Manson and The Family: The Cult That Hollywood Created

 

Ed Sanders arrived in Los Angeles in 1969 when the Summer of Love already reeked of corpses beneath the California sun. The poet who founded The Fugs, the first underground rock band, left Greenwich Village to document what no one wanted to name: the psychedelic revolution didn’t end in flowers but in blood soaked knives. The Family was published in 1971, two years after the blood had dried on Cielo Drive, and it remains the most dangerous account of Manson because Sanders committed heresy: he investigated without an agenda. A beatnik ended up performing the autopsy on hippiedom and discovered that the patient had already been rotten long before it died.

While Vincent Bugliosi was inventing the true crime genre by selling Helter Skelter, that racial war supposedly prophesied by the Beatles, which never made any sense, Sanders crawled through the Los Angeles that Hollywood erased from its maps. Black masses in Topanga Canyon where more than goats were sacrificed. Sadomasochistic circles where last names carried more weight than boundaries. Rumors of snuff films passed hand to hand at parties on Mulholland Drive. Where were you, David Lynch? Sanders didn’t write about lost hippies, he wrote about a network of depravity that connected the canyons to the mansions where Oscars were decided. His book doesn’t portray Manson as a solitary monster but as a franchise of something systemic.

Evan Dando found The Family in his father’s library, an obsessive collector of The Fugs. In “Rumors of My Demise,” he confesses his fascination with Manson, that impossible blend of Jim Morrison and Jerry García, the same gravity that trapped Dennis Wilson, who housed the Family and recorded songs with Charlie for the Beach Boys in 1968. Neil Young almost signed him to Reprise, calling his music incredible. John Waters declared him America’s greatest conceptual artist. Errol Morris interviewed him like someone studying a clockwork mechanism. The Ramones mentioned him in their lyrics. Rollins kept up correspondence with him in prison, called Black Flag tours “creepy crawls” after the Family, and produced an album for him. Axl Rose, Phil Anselmo, and Trent Reznor, who lived in the Tate house before he knew, cited Manson not for adolescent shock value but as professional recognition: Charlie had cracked the code of the rockstar cult and executed it to its final consequences. Marilyn Manson built his stage name from Charles.

What Sanders captures, and Bugliosi buried, is brutal in its simplicity: Manson wasn’t supernatural, he was inevitable. A third rate performer who read his moment with surgical precision and applied showbusiness to mind control. Manson claimed he learned everything by reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People in prison, though the truth cut deeper. The line between guru and serial killer evaporates when you master the right narrative for the exact audience. Sanders documents how Hollywood flirted with that darkness for years, how the counterculture romanticized the apocalyptic without calculating the cost. Cielo Drive wasn’t a cosmic accident, as Tarantino tried to rewrite in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it was the logical conclusion of a decade that confused transgression with freedom. Tarantino had already used Susan Atkins from the Family as inspiration for the character Daisy Domergue in The Hateful Eight, and John Waters dedicated his 1970s film Female Trouble to Tex Watson, another Family member.

The Family unsettles because it frames 1969 as a consequence, not an aberration. When you mix hollow fame, disposable youth, industrial LSD, and nihilism packaged as enlightenment, you don’t get Woodstock, you get a slaughterhouse in Bel Air. Sanders published this while the bodies were still warm, and no one wanted to listen. It was more comfortable to buy Bugliosi’s version: a marginal lunatic obsessed with the White Album.

Fifty five years later, we still evade what Sanders shouted on every page. Celebrity culture operates like a cult: it worships charisma without questioning trajectory. Manson recruited using the exact same techniques as any contemporary influencer: instant validation, tribal identity, promises of transcendence. The difference is one of scale, not essence. Swap Spahn Ranch for any Instagram wellness retreat, and the mechanisms are interchangeable.

Sanders offers no clean exits. He forces you to recognize that Manson’s magnetism isn’t something alien but painfully familiar. Every generation manufactures its disposable messiahs and its starving devotees. The question The Family drives home like a blade isn’t why it happened in 1969, but why we keep pretending we’re immune. Sanders understood what we prefer to forget: the darkness never left, it just perfected its production. Now it has better lighting and millions of followers.