Just watched a really weird, weird movie called "Martyrs". It made me wonder if the cabal does the things that were in it, in their quest for knowledge of the after life.
Quite interestingly The film's American distribution rights were purchased by the Weinstein Company, they also released the film on DVD in April 2009.
Basically starts off with a young girl (Lucie) about 12 escaping from a torture facility. She is befriended by another girl at the facility where she ends up (Anna). No one believes everything that happened to the girl and write her off as crazy. She does self harm when she sees a dead girl that keeps on attacking her (she was unable to save this girl) when she escaped.
Fast forward 15 years and Lucie blows away a whole family in a gnarly ravaging sequence including their children. She calls Anna and tells them they were part of it and used to torture her. Anna shows up and doesn't believe Lucie but is still supportive of her. Lucie kills herself.
"Anna discovers a secret underground chamber in the living room. Imprisoned within is a horribly tortured young woman named Sarah, who proves that Lucie was right about the family. Anna helps Sarah escape, but a group of strangers arrive and gun Sarah down. Captured, Anna meets their leader, an elderly lady referred to as Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle explains that she belongs to a secret philosophical society seeking to discover the secrets of the afterlife through the creation of "martyrs". Their experiments inflict systematic acts of torture upon young women in the belief that their suffering will result in a transcendental insight into the world beyond this one. Mademoiselle also believes the world is divided into victims (people who can't hold tortures and fall into madness, like Lucie and Sarah) and martyrs (people who "accept" tortures and transcend).
Anna becomes the group's latest subject. After a period of being beaten and degraded, Anna hallucinates a conversation with Lucie, and is later told she has progressed further than any other test subject, and has reached the "final stage." She is flayed alive and survives the procedure, entering a state that is "euphoric" and likened to achieving transcendence. Mademoiselle arrives eagerly and Anna whispers into her ear what she sees in the beyond."
Other people in the group start arriving at the house (rich people) to hear about what Anna saw.
Just thought the whole thing strange with the abductions, torture, the search for afterlife info and the Weinstein company being involved.