Their faces look like something out of some grade B film: the wife looking like some hick gun moll and the white-bearded husband appearing like a cross between an Old Testament patriarch and Idaho survivalist.

The locale, it turns out, was upstate New York; New Hartford, to be exact, where several people have been arrested for the beating death of a 19-year-old and the near beating death of his younger brother.

Media have descended upon the town in the past week, talking with neighbors, attending the arraignment, polling the local Catholic priest and even wandering about the building itself. Was this group a church? A Christian sect? A doctrinal cult? A sociological cult? A compound? A commune? The phrases “reclusive church,” “ultra-secretive,” “shadowy,” “sect” and “cult” sprinkle multiple reports of a congregation gone off the rails.

Memories of other congregations run amok (Waco, anyone?) mark yet a notch in the popular imagination of religion as inherently dangerous. We’ll start first with the Daily Beast's take:

On Sunday night, an ultra-secretive New York church turned into a living hell. Two teenage brothers were brutally beaten -- one of them to death -- by their own family members and fellow churchgoers who wanted them to “confess” to their sins, authorities say.

Police charged the boys’ parents with manslaughter and four other participants with assault in the chilling incident that killed Lucas Leonard, 19, and left his 17-year-old brother, Christopher Leonard, in serious condition.

To neighbors, New Hartford’s Word of Life church is a “cult.” Those who live nearby point to the fence separating the red brick building -- a sprawling former high school -- from the community. Some say they’ve heard chants late at night and glimpsed men wearing long black trench coats. Others claim the gated church was breeding dogs, which were constantly barking.

When you search for religion news around the Pacific Northwest, what’s out there is definitely a mixed bag. The biggest religion story in years has been the break-up of Seattle's Mars Hill Church and the continuing saga of its one-time pastor, Mark Driscoll.

This week’s big story, broken by the Sydney Morning Herald, was that Driscoll’s invite to an Australian conference sponsored by the megachurch Hillsong had been rescinded. And so one alternative Seattle publication cribbed off the Driscoll angle by offering -- in graphic novel format -- a story titled “Predators and Prophets: A Comic History of Pacific Northwest Cults.” The subtitle: “Spiritually-motivated bioterrorism at Taco Time, 35 thousand year old Lemurian warrior gods in Yelm, LSD-fueled Queen Anne hippie cults, and much more.”

Figured I had to read that one, which begins thus:

The decline and disintegration of Mars Hill Church last year may have surprised some, but to others it was predictable, and not without precedent. The Pacific Northwest has been home to numerous utopian communes and fanatical religious groups, from the radical to the deeply conservative. Since the arrival of European Christianity and its normative pall, outsider and fringe belief has been a staple of the local culture. From Eastern philosophies to the syncretic, the Pacific Northwest has been a site of religious demagoguery for ages, and the present is no exception.

A cult? A sect? What do you call a church that murders its own?

History of religious cults in America's Northwest gets graphic-art treatment