But Westboro Baptist Church is no ordinary church; it’s infamous for its hate speech against LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, Jews, and more. It’s been designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre and the Anti-Defamation League. It picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, who was killed in a homophobic attack in 1998. And by 2007 it was at the height of its fame, after years of picketing the funerals of soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Most Hated Family in America filmed some of these pickets, and included interviews with Phelps, who has since died, and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper. Theroux revisited Westboro Baptist Church for his 2011 documentary America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis, which examined what had happened to the Phelps family and Westboro following the departure of a number of people from the church.

So one can’t help but wonder, what more can there be left to say about the group?

It’s a question that Theroux asked himself. “I didn’t think I would make another film,” he tells Stylist. “After the second one, which I was very pleased with, I thought, ‘well, we’ve done that now’. The second one was feistier and more oppositional, more argumentative than the first one. The first one was figuring Westboro Baptist Church out and learning who they are and what they stand for. The second one, I go in with more of an in-your-face sort of approach.

“I thought now we know each other’s games, there is no need to really follow up a third time.”