party is for it to act a reunion for the former couple’s friends after drifting apart following the accidental death of Will and Eden’s son, Ty, a death which is strongly implied to have been the fault of another child.
Eden and David are members of a support group called “The Invitation,” led by a man called Dr. Joseph. Both claim the group helped them with their pain through spiritual philosophy. The couple introduces old friends to their new ones from the Invitation: the stoic Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch in a scene-stealing role), and the peppy, yet creepy Sadie (Lindsay Brudge). The group sounds ridiculous at first, and characters laugh it off as it sounds more like a multi-level marketing scheme than a cult.
Quiet and a little awkward around his old friends, Will gradually becomes suspicious of Eden and David and their fellow members’ unusual behavior. Strange stories and actions, pill-popping, and a missing guest set him on edge. Audiences are left to wonder whether Will is being overly paranoid due to his grief.
To paraphrase Alfred Hitchcock, suspense is when the audience knows there is a bomb under the table while the characters do not. The Invitation plays with the viewer’s perceptions of what really is wrong at the dinner party. Is there even a “bomb under the table”? If there is, what is the danger, and how bad can it be? And as the film continues, what can the characters do to save themselves?
The film presents the Invitation with some depth. Audiences aren’t led to immediately dismiss it. When it is first labeled a cult, it is done so as a joke. We can understand why characters joined. Eden’s son died and her first marriage collapsed. Pruitt was a drunk who killed his wife and served time in prison. And this leads to another aspect people forget about cults, smart people join them. Eden and David appear to be reasonable people (at the start). Even if Pruitt is a mega creep, he seems to believe he comes across as an introspective person.
This may not be something The Invitation chose to focus on, but class comes into play when picking victims. Most people involved are both shown and implied to be upper-class, with money to spare. Non-Cult members at first think the Invitation is a resort for the rich. Eden’s house is in a very nice area, and the ending is clear that other houses in the neighborhood are having “dinner parties” as well. It would have been interesting to see other cultists. However, the tension in the film comes from its isolation.
Pop culture has engrained several cults into our collective imaginations. While the titular Invitation isn’t an exact copy of a real-life cult, its rules and beliefs are evocative of both Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate. Because a later film I’ll be covering later cribs heavily from Jonestown (and I think most people know the basics of the former), I am going to focus on the Invitation’s similarities to Heaven’s Gate.
To greatly summarize, Heaven’s Gate was an American UFO religious cult founded in San Diego in 1974 by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. The cult believed that a spaceship was following the Hale-Bop comet, and that the arrival of the comet signaled the “close of heaven’s gate.” To leave their earthly forms, 39 members of Heaven’s Gate, including leader Marshall Applewhite, committed mass suicide over a period of three days.
Members of the Invitation may not believe in aliens or in spacecraft coming to liberate them. They do believe that moving onto the next step, to be free of pain, requires death, and that it is nothing to fear. Heaven’s Gate leader Applewhite made videos, and anyone with cursory knowledge of them will recognize his style in the fictional Dr. Joseph. They even kinda look similar. When watching the film for the first time, I felt a shiver. This was when I started to guess the end result.
Kusama and her screenwriter husband Phil Hay pull the tension of the party to its breaking point. When it finally does explode into violence it’s fast and horrible. After being gaslit the whole evening, Will panics when the company is about to take a final toast. The panic is deserved. As part of their leaving the world and its pain behind, Eden and David attempt to poison their friends as a mercy. Since Will “ruined” the plan, the murder-suicide gets brutal.
Why is The Invitation so unsettling? It is far more than being trapped with suicidal cultists. It is being in a familiar space now unfamiliar, with people you aren’t sure you trust anymore. Feeling doubt about your own ability to correctly interpret what is going on around you. Above all, it is the knowledge that horrible violence can happen suddenly in safe places. No one wants to think they are going to die horribly during a night with friends. That is why I believe The Invitation is frightening. People are quick to dismiss Will’s fears, because him being correct is the answer they don’t want. By the time they can take action, it’s too late.
The ending doesn’t leave viewers with the sense of peace that the cultists were trying to find. Sure, Will, Kira, and Tommy (Mike Doyle) survive. Eden in her final moments admits her pain. David, Pruitt, and Sadie are dead. Still, the Invitation takes many victims on its way out, and like cults of its kind, it won’t be forgotten. Kusama and Hay leave you wondering about the wider implications of the cult and its aftermath since the violence went far beyond Eden’s house. In the universe of the film, I think the Invitation will be written about, documented, and bored college students will read about the suicides and murders instead of working on their papers.
Next Time: We need to talk about The Passion of the Christ.
