I have seen in holy piety, series and documentaries about sects of enlightened people and their hairy, skullcapped leaders.
The Order of the Solar Temple, the Kingdom of the Triple Goddess, Rael and his duvet, systemic explorations assisted by The Escapethe ultra-Christian dancers of TikTok or the Strava app recruits (joke!), it’s posed, checked, balanced. At the Casa Dumas, the guru is consumed like a Guru: quickly, cool and with a few bitter whiffs.
In this plethora of titles about fanatics living in isolated communities, there stands out a terrifying and devilishly well-constructed one, namely Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown (Jonestown Massacre: A Day in History), available in English with French subtitles on the Disney+ platform.
The three one-hour episodes of Jonestown Massacreproduced by National Geographic, burst onto our screens like a Hollywood thriller, embellished with a ton of blood-curdling archive footage.
As its title suggests, the miniseries does not stray too far and focuses on the fateful day before and after November 18, 1978, when more than 900 followers of the Peoples Temple, led by Reverend Jim Jones, perished in a mass suicide that actually covered up a staggering number of murders.
The gruesome videos from the time, shot by an NBC cameraman, show hundreds of bodies lying outside near the main lodge of the sect, which has been based since 1974 in the equatorial jungle of Guyana, a small country in northeastern South America.
American soldiers hold their noses as they count the number of corpses rotting in the sun, mostly women and children. It is extremely difficult to watch.
Encouraged or coerced by their paranoid guru, Jim Jones’ followers downed glasses of grape Kool-Aid laced with potassium cyanide. The documentary pulls out audio recordings of Jim Jones’s final sermon, on the day of the massacre, as he orders his congregation to “accept death with dignity and not lie down in tears and agony.” In the background, we can hear the chaos and panic that is taking over the congregation.
Because those who did not drink the Kool-Aid prepared by their spiritual leader were murdered by the People’s Temple’s Red Brigade. Many bodies were found with a cyanide syringe stuck in the back of the neck.
Empty Kool-Aid cups, the barrel of deadly juice, the syringes, the poison, the corpses, you see almost everything in the Jonestown Massacreas if we were there, 46 years ago. Why? Because the day before the massacre, a small group of journalists accompanied US Congressman Leo Ryan, who was sent to Guyana to investigate Pastor Jim Jones, who was holding several families against their will (he had confiscated the passports of all his subordinates).
Two reporters on site in November 1978, Charles Krause of Washington Post and Tim Reiterman of San Francisco Examinertoday testify to the nightmare they lived through, which almost killed them, like their colleague Don Harris of NBC.
The American delegation was not welcome in the utopian, socialist commune of Jonestown, which about 1,000 followers of Jim Jones have built in a secluded corner of the only South American country with English as an official language. In front of the cameras, the worshipers of the Peoples Temple smile, clap their hands and sing the praises of their Messiah. As soon as the microphone is turned off, several pass notes to the journalists begging them to free them from Jim Jones’ clutches.
The return to the airport of the American delegation will turn into a horror film. Here again, the NBC cameras captured everything. And it is horrible. The next day, a paranoid and drugged Jim Jones will begin the massacre of the members of his sect, starting with the babies, who received cyanide directly into their mouths using a syringe without a needle.
The guru was found, near his throne, with a bullet in his head. Did he commit suicide? Was he shot? Mystery.
Most survivors who confide in the Jonestown Massacre also appear in the videotapes shot in 1978, before the apocalypse broke out. However, the documentary miniseries does not explain much about the origins of the People’s Temple, the inner workings of this multi-ethnic sect or its methods of financing.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY PRODUCTION
Reverend Jim Jones
Fleeing the taxman, the press and the police, Jim Jones moved his religious operations from San Francisco to rural Guyana, where the promised paradise would become a tomb for his followers, mostly blacks from poor backgrounds in California.
Jim Jones’ son Stephan Jones speaks at length in this excellent online production on Disney+. Born into the sect, he does not defend his father’s manic ideas, quite the opposite.
Jones, however, urges viewers to stop using the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” which was popularized after the traumatic Jonestown shootings.
Drinking the Kool-Aid means that an impressionable person believes in outlandish ideas without ever questioning them. This expression dehumanizes the Jonestown victims, who were not crazy, brainless or insane. These people were killed, insists Stephan Jones.
He’s right. Also, it should be noted that it wasn’t Kool-Aid that Jones’ followers were drinking, but Flavor Aid. Archival footage doesn’t lie (like Shakira’s hips).