The Conspiracy

• The Tarsus Club — the secret society Aaron and Jim infiltrate — echoes real organizations like the Bilderberg Group and the Bohemian Club, whose members really do hold a private summer retreat at Bohemian Grove featuring an actual pagan ceremony. Director Christopher MacBride has said those two groups were his biggest real-world inspiration.
• The Conspiracy premiered at Fantastic Fest in September 2012, but it took nearly a year to land U.S. distribution — XLrator Media didn't acquire it until June 2013, releasing it on VOD and in theaters that August.
• MacBride blurred fact and fiction on purpose: several people interviewed on camera are real conspiracy-theory researchers and academics playing themselves, mixed in with the scripted cast, who were encouraged to improvise off the page.
• The two leads share first names with the actors who play them — Aaron Poole plays 'Aaron,' and James Gilbert plays 'Jim' — part of the film's low-key, blurred-reality found-footage realism.

The Tarsus Club isn't just a secret society but a functioning intelligence apparatus. Aaron and Jim were never independent filmmakers; they were being vetted from the start. Terrance's disappearance was bait, and the pair were steered toward the ceremony to see if they'd commit. The footage surviving is intentional, a recruitment tape for the next candidates.

The official story insists Aaron was released unharmed, but the film never actually shows him again after the ceremony breaks up — just Jim, visibly shaken yet cooperative, helping cut the footage into a puff piece for the Tarsus Club and echoing their line that Aaron got 'traumatized' and 'disappeared' on his own afterward. Read the edit choices as evidence Jim is the one who crossed over — by the end he's not reporting on Tarsus, he's speaking for it.

The Tarsus ceremony isn't political or financial. It's genuinely occult. The bull symbolism, the fire, the ritualized killing all point to something the elites believe actually works. The film presents itself as a conspiracy thriller, but the final act reveals it as folk horror. The conspiracy isn't about power; it's about sacrifice, and the world's elites serve something older than governments.

Two DIY documentarians chasing a loudmouth conspiracy theorist named Terrance figure he's just another crank worth a few viral hits. Then Terrance vanishes. Aaron and Jim dig into his apartment and his research, and follow the breadcrumb trail to a shadowy global organization called the Tarsus Club. They infiltrate a clandestine gathering in the woods, wearing masks, surrounded by men in suits. What they find isn't a lecture. It's a ceremony. And the ceremony needs a sacrifice. The footage keeps rolling right up until it can't.