Indie band Cults has released the official video for “Go Outside,” which brings the fascinating and tragic story of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown back into the public field of view.
Just over thirty years ago, Reverend Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple, led his followers in a mass suicide, which has come commonly to be known as the Jonestown Massacre. The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project was intended to be “a utopian, agrarian, interracial community in Guyana, which had a Socialist goverment [sic] at the time. Jonestown [as the community was known] was to be free from racism, sexism, and ageism, and founded on communist principles. Jones told his followers to think of him as a living incarnation of Jesus Christ, and God.” On November 18, 1978, this utopia fell: a cocktail of poisons ended the lives of nearly one thousand men, women, and children.
Cults‘ music video director, Isiah Seret comments:
For this music video we didn’t want to put a spin on the footage or the peoples lives—instead we wanted to re-tell and humanize their story. . . . I am moved to say when we completed the video we were able to preview it for some of the survivors of the Jonestown Massacre, who expressed their appreciation of our focus on the lives of the People’s Temple members as opposed to exploiting the graphic images of the final tragedy.
Read the remainder of Seret’s Director’s Statement and watch the video at Boing Boing.