Sundance Report: This Is What It's Like to Be Trapped in a Nightmarish Cult for Two Decades

The documentary Holy Hell, about a long-running cult based in California and Texas, is filled with horrifying revelations and cringe-worthy moments of outright absurdity. But the movie’s most shocking element is never shown on screen: Director Will Allen spent 20 mostly horrible years under the toxic influence of the cult’s leader and yet seems like a well-adjusted person who will answer any and all questions about the nightmarish experience.

Holy Hell, which premiered at Sundance on Monday, tracks the disturbing story of the Buddhafield cult from the inside. Allen, now 53 years old, was just 22 when he was invited by his sister to join what, at the time, seemed like a joyous commune in California. He had just graduated film school with little plan for the future, and had been kicked out of his parents’ home after coming out as gay.

And, as the documentary shows, the group really did provide a respite for him in the early going. Video that Allen captured as the group’s unofficial filmmaker depict a yuppie paradise on the California coast, filled with dancing and singing and spiritual awakening imparted by its leader, a man who went only by the name Michel.

“I got out of this group and I thought I knew what happened,” Allen tells Yahoo Movies. “But then I was like, was he evil from the beginning? Did he know all of this? So I had to go and ask all my friends, and I had to put the pieces together.”

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To watch the footage now is to wonder how no one was immediately suspicious of the bizarre former actor at the center of the community, what with his off-putting demeanor and textbook narcissism. But any charismatic cult leader seems fishy in hindsight, and Allen’s film describes a slow descent into co-dependence and abuse.

Fusing Eastern philosophy and snake oil, Michel built himself up over time as a deity figure who was imparting wisdom (which he called The Knowing) to a very select and lucky group of followers. And then, after securing their trust, he began to warp it in the worst ways possible. Years later, ex-members would realize that many of them had been sexually abused — often for decades — and understand that they had become virtual slaves by surrendering their lives to supporting Michel’s demented visions and demands. They quit their jobs, acted as guinea pigs for plastic surgery, and moved across the country with the increasingly erratic leader, helping to build his new community (including a full auditorium for ballet performances no one ever saw) and worshipping him even as they began to hate him.

Allen, and his producer Tracey Harnish, who spent 23 years in the cult, spoke with Yahoo Movies about the harrowing experience.

Alexandra Johnes, director Will Allen, and Tracey Harnish. (Photo: Getty)

The group seemed semi-utopian at first. How long did it take to realize that it wasn’t?
The film I ended up making has a 20-year arc. So all the characters had to go through the same journey over 20 years, even though some people came at different periods. Now I say my arc was a full 20 years, I get it. I used to say my arc was the first five years. Everything happened to me in the first five years, and then I stayed. I stayed through everyone else’s arc. But if we did it in the movie chronologically, so much would be revealed in the first 20 minutes of the movie, you would start hating him right away. You would never get through the whole story.

So we had to, as we were editing in the first 20-30 minutes, in the beginning we were trying to bring the audience in to understand what we were experiencing, so they could sort of buy in. We had to keep everything in the present, keep it positive. So in interviews, any time anyone said that the leader was an asshole, all the alarms would go off. “Why were you there? Why did you stay there?”

A lot happened to me in the first five years. The sex started happening to me in those first five years, I started hating him very early on. I was confused and angry … and then continued to go. A lot of people didn’t have that until the end, and lot of people came at different times. Their disillusionment came later. Mine came early, but I was such a good disciple.

You say in the film that you wanted to protect him.
He cultivated that in us. He cultivated that he was always at risk from the outside world, and it was our job to protect him. He would read us parables about disciples that would protect masters. The masters were always attacked. He’d say something like, “I’d always protect my master, and if anyone said anything bad about them, I’d let them have it.” So we thought, this is how you show your love: You protect him. But also, as I came to understand, as with anyone who’s been abused or had sexual boundaries ruptured: You have a love-hate relationship with that person. Take a child and their father. They’re very young, but they love their father and their father loves them. They get confused. I want to protect dad, so I won’t tell anyone. And I think that psychology was happening a lot with me as well, without me knowing it.

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Were there moments that you almost left?
I had many moments where I would blow up and call Tracy and say, “I’m out of here, I’m on the way to the airport!” And we would do that to each other. If anyone felt angry, we’d say, “OK, calm down, this will pass. Breathe it out.” So we had these moments where we said, “I’m not going to do this anymore,” but we’d talk to each other, because we were in a community, and they were people we loved who weren’t the cause of the problem.

But there was also a time I thought I would never leave. I thought, I’ve committed to this thing so fully, it became my life. If you build a house in the mountains, you think, I’ve put so much time into it, I have to stay here. So that’s another problem: We don’t know how to quit, that we can get out.

What was it like for you to go through that footage and relive things, Tracey?
It was really interesting. Because it felt like we were making a movie, it was very straightforward. But then as we continued to look at footage and talk to people and take stuff from the past and take things from the present and put them together, it was really intense. There was one point where I was transcribing some of the interviews, especially with Chris, where I just got really upset. I said, “I can’t do this, it’s way too difficult.” But we’ve been working on it for four years, and over that four-year period, we’ve gone through a lot of [personal] changes. And it’s been in a way a healing process, learning how to reconcile the things that happened and understanding what happened to me, what happened to other people. And more truth has come out. It’s given me a much better understanding of what happened to everybody and how everybody felt and understand all sorts of different perspectives.

