The spine-chilling true story behind new cult drama ‘The Clearing’

The Clearing is the eerie new psychological thriller on Disney+ that will shock you to your core. What’s more is that while Hollywood regularly takes inspiration from true stories, the fact that this eight-episode series is based on real-life events is even more startling.

Starring Miranda Otto, Teresa Palmer, and Guy Pearce, the show follows one mysterious woman who faces the demons of her past to prevent a dangerous and religious secret cult from gathering children and coercing them into executing their grand master plan.

If that wasn’t enough to send shivers down your spine, the show is a creepy yet fascinating look into the damage done to a society where facts and fiction are blurred when a female leader is at its helm.

The show, which is the first Australian original scripted series from Disney+, has been written by Matt Cameron, Elise McCredie, and Osamah Sami.

It is based on the best-selling 2020 novel by J.P. Pomare titled In The Clearing, which is a fictionalised account of the Australian New Age group, the Family.

But what is the real-life sorry behind the cult, which inspired the book and, subsequently, the limited television series?

Well, the actual Australian doomsday cult, the Family, was formed in the mid-1960s in regional Victoria under the leadership of yoga teacher Anne Hamilton-Byrne, who claimed she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and a living god.

Over two decades, the cult, which preached that it was “a mishmash of Christianity, eastern mysticism and apocalyptic prophecy”, got its hands on 28 children through shady adoptions arranged by lawyers, doctors, and social workers within the group. Some children were “gifts” from unwed mothers, while others were natural children of members of the Family.