In the world of true crime content, Jonestown is an infamous – if often misunderstood – Ur-text: arguably the most well-known, well-publicized and, ultimately, lethal of cults. The Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, is a case study of the worst possible outcome of megalomania, isolation, pressure, sustained coercive control and idealism curdled into paranoia. Jim Jones’s orders on 18 November 1978, are so famous that the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid” has entered the American vernacular as a shorthand for buying wholesale into a dubious belief system – though as several survivors testify in a new documentary series, the phrase is misleading and offensive; the deaths of more than 900 people, including over 300 children, from cyanide poisoning was contemporarily characterized as a mass suicide, but the tragedy of Jonestown is more accurately described as a mass murder.
Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown, a new National Geographic and Hulu documentary series on the four days surrounding the massacre, is an entirely archival – including an hour of as-yet-unseen footage of Jonestown taped around the massacre – and first-person account of the events that led to the deaths of, in total, 918 people. There were 909 at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, informally known as Jonestown, in the remote jungle of north-western Guyana; two at a Peoples Temple outpost in Georgetown, the South American country’s capital; and five, including the US congressman Leo Ryan and NBC News reporter Don Harris, shot on the airstrip at Port Kaituma as they were attempting to leave with a group of defectors. The three-episode series serves as “a historical record”, the series director Marian Mohamed told the Guardian, particularly for “a generation of people who don’t know about the Jonestown massacre”.
