How to recognize a cult

I talked to cult experts so you don't have to

Painter’s Palette in Death Valley, shot on turquoise-tinted 120 film. (© Harrison Blackman, 2025)

In February, I published a feature about documentary filmmaker Cecilia Peck in Princeton Alumni Weekly. Peck, the daughter of Hollywood icon Gregory Peck, specializes in docuseries about modern cults. Both Seduced, her Starz docuseries about the NXIVM cult, and Escaping Twin Flames, her Netflix series about the Twin Flames Universe cult, have been lauded for the way that they not only explore how people get sucked into these high control groups, but how they can recover and get out of them.

That attention to recovery is often what is missing in the true crime genre, which tends to rely on the exploitation of sordid details.

In the research for that article, I talked to a bunch of cult experts. They all had different definitions of what a cult is. I didn’t end up using all that research in the original article, but I thought it would be fun to share it with you here.