In huge news for anyone who’s very much like me and wildly curious about cults, a brand new docuseries about the notorious Heaven’s Gate cult is on its way.
After the success of The Vow and digging into the depths of the NXIVM sex cult, HBO Max has now dropped the trailer for Heaven’s Gate: Cult of Cults – an exploration into the inner workings of one of the strangest cults ever, and how it led to the mass-suicide of 39 people in California in 1997.
The four-part docuseries explores the cult’s beliefs, and although you can still access a lot of the group’s sermon videos online, it features new footage from inside the group and interviews with first-person accounts.
If you’re already aware of Heaven’s Gate, you’ll know that the group’s leaders, Marshall Applewhite (later known as Ti) and Bonnie Nettles (later known as Do) believed they were destined for a ‘higher evolutionary level’ above their mortal existence on Earth, and would one day be transported to an alien spaceship to ascend to a higher existence.
After forming a group in the mid-1970s with like-minded people in Texas, the Heaven’s Gate group eventually moved across the country, gaining followers in self-described “truth-seekers” and people seeking to find themselves outside of organised religion.
Heaven’s Gate eventually began to believe that the spacecraft that was going to take them to the believed higher plane of existence was going to be travelling on the tail of the Comet Halle-Bopp as it travelled past Earth in early 1997. A group of 38 cult members along with Applewhite took their own lives while dressed in the infamous ‘Away Team’ uniform, including Nike Decades – which were immediately discontinued.
Two people from the Heaven’s Gate cult remained to maintain the group’s website and other communications.
Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults is set to hit the US in early December, and all episodes are landing in Australia on Foxtel from January 24, and on Binge around then, too. You can sign up and get yourself ready for the drop over on the Binge website.
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