Seven figures in dark pointed hoods and floor-length robes make their way through a swelling throng in a darkened room. Hands reach for these figures as they pass, just to brush against the fabric, to grab at the hem of a garment, to feel some kind of proximity to a higher being. There’s a sense of approaching rapture. Or perhaps of impending doom.
The figures ascend a set of steps to the dais, their arms crossed in front of them like monks. Their faces are shielded, eyes peering out from inside their hoods. They turn to face their congregation. The crowd erupts. Within moments they’re on their feet, lurching, shuddering, chanting a string of repeated words – death, death, death, they say. Over and over again. Then, facetiously: Amway, Amway, Amway.
The cult leaders on stage tonight are the Melbourne variety. They’re known as TISM, or This Is Serious Mum. And the setting is the Forum Theatre, an iconic Melbourne venue with a storied history. TISM know that history very well indeed.
Even before it became a real-life cult headquarters, the Forum always felt spooky. Those tarnished green gargoyles jutting out over Flinders Street, leering down at Fed Square? It turns out that they’re just fashion-statement gargoyles: mix ’n’ match adornments on what was once a gigantic picture palace.
It opened in 1929 as the State Theatre, designed by John Eberson, the American architect who pioneered the “atmospheric” movie palace, alongside local firm Bohringer, Taylor & Johnson. No movie palace of the day would be complete without a set of Moorish turrets, or at least a central gothic tower topped with a green onion dome to match the gargoyles.
If the Forum’s exterior is foreboding, the interior is downright outlandish. Full-sized Roman-style statues flank both sides of the stage, staring downward, holding dominion over all they survey. One of them stares outward from inside a huge indoor rotunda – almost a gilded cage. And the ceiling, inlaid with hundreds of tiny, glimmering lights, provides an artificial starry night sky above. The stalls, part of a cinema that once seated 3,371 – the most of any in the country when it opened – are now a broad, flat expanse. Tonight it’s filled with people, all of them pressing toward the stage, all of them shimmering in the soft light.
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The Forum gives off one very specific impression: it’s a temple. And in years past, its audiences have often had an end goal that lay beyond this earthly stage. That goal, the End of Days, sat waiting patiently above it all, watching alongside the eerie statues, nestled among the stars in the artificial night sky. The grandiose old cinema feels like it was purpose-built for the cult that eventually bought it.
From 1985 to 1995, the Forum Theatre served as the headquarters for a religious sect known as Revival Centres International (RCI). The sect found the imposing décor well suited to its purposes, which centred on the eagerly anticipated Second Coming and the associated End of Days. For ten years, followers of RCI would flock to the Forum Theatre for services. Thousands more attended services at smaller venues around the country, as well as overseas, particularly in Papua New Guinea.
“If you told me it had all been a bad trip, I’d believe you,” says one former member, who we’ll call Dave.
Dave joined the sect when he was just 18. He had begun to feel those restless rumblings of youth – the need to search for something larger than himself. “All of a sudden I was part of a community,” he says. “Thinking back now, I was just a prime candidate for recruitment. And then before I knew it, I was speaking in tongues.”
Chief among RCI’s teachings was the importance of glossolalia. Speaking in tongues – purportedly in a personal language that only God can understand – was considered the definitive sign that a person had received the Holy Spirit. And only those who had received the Holy Spirit would enter the Kingdom of Heaven at the End of Days.
“They would say, ‘When that time comes, you’re either in or you’re out.’ And if you were out, you were fucked,” Dave says. In 1984, a church editorial declared that Christ would return no later than 17 September 2001. That date, too, has come and gone.
Members across Australia and abroad were “tithed”, with 10 per cent of all personal income going directly to RCI. “They could have said give us 50 per cent,” Dave says, “and I still would have said I don’t give a shit, just let me in the door. They were giving me this sense of belonging that I so desperately wanted.”
Meanwhile, the RCI leadership enjoyed the lap of luxury. “It was one of those sorts of things where the spidey senses started tingling,” Dave says. “The main dude – he had white hair, and he wore this white suit, and he’d turn up in this car, a Daimler. A V12, with the Double Six badge on the side. And he lived in a mansion in Toorak somewhere – he had absolute rockstar status.”
Years later, in 2008, former RCI members Sue and Craig Williams went public about their dealings with Glenn Duker, a Gold Coast solicitor and RCI pastor. They had invested in one of his property ventures and lent him money, and they were left tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket. Members were taught that “pastors care for your very soul, as a shepherd for his sheep”, the couple said. The thought of being misled was unthinkable.
In early 2009, Duker declared bankruptcy owing investors and creditors as much as $40 million. RCI weathered the fallout, and in 2015 rebranded as Revival Centres Church.
Back in the ’90s, however, Dave found himself excommunicated for breaking one of the sect’s cardinal rules.
“I ended up getting thrown out for fornication,” he recalls. “People talk about getting out of these cults, but I didn’t want to get out. I was shattered. I had these really close friends, but when they saw me in the street, they’d turn their backs.”
Eventually the sect came knocking, asking Dave to repent and return to the fold, along with his 10 per cent tithe. Disillusioned, Dave flew to England, only to find English RCI members waiting for him when he landed at Heathrow.
“To counter that, I think I spent a lot of time in London drunk. I thought, if they kept seeing me come staggering out of some pubs, they’d probably leave me alone. And eventually they did.”
Revival Centres International sold the Forum in 1995. The sect had ruptured: around half its Australian congregations broke away to form the Revival Fellowship, over a controversial new doctrine that barred anyone who’d had sex outside marriage from ever returning to the church. Concert promoter David Marriner snapped up the venue and promptly turned it into Melbourne’s most majestic mosh pit. The 2,000-capacity venue is a favourite among local acts like The Living End and You Am I, and has also hosted intimate gigs for Oasis, Madonna and, more recently, Harry Styles.
Fast-forward to October 2026, and TISM have brought their own brand of doomsday sect to the Forum. Their frenzied, devoted followers have come with them. At this show, the last of three nights at the Forum, the crowd is treated to a diatribe of which any cult leader would be proud.
The band’s masked, anonymous frontman – who goes by the pseudonym Ron Hitler-Barassi – takes to the microphone to decry personality cults and divisive politicians: “These pompous blow-hards are just one more instance,” he growls, “of patriotism disguising self-interest.”
Hitler-Barassi’s timing couldn’t be better. If ever there was a time that we needed an antidote to political rhetoric, it’s now.
