Movies about cults have long been a staple of the horror genre; they often overlap with folk horror and usually feature strange rituals, paranoia, and terrible sacrifices (with our protagonists as the stars of the show more often than not). It’s a great formula, but there’s nothing wrong with shaking things up now and then. The Heretics separates itself from other cultist horror movies because it constantly subverts the audience’s expectations of the subgenre. It even begins after the cult has committed what seems to be their final sacrifice, leaving lead Nina Kiri alive but still processing the trauma of the event years later. This unconventional beginning to a cultist movie sets the tone for the rest of The Heretics, as it rarely goes where you expect it to, switching from quiet, dramatic horror to kidnapping thriller, then back to full cult mode, supernatural weirdness and all.
‘The Heretics’ Switches Up the Usual Cultist Horror Formula
The Heretics does open with the ritual for which the demon-worshipping cult abducted Kiri’s character Gloria, but the scene is only a nightmare; it’s actually been five years since she survived her cult encounter. She obviously still has symptoms of PTSD from witnessing the cult ritualistically end their lives in front of her, but she’s also in group therapy and a year into a relationship with fellow abuse survivor Joan (Jorja Cadence). But what seems like the introduction to a drama-heavy horror about trauma soon takes a left turn as Gloria is kidnapped a second time right in front of her home. Now the audience sees the terror of her previous abduction first-hand, as well as the fierce determination of Joan, the other members of their therapy group, and Gloria’s mother to find her again. As the movie cuts back and forth between the two parties, it seems as if the thrills of the movie are going to come from the race against the clock to rescue Gloria from a vengeful cultist.
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But then The Heretics pivots again, returning to the cultist horror that we know and love, but with some fresh twists. The man who kidnapped Gloria is actually trying to protect her from what he believes to be delusional surviving cult members; his insistence that there’s nothing supernatural happening is convincing, too, since there aren’t any kind of supernatural elements in the first third of the movie. But there’s nothing like demon wings starting to burst out of a woman’s shoulder blades to make you rethink your belief system. Gloria slowly but painfully begins morphing into a demonic vessel, much to both her and her kidnapper’s surprise. And it’s a goopy, nasty transformation, too; each time the movie cuts back to Gloria, a new part of her is covered in strange black patches and veins or even more clumps of her now-stringy hair have fallen out. The Heretics really is a cultist horror at its heart, even if it does a good job of pretending it’s not to keep the viewer on their toes in the first half.
‘The Heretics’ Cleverly Puts Its Biggest Twist in the Middle of the Movie
There’s nothing worse than a poorly thought-out twist at the end of a horror movie; even M. Night Shyamalan couldn’t keep up his track record with twist endings forever. The Heretics clearly doesn’t avoid twists and turns, but by simply moving its biggest surprise to the very center of the movie, it no longer feels as cliché as it would if it were at the end. The exact identity of the surviving cult member hounding Gloria is best left a secret, so we’ll just say that not everyone who’s part of the search and rescue effort is all that into the “rescue” part. Because the twist is such a hard pivot in terms of whom the villain really is, having it earlier in the movie actually raises the bar for how much higher the tension can get before the climax. Just as the audience settles into rooting for the search party to find Gloria before she’s killed, their whole perspective of who’s good and who’s evil gets flipped. After the reveal of the true antagonist and their intentions, the determination of Gloria’s “rescuers” turns from something to be cheered on to a source of total dread, not just raising the stakes but changing the whole game.
The Heretics still delivers all the supernatural horror and thrills you want out of a good cult-based horror. But it’s the way the movie keeps defying the audience’s other expectations of the subgenre that makes it really stand out among the rest of the pack.
