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This chapter outlines the approaches, definitions, and theories used throughout the book, before giving a structural overview of each chapter. Firstly, the chapter directly addresses the accusations of gimmickry that have been directed towards extreme art film, mapping the reception climate and evaluating the most popular and widespread responses. From this, it becomes clear that a lack of attention has been paid to the commercial identity of the film, and the way extremity informs its commercial persona. Thereafter, the chapter historicises extreme art cinema, positioning it as an outcome of taste slippage, and the blurring of boundaries between art cinema and exploitation cinema. By paying particular attention to representations of the body within both highbrow and lowbrow cinema, the chapter argues that convincing similarities exist between the cinematic traditions. Additionally, the chapter challenges the popular Francophile definition of extreme art cinema, broadening the geographic scope of the field by looking at films from Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Italy and Belgium. Finally, the chapter introduces paratextual theory, and details the way the preeminent ideas will be applied to the discussion of extreme art film paratexts.

Using Paul McDonald’s, Barbara Klinger’s, and Jonathan Gray’s work on the home entertainment industries, this chapter positions the DVD and Blu-ray as a fundamental paratextual form. Establishing it as a bearer of meaning capable of changing the commercial identity of the film, the chapter stresses the role these objects play in shaping the cultural persona of a film. The chapter then outlines the marketing practices that have historically defined art and exploitation cinema. The chapter highlights the consistency in which art film distributors have promoted the figure of the auteur and the country of origin on marketing materials, while foregrounding existing critical acclaim and any film festival success (such as awards, nominations or appearances). The chapter then explores exploitation marketing, charting the frequency with which distributors opt to use ballyhoo dares and promises in blurbs or taglines, the regularity with which they knowingly select images that disgust and provoke, how they will act quickly to milk cinematic trends, and effectively turn critical condemnation into hyperbole. Finally, the chapter places the book’s discussion of the home entertainment product alongside other studies of taste slippage, extending the histories established by the likes of Mark Betz, Joan Hawkins and Kevin Heffernan.

This chapter covers the case of Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), the first Japanese horror film released into cinemas by Tartan after the notable impact of Ring, and a formative moment in the development of the nascent Asia Extreme brand. This chapter argues that Audition was associated much more strongly with Orientalist views of Japan by critics, partly as a mechanism used to reject the film’s theme and message. This chapter lays out some of the theoretical groundwork that will inform later analyses, specifically academic debates concerning transgression in cinema and the merits of the visually explicit ‘body horror’ sub-genre. It conducts a detailed analysis of the extensive and innovative marketing campaign for the film, comparing the film’s apparent appeal in the UK to its original marketing in Japan. The film’s critical reception in analysed in detail, as responses ranged from high praise to alarm and derision, with critics divided over issues of exploitation, violence, feminism, and Orientalism. The legacy and continued relevance of Audition is also discussed.

From the Shaw Brothers production line to the clones of Bruce Lee, Hong Kong cinema has long been seen as driven by raw commercial concerns. Like many other commercial film industries, most notably Hollywood, production in the Hong Kong film industry has also been focused on popular cycles of production. These have included phases when family melodramas, historical swordplay and kung-fu films, screwball comedies and triad based crime films have all proved successful at the domestic and regional box-office. As with other commercially focused film industries there has also been a low budget sector within Hong Kong industry. Here producers and directors have fashioned energetic, populist films that were designed to appeal to audiences’ desire for films that contained sex and violence. The horror genre seemed the perfect vehicle to satiate these needs. This chapter explores the work of filmmakers who worked at this rougher end of Hong Kong horror in the 80s and 90s. As well as placing them into this exploitation context of production, this chapter discusses their excessive content and the visual style employed by directors such as Kuei Chih-hung (Killer Snakes, Hex) and Herman Yau (The Untold Story, Ebola Syndrome) to deliver their exploitative content.

This chapter focuses on Rollerball's reception, the immediate critical reaction and box office performance and more recent critical commentary. It studies how the publicity efforts of the film's distributor, United Artists (UA), helped to pump prime controversy over the film's violence. In the United States, at least, this overshadowed Norman Jewison's desire to make a picture critiquing corporate power and rising violence in sport, contributed to its poor critical reception as an exploitation film, and even fuelled short-lived speculation that Rollerball might become a real sport. The chapter then looks at the film's cultural influence, concluding with some brief remarks on Rollerball's place in the broader body of murder game films. This is a broad cinematic output that spans reality TV parodies, Italian exploitation cinema and B-movies, mainstream science fiction, and YA dystopian films.

This chapter assesses how, in Shivers (1975), David Cronenberg uses image and sound as discrete channels to extend narrative space and alter the significance of the visual information with the context provided by the aural. By coupling visual pleasure to aural infodump, Cronenberg not only smooths the audience's experience of a passage of pure exposition, but also qualifies their enjoyment in a way that produces a comic shudder. The chapter then considers exploitation cinema and exploitation film spectatorship. The film's association of a desiring female subject with fear raises the question of whether one is watching a misogynist film. The chapter also reflects on Cronenberg's Canadian liberalism. Moreover, it looks at the most significant evaluations of Shivers.

Chapter four examines the film’s uncertain position between arthouse and grindhouse. Possession held the paradoxical position of being showcased at the world’s leading art cinema festival in competition for the illustrious Palme d’Or, and being included in the United Kingdom’s ‘video nasties,’ a list of ‘obscene’ or otherwise questionable films, mostly comprised of violent exploitation fare. The film underwent heavy cuts for the US release. In an attempt to capitalise on the film’s horror elements, almost a quarter of the original film was removed rendering an already enigmatic film utterly incomprehensible. Chapter four unpacks the fraught history of Possession’s conflicting status as art and trash, paying particular attention to the shift the film underwent upon its release on VHS–in terms of its marketing and reception outside of the festival circuit, its butchering for the US market, and its odd place amidst other notorious video nasties. It also takes a dive in the BBFC’s archival records on Possession, shedding new light on the film’s reception history.

In “Oscillating Histories: Representations of Comfort Women in Chinese Language Film and Television,” Lily Wong confronts the dark historical legacy of the comfort woman through the lens of Hong Kong and PRC exploitation cinema and television miniseries. While the comfort women issue has become a hotbed for social movements in Korea, Taiwan, Japan China, and elsewhere where protesters demand justice through apologies and reparations, one of the more unexpected responses has been a series of Chinese-language films that frame historical violence as soft-core titillation. In this chapter Wong navigates the often murky ethical waters and complex sexual politics surrounding such productions as Shaw Brothers’ Bamboo House of Dolls (Nü jizhongying, 1972) and the television miniseries Imperial Comfort Women (Diguo junji, 1995).