The Endless (2017)

Most cult horror gives you obvious villains. THE ENDLESS gives you people you'd almost want to hang with - warm, communal, strangely at peace - and then slowly reveals why that peace should terrify you.

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead wrote, directed, and starred in it as two brothers returning to the UFO-adjacent cult they escaped years earlier.

That's not a gimmick. It's why the film feels the way it does - lived-in, personal, a little desperate. They shot it in Descanso in southeastern San Diego County on a budget that was clearly not large, and turned a small patch of California wilderness into a full metaphysical trap.

It premiered at Tribeca in 2017 and exists in the same universe as their earlier film Resolution, which rewards the obsessive viewers who want to go deeper. But it works completely on its own terms: a time-loop nightmare disguised as a homecoming story, built on ideas rather than spectacle.

The cult members aren't monsters. They're articulate and kind and genuinely seem to have found something. What they've found is the problem.

Benson and Moorhead have since gone on to bigger projects - Moon Knight, the MCU - but this is the film that shows what they're actually capable of when freed from corporate bondage.