Revisit the Jonestown Massacre in Trailer for New Docuseries About Final Hours of Jim Jones’ Cult

Daniel Kreps
·2 min read
Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones is pictured in a family portrait with his wife, Marceline Jones, their adopted children (behind Jones), and his sister-in-law (right) with her three children in California, 1976. - Credit: Don Hogan Charles/New York Times Co./Getty Images/Courtesy of National Geographic
Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones is pictured in a family portrait with his wife, Marceline Jones, their adopted children (behind Jones), and his sister-in-law (right) with her three children in California, 1976. - Credit: Don Hogan Charles/New York Times Co./Getty Images/Courtesy of National Geographic

Revisit the tragic and infamous Jonestown massacre in the new trailer for an upcoming docuseries that examines the final hours of Jim Jones’ cult in Guyana.

Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown — the latest installment in Nat Geo and Hulu’s One Day in America franchise — features rare archival footage as well as interviews from witnesses and survivors to explore the downfall of the utopian community turned militarized cult and the group’s final descent to murder and mass suicide that left 918 dead in November 1978.

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“There’s not a day that goes by that you don’t think of some parts of it,” one of the survivors says in the trailer for the docuseries.

The three-episode docuseries, premiering on June 17 on Hulu and Aug. 14 on Nat Geo, opens with California’s U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan’s ill-fated visit to the Peoples Temple cult amid abuse allegations, setting off a series of events that further enflame the already-paranoid Jones.

Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown features interviews with former Peoples Temple members, including Thom Bogue, Leslie Wagner Wilson, and Yulanda Williams, as well as Jackie Speier, a former member of Congress and aide to Rep. Ryan , Washington Post foreign correspondent Charles Krause, Jones’ son Stephan Jones, and — speaking about the tragedy for the first time in a documentary, former special ops Air Force Sgt. David Netterville, one of the three U.S. service members to enter the Jonestown complex in the immediate aftermath of the mass-casualty event.

The docuseries comes from Emmy Award-winning 72 Films’ executive producers David Glover and Mark Raphael, BAFTA Award-winning director Marian Mohamed, along with Academy Award-winning filmmakers Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin.

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