So what was the final straw?
Will: We all came to our conclusions on our own, separately, even though we always influenced people in the group. We knew we had to make our own decisions, but we decided independently of each other pretty much at the same time. But we stuck it out because it becomes your life. It’s really hard to quit your life. We were stepping into a new abyss where nothing was like what we’d left.

Tracey: It took a long time too to untangle what had actually happened, because when the truth started to become unraveled, there was a lot of stuff that as slightly inaccurate, so it clouded what was true and wasn’t true. When an angry email [from an ex-member] came out, there was a lot of confusion, because not everything in it was right.

One thing that was really important was that, there was a lot of stuff that was coming out about what had happened, but the truth was that in the present, he was treating everybody really badly. People who had cared about him so much and had been with him for so long, he was treating them so badly. And I couldn’t take it.

Will: He was able to hide so much of his personality until this time, and when things started coming out, we could all see it. Because he wasn’t able to hide it anymore. That’s when we could see it, that he was crazy.

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Do you think he had good intentions at first and then turned evil? Because if he had this planned, it would have to be a really long-term game plan.
Will: I like the film to play that out, and is something I want the audience to come to a conclusion. I don’t think anyone’s evil, I don’t think that exists. But I think power corrupts. He had a lot of uncooked seeds of narcissism, sociopathy. Those got fed. And being in a master/guru-disciple relationship, they go unchecked.

He had so many people worshipping him, so it made sense that he was changed. But he had to have guts to call himself a guru in the first place.
Will: When we first got there, he came off like a reluctant guru. He came off like people put him in this position and he didn’t really want to be in it. We didn’t know if it was false humility or what. Eventually he allowed it to happen, enjoyed it, and then enhanced it and directed it. But originally, back in 1985, it was like, “I don’t want a bunch of people worshipping me. We’re all the same.”

Did he have a philosophy, or was he making it up as he went?
Will: He was borrowing it. No teachers come up with their own thing, they’re all repurposing, and he was a huge reader. And he would read other gurus. There was one particular guru he studied, his name was OSHO, he was around in the ’80s and he was really radical. He became a sex guru, he had tons of Rolls Royces. He had 50,000 followers in Oregon, and he was considered a cult leader. Our teacher would study all of his books, they were both hypnotherapists, and he would do everything he did. But he wouldn’t tell us. So he’d read the books, underline them, take all the words, and since he was an actor, he would memorize them and say them like they were his.

The teachings he was borrowing had some great valid things that worked, so we were benefiting, but he was owning it as if it was his.

Will Allen (Photo: Rick Kern/Getty Images)

At one point did he say, “God speaks through me”? When did he declare himself a deity?
Will: His whole delivery of his sermon, he would meditate to a place where he was completely out of himself, and then he’d open his eyes. And that was the beginning of truth coming out of him. He would say he was like a flute; if you become empty like a flute, then God can flow through you. I’d look at him and think he’s just really empty right now, an empty vessel, and a source is sharing beautiful jewels through him. So we put that on him a lot, we put that deity thing on him. This was during that five-year arc for me.

An L.A. Times story previewing the film said he didn’t break any laws.
Will: No, he broke a lot of laws. I guess what the writer was summarizing was that, all of the laws he broke were very tricky and hard for us to prove. And in many situations, the law protected him. A lot of the people who were abused were over 12 years old, so it wasn’t child abuse. But we knew he broke laws. There were like 22 people who tried to do a civil lawsuit against him for the abuse that happened, but there were statute-of-limitation laws, it happened too long ago and we couldn’t prove it. The tax evasion is true, and we reported it to the FBI, but that’s not something we can push ourselves. The FBI has to decide to investigate.

Do you hope the new people he has recruited see this?
Will: We always wanted to go back and have more of the story happen there and have an intervention. I know that when I was in the group that would not have worked. But I learned from my experience that there’s power in numbers. One or two people going and complaining sounds like someone who is angry, but a bunch of people saying the same thing from a mass experience of knowledge who were very devoted, there’s a lot of power in that. So I think the film will be able to speak for itself.

I know that if we don’t get there first and get these people to see it before he stops them [it’ll be hard] … they’re not my responsibility. I can’t save them. There’s 120 of them. But they’ll come around. The strongest thing we can do is that we’ve gotten to Sundance and we’re healthy and whole. They won’t feel attacked; they can look at us and maybe think, “What’s going on out there?” and look on their own for more information on this person they’re following.

You have a good number of people in this film talking about their experiences, and I was amazed by how OK they were.
Will: It’s like anything; you have to pull yourself out of it and move forward. You can’t stay broken forever. I think the work we all did on ourselves, meditating all the time, all that sense of learning how to deal with your personality in relation to the good and the bad, I think we all learned how to do that. And I think that was good. And the trauma and the PTSD that everyone went through, it’s taken them years to get out of it. And all in different ways. Going to college, running away, whatever it took. And we’re all loving people who really want to best for everyone. And so I don’t think everyone’s going to stay stuck in that.

Although, you can scratch the surface and the anger is right there, like it was yesterday. So it’s not like it’s gone; it’s just that what you’re doing is giving power to him, by focusing on that person, you’re not moving anywhere. So we had to stop focusing on him, although it was hard for me for the last four years making the movie. But now I’m ready.