‘I grew up in horrifying cult with murder, drugs and spaceships to Venus’
The Hollywood screenwriter behind new Charles Manson movie Charlie Says has spoken about how she herself grew up in a bizarre cult where she was raised to believe they would be "picked up by spaceships and taken to Venus".
Guinevere Turner’s latest film tells the story of the cult mastermind who brainwashed young hippies, finally taking them on a two-day murder spree which left nine people dead – including a pregnant actress.
And while she has penned innumerous hit screenplays, including American Psycho, it is clear by her own story which of the stories is closest to her heart.
Guinevere was born into the Lyman Family cult, a group started in Boston in 1966 by Mel Lyman, who, like Manson, was also a musician.
Her mother joined the cult in 1968 as an unwed, pregnant 19-year-old – the same age Leslie Van Houten, one of the women convicted of murder whose story is told in the film, joined the Manson Family.
She said: “It was an insular existence. I had no contact with anybody out the Family. My whole world was inhabited by people I had always known. I was homeschooled and never saw a doctor.
“My reality included LSD, government cheese, and a repurposed school bus with the words ‘Venus or Bust’ painted on both sides.”
Manipulated by charismatic cult leader Lyman, members of the Family believed they would be taken by spaceships to Venus, the planet of Love, on January 5, 1974.
Guinevere says she lived separately from her mother, like all the children in the cult, and saw how Lyman used drugs to brainwash his followers, which numbered 100 adults and 60 children.
A common practise, she said, was to give a follower LSD “and then have everyone come at them, and attempt to become more of a continuous part of a collective.
“If you do a lot of acid and have someone just talking at you and talking at you, you can imagine that – for anyone who’s done acid – you have a really hard time holding on to what’s real.”
The group also used Ouija boards to talk with spirits, and she remembered how shelves of the group’s houses in Los Angeles, Kansas and San Francisco were lined with notebooks containing transcriptions the conversations adults had had with various entities.
She remembered: “We kids were allowed to talk to only one spirit, Faedra, and sometimes after dinner we’d gather around the board to summon her.
“One night, one of the questions was “What does Guinevere need to learn?” The answer came back that I was a lazy little girl.
“After that, I cleaned every ashtray in the compound for weeks, ashamed but also secretly thrilled that Faedra even knew who I was.”
And the group were taught that ‘world people’ – thought outside the cult – were soulless and had as little contact with them as possible lest they had their souls “sucked away”.
But thankfully, the similarities between the Lyman and the Manson families ended there.
Over a period of five weeks in the summer of 1969, Manson instructed his followers to kill nine people in the Los Angeles area.
Seven of those were killed during two murderous nights, during which Manson and his followers stabbed to death pregnant actress Sharon Tate, the wife of movie director Roman Polanski, and four of her friends, at the couple’s Beverley Hills home.
Tate pleaded for her unborn child to be saved only to be stabbed to death 16 times.
The following night Manson took three Family members to the Los Feliz, Los Angeles house of wealthy supermarket businessman Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary and ordered his followers to brutally murder them.
Two years after the LA killing spree, Manson and many of his followers were found guilty of the murders, and he remained America’s most notorious killer until his death in 2017 aged 83.
While Guinevere’s cult never took part in anything so heinous, she recognises that Lyman Family followers believed so blindly in their leader – who wrote a book called ‘Autobiography of a World Savior – that murder would have been entirely possible.
She said that after leaving the cult she “had to consider some irrefutable truths.
“I grew up under the reign of a charismatic, complicated leader… who was constantly issuing new rules for living.
“True, Lyman never ordered his followers to kill anyone, the way Charles Manson did.
“But, if Lyman had asked, I’m pretty sure that they would have complied.”
In 1973, four years after the Manson murders, three members of the Lyman Family staged a bank robbery. One member of the Family was killed by police, and the other two were caught and jailed.
Finally, in 1974, the day the group had been waiting for arrived, when they believed they would be picked up by spaceships and taken to Venus.
Guinevere remembered how, as the day approached, “we children were told to put on our favorite clothes and pick one toy to bring on the journey.
“We sat in the living room all night, listening for the hum of the UFOs.
“The prophecy’s failure didn’t make anyone believe in Mel Lyman’s wisdom any less, though. We were told that the spaceships hadn’t come because our souls weren’t ready.”
When her mother chose to leave the Family, Guinevere was kicked out too in accordance with the cult’s rules.
Although she considered rejoining when she was 18, she eventually chose to attend college, becoming an actress, screenwriter and director. Her first film was Go Fish, which she acted, co-wrote and co-produced with her then-girlfriend, Rose Troche.
But she also admits having happy memories of her unorthodox upbringing, and to feeling “protective” about the cult when it is branded as dangerous like Manson’s.
She said: “What I don’t always say is that I also had a happy childhood, or, anyway, parts of one.
“The young Family members sang together almost every day as we harvested strawberries or corn.
“We foraged in the woods for morel mushrooms… We had dogs, goats, cows, chickens, a Shetland pony named Stardust, and a cockatiel named Charles.
Older kids read younger kids stories before bed – The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, and we fell asleep in piles, three or four to a bed.
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