Cults: A Parcast Original

Cults: A Parcast Original by Christopher J. Garcia

True-crime podcasts are hot right now. They have been since Serial, though things like Last Podcast on the Left have been around for much longer. The area of cults has been covered in a bunch of great shows, from Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults to The Indie Scientology Podcast. One podcast that I love is Cults, one of the best from the Parcast family of podcasts. One thing that Parcast does really well is fitting their hosts to their content. Vanessa and Greg, who host the wonderful show Serial Killers, are a pair who have good chemistry, and more importantly, excellent voices. The two of them are so good, they manage to trade off without making it feel like they’re overreading, which is a curse many two person podcasts have. The writing is good, if slightly sensational, but the way the two talk is smart and engaging. Vanessa is pegged as the one who gives the psychological background, citing the articles and such that inform the episode. Greg moves the story forward, but the pacing is dead-on, largely because it’s cut well, but really because it feels as if they’re actually playing off each other. I know enough about podcast production by pros to know it’s a difficult thing to pull off. The content is great, and a buddy of mine from college, Tim Davis, was one of their writers. The way they covered the Order of the Solar Temple, and especially the way they covered the People’s Temple, is smarter than most. When Last Podcast on the Left covered the People’s Temple, it was less about the cult aspects than it was about Jim Jones. Here, they focus on how the cult formed, and what the cult meant. Only the way that Bay Area Mystery Club covered Our Black Muslim Bakery approaches the quality of the point of view.

The highlight, and if you only listen to one set of Parcast podcast, it’s the look at the Satanic panic. The fact is it wasn’t real, but at the same time, there were elements that 100% were. They take both seriously and make some impressive notes on the psychology of the whole thing.