Search Results

The cult film is generally seen as a development of post-war cinema, and includes a range of texts that can be used as sites for nostalgia, cultural allegiance and amplified pleasures, and which tend to be associated with camp, low culture, subversion, excess, the unexpected, the absurd, the eccentric, the extreme or the forbidden. Cult films effectively create communities of avid audiences who respond in ways that carry personal meaning yet are familiar and ritualistic. This chapter explores how some classical screen musicals have acquired a devoted following through nostalgia. However, of the many factors that assist in the creation of a cult text, the challenging of expectations and the violation of both film and social conventions features prominently. With the cult musical, this can be observed in one way in the subversion of the classical film's utopian narrative. In this context, the chapter focuses on a subgroup of the cult musical, the horror-musical and films such as The Little Shop of Horrors (1986) and Joe's Apartment (1996), where it deals with the depictions of a screen dystopia.

In Chapter 4, I extend some of the issues surrounding fan filmmakers as discussed in the previous chapter, and deliberate the representation of masculinity and cult film fandom within a series of horror-comedy hybrids. Through acknowledgement of the ways in which cult film fandom has traditionally been gendered as ‘male’, and often as immature, crude and boyish, I draw parallels between recent horror-comedies that use these stereotypes as ironic self-critiques of the filmmakers’ themselves and their desired audience. I ultimately locate these films within discourses surrounding ‘New Lad’ culture of the 1990s, which has similarly been linked to contemporary cult film fandom (Hollows 2003; Read 2003). Through a discussion of themes, industry statistics and textual analysis, I show how films such as Shaun of the Dead, Doghouse and Lesbian Vampire Killers satirise the social marginality of laddish behaviour by placing fannish ‘New Lad’ types within a horror film environment, thus literalising many of the stereotypes that have figured within contemporary academic writing on cult film audiences.

This chapter explores the cult legacies of Re-Animator, beginning with its critical reception and adoption as a cult film. The chapter considers this in relation to Re-Animator’s strong presence on home releases and how those cultures of distribution contribute toward a film’s legacy. The next focus is on sequels Bride of Re-Animator and Beyond Re-Animator, and spin-offs that include comics, a porn parody, and a musical. The chapter ends by exploring the cult horror stardoms of Jeffery Combes and Barbara Crampton as extensions of Re-Animator’s legacy, tracing their cult performances to present.

This concluding chapter addresses issues concerning the evaluation of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Russ Meyer's Pussycat remains excluded in the criterion's catalogue of “important classic and contemporary films” marking the “defining moments in cinema”, primarily because the film—like so many other cult films—is dogged by the insistent problem of evaluation. Most cult films distinguish themselves not by how well they meet the criteria by which mainstream movies are measured, but how well and thoroughly they flaunt conventional standards. Cult fans are fond of saying that there is nothing quite like their beloved films, placing a higher value on transgressiveness, novelty, and messiness than on any conventional criteria: hence the preponderance of “bad” movies in the cult canon.

This chapter examines why David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) is considered a cult film. Fight Club is a cult film because it is subversive, quotable, iconographic, generically challenging, about marginal characters, complex in terms of its narrative, intertextual, gory and violent; because it transgresses social laws and norms; creates a community of fans and finally, because it was an economic failure on its release. The strong first-person voice of Chuck Palahniuk's source novel is intentionally preserved in Jim Uhl's screen adaptation. The use of a second-person address, which, along with other techniques, breaks the fourth wall, further helps engage the audience in the story of everyman ‘Jack’. The film was mis-sold as a product for the male youth market. Instead, it is a generational film, with particular appeal to the Generation X experience, the generation sired by the ‘baby-boomers’. Indeed, Fight Club's cinematic legacy can be traced back to baby-boomer films. A new generation's quest for meaning and purpose is the unifying factor.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, namely to track the relationship between the cult film and the science fiction (sf) genre, exploring a connection that has always seemed closer, somehow even more natural than in the case of most other film genres. In fact, sf has typically enjoyed a special version of the relationship between audience and text that critics often cite as one of the defining features of the cult film experience. The chapter then discusses the reasons why is it especially useful or important to focus attention specifically on sf texts for this investigation. This is followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines the reception of Quadrophenia (1979) and other cult films in the U.S. Quadrophenia was never a box-office success in the U.S. and its initial core followers were the cognoscenti of The Who back catalogue. Its ‘group’ cult status grew through early exhibition in the midnight movie circuit. Critic Barry Keith Grant said that the ‘midnight screening’ was vital to the depiction of the cult film as transgressive, as anti-respectability, and as ‘against the logic of “prime-time” exhibition’. Meanwhile Joanne Hollows elaborated how the sites of such screenings, ‘often screened in porn cinemas or in picture-houses that existed in close proximity to them’, re-enforce cult movie-going as a male preserve: ‘the sleaze of the cinema … works to confirm the figure of the cult fan as a “manly adventurer” who sets out into the urban wilderness, a position less open to women’.

