I think cults are often misused as a story telling trope: in horror media, they are often depicted as scary because they are shadowy groups conspiring to achieve supernaturally evil goals, when what is actually horrifying about cults is that they are abusive to their members.

Cults are seen as mysterious external groups with intentions to harm normal society. But from what I understand, in practice they are very insular. They prey on vulnerable people, replacing their social supports with a group the cult controls and then exploits them.

There are examples of cults attacking society at large: the Tokyo subway sarin attack is the highest profile one I can think of. But generally the horror of cults is that they consume individuals, robbing them of autonomy by offering them an illusion of belonging

Cults are an abusive relationship as a expanding social group. Maybe they try to summon demons or whatever in their down time but I think that mental image is more the product of fear of these groups as a perversion of religious norms.

Now, if your story needs a bunch of dudes purposefully summoning an ancient evil then I get why cults are a useful trope: a deviant religious group is an easy way to rationalize people taking an irrational action

But ultimately anyone who joins such groups do so for human reasons: wanting to find meaning and purpose and acceptance and safety but falling victim to leaders manipulating them into taking destructive action

Side note, but if you want to talk about this pattern of behavior actually being used to harm society, Innuendo Studios has this video where Ian talks about how the alt right demonstrates many of the hall marks of an abusive relationship:

Anyway. Cults as a trope are fun because they let you get away with people doing insane things without spending much energy explaining a motive WHY they would do them. But if you want to use them to be scary then what actually unsettled ME about them is their predation

Cults are power structures. They assert control over individuals and take everything they can from them. What horrifies me is that we lose people to them but they are the people who were already neglected by our society.

It’s not a shadowy outside group threatening society that gets under my skin, it’s that society is so indifferent to individuals who slip through the cracks and fall victim to those groups. That’s what upsets me.