Noticias

Aum: The Cult at the End of the World throws viewers into a maelstrom of gas-filled subway cars and frantic radio dispatches. On March 20, 1995, sarin gas tore through Tokyo’s Hibiya Line, killing 13 and injuring thousands.

Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto follow that calamity back to its source: Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo, which mutated from a meditation circle into a doomsday machine. Premiering at Sundance, the film asks: How did a fringe yoga outfit morph into a global terror network?

And why did its excesses go unchecked for so long? (Hint: blinking often helps when history feels stranger than fiction.) By probing those questions, the documentary reckons with faith’s dark mirror—and whether vigilance can ever catch up to conviction.

Origins and Organizational Evolution

Shoko Asahara began life as Chizuo Matsumoto: a near-blind graduate of unaccredited pharmacy courses who moonlighted as a yoga instructor. In 1984 he launched Aum Shinrikyo,...

Editor’s Note: This review was published during the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. “Aum: The Cult at the End of the World” opens in theaters March 19, 2025 and launches on PVOD March 28.

It’s easy to understand why true-crime documentaries about cults have become so popular in a streaming age that depends on a constant stream of new (but reliable) content: Every one of these stories is different, and every one of these stories is also the same.

That double reality has seldom been more dramatic than it is in Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s “Aum: The Cult at the End of the World.” An American-Japanese collaboration that refracts the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway through local and global lenses at the same time, this well-sourced look back at the conditions that allowed for such a terrible act of bio-terrorism is flattened into an infinite hall of mirrors that...

The chilling legacy of doomsday cult-turned-domestic terrorists Aum Shinrikyo is now being captured on the 30th anniversary of their Tokyo attack.

Documentary “Aum: The Cult at the End of the World,” co-directed by Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto, tells the shocking story of Aum Shinrikyo, a group that was founded by former yoga teacher Shoko Asahara. Aum Shinrikyo later unleashed a deadly nerve gas in Tokyo’s subway system in 1995. The film premiered at Sundance in 2023.

The official synopsis teases how “Japan’s police and media turned a blind eye” to the rising terrorist organization that began stockpiling weapons of mass destruction from the collapsed Soviet Union. The documentary is billed as a “potent reminder of just how dangerous unchecked fanaticism can be.”

The feature includes rare archival footage and an interview with one of founder Asahara’s former high-ranking disciples. “Aum: The Cult at the End of the World...

This article contains spoilers for How To Become A Cult Leader episode 5.

How to Become a Cult Leader provides a terse, yet encouraging, look at some of the history’s most notorious cult leaders across history. Narrated by Peter Dinklage, the Netflix series offers “tips” on how to break into this growing field, offering six half-hour episodes of cautionary tales.

Episode 5 focuses on Shoko Asahara, leader of the meditation and yoga cult Aum Shinrikyo. On March 20, 1995, the group released plastic bags containing homemade sarin, a toxic nerve gas, on five subway lines of the Tokyo Metro during rush-hour. The gas killed 13 people and injured over 6,000. As the documentary points out, a second but failed attempt was made on the subways using Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide. These weren’t the first casualties of the sect’s run.

Reverend Shoko Asahara was born Chizuo Matsumoto on March 2, 1955, in Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture.