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Cult films inhabit four categories that are not mutually exclusive and may come into tension with one another. These categories depend on differing processes of cult development: world-based, auteur-based, star-based, and production-based. This chapter focuses on the first two, examining how world-based and auteur-based cults operate in relation to two exemplary science fiction (sf) texts, Blade Runner (1982) and the rebooted Star Trek (2009) franchise. What is so fascinating about auteur-based and world-based cults is that these potentials can be activated around the same series of texts — whether Star Trek or Blade Runner — and yet exist in tension with one another, as some fan audiences stress authorial vision while others emphasize the narrative universe that they love exploring, documenting, and speculating about. Cult/sf is not just a doubling of categories; cult sf really can mean different things to different (fan) readers.

This chapter identifies the isolating effects of stalkers on female figures, emphasizing the temporal isolation accomplished through the control of storage media such as tape recorders and answering machines that would otherwise connect the heroines to a vital past of female networks. Following the stalker through two pairs of films: The Terminator and Klute, then Blade Runner and Vertigo, it becomes clear that this abuse of the past constitutes criminal necrophilia. This necrophilia will nonetheless be relentlessly projected back onto the heroines, whose female networks will be figured in various ways as morbid simulation. At stake is always the cultural verdict on the modern city, a city seen as fraught with female independence and male shame.

This chapter focuses on two cinematic narratives: Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Ridley Scot's Blade Runner (1982). Both films relate to dystopias generated by human decision-making, reveal how law is significant factor in constituting the dystopian situation, and illuminate it by focusing on the fate of a subject or character. The films employ metropolitan settings to create similar cautionary tales, in which the metropolis - the pillar of liberal and rational social existence - turns into a dystopia. In both cases, law is presented as tool for translating the political will of its masters into normative language, thus taking an active role in enabling and facilitating the dystopian regime. The films juxtapose the imagination of disaster with the legal imagination, while constituting a warning against violent employment of authorized power, and against abusing legal instruments by using them as tools for exclusion of certain subjects from the domain of law.

In February 1980, Ridley Scott signed on to direct a film based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? During development of the project the film became Blade Runner, a highly influential science fiction film set in a dystopian Los Angeles of the near future. The production was highly inventive and the narrative experimental. Scott pushed the cast and crew hard because of the limited amount of time he had to put his vision on film. The producers were constantly hounding him over what they considered excesses and lack of respect for the schedule, actually firing him and his producer Michael Deeley at one point, only to rehire them days later, although they constantly threatened to take the film over. Narration included for clarity slowed the film down and was eventually removed after the initial release. Blade Runner is a landmark film in visual effects and for its sophisticated narrative and complex characters.

This chapter focuses on Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner that has become one of the most lauded science-fiction films ever made. It talks about academics who have written about Blade Runner in terms of its racial and sexual politics, its exploration of humanity, and of the way it challenges many of the accepted or expected codes and conventions of the science-fiction film. It also examines how Blade Runner is considered by the British Film Institute to be a 'Modern Classic' and is often one of the most written about films when it comes to science-fiction readers. The chapter analyses how Blade Runner is often used as the seminal text with which to explore the poetics and politics of the science-fiction genre. It mentions Blade Runner as one of the biggest commercial failures of the summer of 1982 for bringing in less than half the cost of its production.

This chapter looks at how audiences, through their choice of screenings and their response to films, can transform production trends and the decisions made about which films are made at the planning stage of film production. It analyses the production and early distribution history of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner that bear classification struggles encountered during its production, which were driven by a fear that it wouldn't be a suitable vehicle for mainstream audiences. It also confirms the way audiences are more active, appreciative, and diverse in their consumption of a film once the tag of mainstream flop has been removed by time, distance, and context. The chapter describes how Blade Runner audiences are sovereign and not purely connected to shaping production trends. It recounts how Blade Runner immediately found a cult audience on a late-night cable television, and in terms of video rental became a home box-office smash.

This chapter talks about representation, which is a concept given to the way things, objects, places, people come to have meaning in the social world. It mentions the clear and direct sense on the growth of technology in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which has resulted in a future where nature and the natural has been nearly entirely snuffed out. It also cites Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, who argue that from a conservative perspective, technology represents artifice as opposed to nature and the mechanical as opposed to the spontaneous. The chapter examines how the Blade Runner complicates the relationship between technology and nature and collapses the binary opposition between them. It demonstrates how technology is being validated or authenticated or at least humanised or naturalised in Blade Runner.

This chapter points out that the real story of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is about what it means to be human in a world increasingly touched by technological invention and media intervention. It discusses technology in Blade Runner relating to human simulacra, the love of technology by humans, and the spread of media technology into all areas of social life that can make machines out of them. It also discusses how Blade Runner questions the nature of what it is to be human in even more complex ways. The chapter deals with the question on what does it mean to be human, which is bound up with suffering, loss, alienation, existential confusion, and with the unstoppable march of death. It examines how Blade Runner mediates on the postmodern nature of the human condition.

This chapter reviews the terms of the themes, iconographies and mode of address of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner that made it fall within the science-fiction genre. It describes Blade Runner as a dystopian, iconic and visually spectacular film that is argued to be an exemplary case study for what constitutes a science-fiction film. It also explains how Blade Runner offers a despairing view of the future, showing high, low and expansive shots of the Gothic, patchwork city as it belches flames, chokes on its own smog, and produces the discernible sense of an omnipresent decay. The chapter discusses Blade Runner's theme on disintegration, in which earth is so over-populated and polluted that people in the film are encouraged to move to off-world colonies. It investigates the 'aesthetic of decay' of Blade Runner that is compounded by the encroachment of technology and techno-science into all areas of social life.

This chapter discusses the narrative of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner in terms of the way it functions, like the anti-narrative film found in a great deal of European art cinema. It discusses German Expressionism as the reference point for Blade Runner. It also analyses the dislocated and open-ended nature of Blade Runner's narrative that suggests a challenging art aesthetic that was borrowed from film movements, such as the French New Wave. The chapter explores Blade Runner's narrative, which is marked by gaps and enigmas that are never fully cohered or resolved. It addresses arguments made about contemporary science fiction that is predominately driven by a desire to be always visually spectacular.

This chapter discusses Ridley Scott's Blade Runner as a textbook case of how the contemporary Hollywood studio system works or rather fails to work properly. It explores Blade Runner as a case study of budgetary problems, falling outs, rows on the shoot, sneak screenings, sackings, final cuts, and director's cuts. It also analyzes how Blade Runner's commercials are privileged over all other artistic and professional considerations where filmmaking is concerned. The chapter mentions The Deer Hunterproducer Michael Deeley, who offered the Blade Runner project to Scott. It recounts how Scott officially signed on to make the Blade Runner on 21 February 1980.

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.

Daguerreotypes begins by telling a different story about the history of photography, one that blends fact and fiction to weave a tale of imposters and automata, historians and detectives, images and identity. It turns first to the infamous early modern case of the trickster Martin Guerre (fortuitously born Daguerre), best known through the cinematic adaptation of Natalie Zemon Davis’ field-defining work of history and historiography. After mining her story for the trace of a photographic imagination, the introduction revisits the modern moment of photography's invention and development as a technology of identification and concludes with a reconsideration of its migrations into the postmodern, by way of a juxtaposition of the cinematic and philosophical projects of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida.

This chapter defines the Gothic punk milieu (GPM), and explores the aspects of science fiction in relation to the Gothic tradition. It discusses the ‘cultural stylings’ of the Gothic science fiction, starting with the cyberpunk Metropolis which was published in 1926, followed by Blade Runner in 1982 and then with Heresy Kingdom Come in 1995. The chapter further notes that the scenes and imagery in these works reflect the deterioration of the urban culture and the foreshadowing of the postindustrial culture.

Blade Runner is concerned to humanize our social and political relationships, which are in danger of falling into the affective trap that Rousseau outlined in his Letter to D’Alembert. Rousseau described citizens who mistake a theatrical experience for an equal, reciprocal human experience. To understand the problem, we must learn to differentiate, as the characters of Blade Runner do, between mutual surveillance and mutual regard. Surveillance can create in us the illusion of power and freedom that we mistake for real autonomy. Regard for others, which can be interrupted by representation, needs to be sustained for human society to flourish. If we must use representation to have a democracy, we must insure that its tendency toward inequality and surveillance does not come to dominate us.

This chapter summarizes the meaning of the word “junk”, which is both described as an unknown part of DNA or the binding principle that holds the world together. Junk is the cement of cultural experience and the fractal principle that unifies DNA to the cosmos and everything in between, and can be used to describe any significant cultural experience in today’s global culture, such as reality TV, recycled music, movies, and contemporary art. The chapter also talks about Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s fictions of the 1960s that portrayed junk culture.

This chapter explores how the distinction between humans and androids, between empathy and psychopathy, traverses every human psyche. In the movie Blade Runner, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) busts an android network and senses that he, as the Form Destroyer, is impinging on a microcosm of life. Thus he rises to the occasion as overseer and death driver while the androids are miniaturized, in a sense, inside their representation of world or life. In both Blade Runner and the novel on which it is based, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the android begins to enter the field of testing as object of empathy. Blade Runner departs from or exceeds the safe enclosure of its android self-reflexivity in the closing staging of finitude, for androids and humans alike.

This chapter attempts to view the world after the end of Blade Runner (1982). It revisits the film again after its end, from the finitude that is counted down and in advance for us, as are the lives of Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and the other replicants, as is the filmic montage that they, and we, are. It describes a scene where Roy and another replicant are able to find the lab where Chew (James Hong) is making the most important of the spare parts that contribute to their android assemblage: the organ of their vision. Roy confronts Chew, looks straight into his eyes, and says: “Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes,” if only you, the human, could see what I have seen with your eyes. It is impossible to decide if the eyes he is speaking of (“your eyes”) are the ones Chew has fabricated or if they are the eyes of Chew himself. If it is the eyes made by humans for the androids or if it is the eyes of the humans themselves.