Does Cult Massacre: One Day In Jonestown have anything else to say?
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
If you've clicked on this review to find out whether to bother with Cult Massacre: One Day In Jonestown, I can't imagine you don't know the basics already, but just in case: on November 18, 1978, more than 900 people perished in a mass poisoning at Jonestown, the Peoples Temple settlement in Guyana. Five more were murdered at a nearby airstrip.
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Initially reported as a mass suicide, the tragedy is now properly understood as a homicidal massacre committed on the orders of the community's leader, Reverend Jim Jones.
The story
Eve noted during our Slack conversation about Cult Massacre: One Day In Jonestown that there just isn't much left to say about the horrific events of mid-November 1978. I don't disagree, but I put myself forward to review it anyway, despite doubting that a standard-issue Hulu three-parter from NatGeo could hold its own against indispensable Jonestown properties like Jeff Guinn's The Road To Jonestown (the most complete) or American Experience's "Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple" (the most bleakly affecting).
And it doesn't rise to that level; if you've read the Guinn or watched the doc, Cult Massacre isn't a necessity – but it did impress me, for three reasons.
NatGeo knows what it's doing
Obviously this is not an enjoyable experience visually, but NatGeo as a brand is all about the power of the picture. Cult Massacre uses a few familiar photos and film clips, but mixes in footage I didn't remember seeing before, like the gunmen arriving at the airstrip (on a tractor, for god's sake), or news correspondents' (inappropriately, in retrospect) accusatory tone with survivors who'd fled into the surrounding jungle.
More to the point, NatGeo specializes in bringing a viewer or reader into the faraway and the very unfamiliar – a good skill set to have for a story that's still so difficult to wrap one's head around nearly half a century later.
The interviews are very affecting
The series gets extraordinary access: to Peoples Temple apostates, to Jackie Speier and others at the airstrip, to survivors who watched relatives die and to Special Forces soldiers who came to collect the relatives' remains. Jim Jones's son Stephan also participates. Director Marian Mohamed wisely doesn't get tricksy with the shot composition, just shoots everyone head-on and lets the ghosts that surround all the interviewees suggest themselves out of frame.
Speier, who became a congressperson herself years after the attack, says towards the end, "We failed those people." She'd spent months in the hospital; she and her boss, Ryan, had tried to get frightened people out when they asked for help; a madman had people shot in front of her, and nearly killed her. And yet somehow her take on what happened back at the compound is that they'd failed the victims there.
Stephan is irritated at how the flippant "drinking the Kool-Aid" has endured, because it disrespects the dead – but even as he's saying it, he seems to realize that this is how the culture manages a horror this profound.
Cult Massacre understands what everyone's "here for"
A lot of docs and articles about Jonestown feel obligated to start waaaay back at the very beginning with Jones's childhood and the funerals he conducted for neighborhood pets, and while that context is valuable – it's hard to grasp how the situation reached the ultra-lethal point it did without a slower build through the Bay Area congregations, etc. and so on – it sometimes comes off like performatively not rubbernecking.
But it's hard to grasp the situation no matter how much information you have; it's a big part of why Jonestown continues to fascinate people. That too is how we manage a horror this profound: learning everything we can about it, trying to understand it, trying to make it fit somewhere psychologically. I do appreciate a Jonestown doc that isn't disingenuous about why people want to watch it in the first place, if that makes sense.
Jonestown is a hideous chapter in American history, so if you feel you know enough, Cult Massacre isn't mandatory – but if you don't know much about the massacre, it's not a bad place to start, informative and properly somber, not prurient, doesn't drag.