The Fallout of 'Dancing For the Devil'

By Alison Lanier | TV | June 17, 2024 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | June 17, 2024 |

Since it appeared two weeks ago, Dancing For the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult has not dropped out of the top ten titles on Netflix. It’s a sleek, binge-worthy true crime story of an active cult: targeting talented young dancers looking to make it professionally as artists, 7M is a “management company” as well as a church headed by Robert Shinn. The cult is rife with prolonged and systematic abuses, from financial to sexual, while operating under the guise of a religious organization.

Watching the documentary, along with millions of other viewers, I was struck by the transparency of Shinn’s manipulations in his recorded sermons. He isn’t clever or subtle, just insistent and confident. 7M is also distinguished as a cult by its visibility: it tides dance videos onto social media and has a very active influencer-style system of personal videos. It wants to place its dancers in commercials for major brands and be recognized as the company that put them there.

The true-crime-genre publicity around 7M as a cult has been hailed by Shinn as a sort of “any-publicity-is-good-publicity” boon. But it’s also been effective in opening the eyes of the current members and getting them out from under Shinn’s control, although without any of the financial or legal reparation that Shinn owes. The Netflix documentary is undoubtedly the biggest moment of this “boon.”

The cult carries strong echoes of NXIVM, with its valence of self-improvement and business networking over the classic high-control environment. Part of the brainwashing is that this group is helping you to achieve your professional and personal goals, that without this group you would be relegated to hopeless failure (and, in the case of 7M, also go to hell as an added bonus). One moment from a NXIVM member’s TED Talk comes to mind: as a member of the group, the speaker credits infamous cult leader and sexual predator Keith Raniere as his “mentor” and the wellspring of his success as a filmmaker, which is as blatantly ridiculous as it sounds. Later, after escaping NXIVM, that same man can see the absurdity of it as it looked from the outside. Dancing For the Devil delivers such moments over and over again, in defense after defense of Shinn by members of his church—to then be countered by the ex-members who can see those statements for the manipulations that they are.

The face of this brainwashing is Miranda Derrick, one of the longtime members of 7M and the center of the Netflix documentary. Her parents and sister — who is also her former professional dance partner, Melanie Wilking — launched a social media campaign to try to break Miranda free of the cult’s control after losing contact with her directly and watching her go through a dramatic shift in personality via her TikTok videos.

But in the two weeks since the docuseries went live, watching Miranda’s reaction has been as telling as any sequel docuseries. Miranda has posted exactly according to the highly controlled cookie-cutter formula outlined by ex-7M members in the series—showcasing how she attended her sister’s wedding (wearing black, which is weird, but whatever), how she really wishes her family understood how happy she is, how they’re the ones creating the problem, etc.

Specifically, she’s claimed that she is not a “victim” and is not being abused. Unless the whole operating structure of 7M has changed very, very recently, it’s fairly certain that she and her husband are in the same system of financial abuse and “tithing” by the church that the other members suffered under. But she doesn’t see herself as a victim. In a classic brainwashing tactic, only one source of truth exists — the cult leadership — and everyone else is lying or just wrong.

Watching this true-crime story unfold in real-time is surreal, but it’s also a telling shift from the classic hindsight-is-20/20 narrative. Instead, we’re looking into the eyes of the people whom this is actually affecting as they live through it. It’s disturbing — which true crime thrives on as a voyeuristic genre — but it’s also driven by those people being affected: by their pain and by their love for a person who doesn’t seem able, in this moment, to break free on her own.

Dancing For the Devil is now streaming on Netflix.