Occult Revivals: Cults and New Religious Movements in Horror Cinema - Miranda Corcoran - Zoom

Sinister cults and secretive sects have long been a source of fascination, particularly within the genres of horror and the gothic. In the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of social upheaval and dissatisfaction with traditional religious institutions resulted in the proliferation of new religious movements (NRMS) that simultaneously ignited the burgeoning youth culture and sparked a moral panic in more conservative quarters. On screen, new religions and cults were frequently a source of voyeuristic fascination, with 1970s horror films like The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, Race with the Devil, and Devil’s Rain portraying cults, rather sensationally, as loci of moral and sexual transgression. Later representations of new religions, particularly as rendered in 2000s and 2010s films like Midsommar and The Other Lamb, are often more ambivalent, treating cults as sites of violence and horror but also, potentially, of liberation and pleasurable transgression. This talk will track the development of cinematic cults from the 1960s through to the present day, exploring how onscreen cults reflect contemporary anxieties about religion, youth rebellion and sexuality.

BIO: Miranda Corcoran is a lecturer in twenty-first-century literature at University College Cork. She is the author of Witchcraft and Adolescence in American Popular Culture: Teen Witches, published in 2022 by the University of Wales Press. She currently the Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies and a co-editor of the journal Shirley Jackson Studies. Her new edited collection Satanism and Feminism in Popular Culture: Not Today Satan was released in November 2025.

Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.