This chapter explores underground nightlife in the context of subcultural resistance to normative models of liberation. Ugliness in the chapter is visible as an antagonistically expressed gender and sexual nonnormativity within the postpunk aesthetics of cult film Liquid Sky (1982). The film is theorized as a dystopian feminism that aligns itself with alienated sexual and sonic space. The conceptual ugliness, in this chapter, corresponds to the queer female body as site of estrangement, ensconced in sexual and substance-desiring practices.

This chapter examines Oshii Mamoru's animated Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). It analyzes the connections between the ‘cult’ elements of the film and the science fiction (sf)-esque issues that Oshii explores throughout his oeuvre. It argues that for Oshii, the film is a kind of performed philosophical speculation, and many of the same elements that allow us to define his work as ‘cult’ also function to highlight and enact his theories regarding technobiopolitics — theories typically linked to sf. To define Innocence as ‘cult’ here is not a secondary designation; rather, ‘cult’ is a fundamental element in producing the meanings of this sf film.

Iron Sky (2012) was one of the first high-profile films to use the practices of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. This chapter considers how crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are not only intersecting with the discourses of cult cinema, but also beginning to redefine it. Typically, definitions of cult cinema have focused on both aesthetic and audience factors. Aesthetically, cult films are often associated with parody, camp, and other forms of aesthetic transgression because of their ability to challenge the norms of Hollywood cinema, while cult audiences are typically assumed to emerge after a film is released, and movies deliberately designed to cultivate that audience are often dismissed as ‘prefabricated’. In this sense, Iron Sky challenges many of these preconceptions, even while building a massive international audience that has enthusiastically embraced it, to the point that the film's production team began work on a (crowdfunded and crowdsourced) sequel just months after the original film's premiere.

The conclusion underlines the book’s case for Re-Animator’s status as an important horror film, and film in general, of its era. It positions this book amid other scholarship that employs a revisionist approach to the history of American horror films and explains how the film is more significant than many might realise.

This chapter uses Don Coscarelli's the science fiction (sf)/horror mash-up Bubba Ho-tep (2002) to propose that sf, fantasy, and indeed cult films of all stripes are both literal and figurative ‘strange attractors’, that is, they literally attract due to their strangeness. Not only is the cult film retroactively constituted as such based on fan response, but more particularly because it produces and regulates the turbulence, eddies, and whirlpools of a kind of chaotic desire that marks the cult — a desire that, in going ‘beyond all reason’, manifests itself both on the level of conscious intellectualization and on the level of affect, that is, the experience of feeling or emotion. What one loves in the cult film is something more than the film — it is the idea of the film as well as the affect produced by the film, the ‘visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion’.

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 talks about the initial reception of the film and its rise to cultdom. It discusses how a film that gets prematurely dismissed as bad is able to rise above by gaining some high profile and highly vocal supporters. One such supporter that was cited was Quentin Tarantino who mentioned The Thing as an inspiration to Reservoir Dogs. The chapter states that this was a crucial stage in the film's journey from flop to classic. It discusses how The Thing qualifies as a cult film citing its budget, its approach to goriness, and its troubled production story. It also discusses the transformations the film had to go through as it was transferred for home-video release, and for cable TV. The chapter describes the film's reception in the 1990s and the decades that have followed. It also discusses the film's influence on films and TV shows in the 2000s.

This chapter analyzes the intersection of cult and science fiction (sf) cinema, focusing on Robot Monster (1953). It argues that sf films have developed a cult reputation and following not only because they are bad films or in some way ‘paracinematic’ but rather because, either intentionally or not, they seem to tap into a double character that, for better or worse, quite often marks the sf film: that ability to seem by turns quite serious, conventional, and compelling, but also more than a bit strained, unserious, even absurd, especially in instances when their special effects become dated and appreciably less appreciated, that is, through a kind of slippage that can make viewers overly conscious of how these works function as films and/or as generic texts, and thus of the special effects' own relationship to these texts. But that is only one connection and, indeed, even without such ‘slippage’, many sf films often seem to be in negotiation between the serious and the strained, to verge on the cult, and this potential kinship says much about both the science fictional and the cult.

This chapter analyzes Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s Bride of the Monster (aka, Bride of the Atom, 1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1956, released 1959), and Glen or Glenda? (1953). While known primarily for their cult status, these films abound in science fiction (sf) iconography and thematics — with their flying saucers and intergalactic intelligences, mad scientists and mutant creatures, and ruminations on the use of advanced technology. Cult films also challenge the distinctions between innovation and ‘badness’, between high and low culture, between acceptable and forbidden subject matter. As a result, our experience of the cult is frequently marked by confusion: a confusion not only of categories, but also of response. In Wood's case, he may be regarded as a misunderstood auteur (even, perhaps, an accidental artist of the avant-garde), or dismissed as one of the ‘worst’ directors of all time.

This introductory chapter presents and analyses a review of Russ Meyer's masterpiece film, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and relates it to other cult films. In the opening of the film, Meyer introduces the key motifs of the film: the primal relationship between sex and violence, the castration anxiety that undergirds male desire, and the tenuous relationship between female subjectivity and objectification. In addition, the audience's ritual invocation of dialogue and facsimiles of characters' costumes transform its inherent banalities into the elements of a primal ceremony. These aspects—the “Eureka!” moment of discovery where the cult object seems to reveal its apparently mystical power—are key components of many cult films.