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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.

The New Wave movement involved a rising science fiction (sf) avant-garde that sought to remake a genre traditionally inclined towards technocratic scientism and conservative narrative style into a more experimental, counterculturally savvy mode of writing whose perspectives on technological modernity had a subversive critical edge. This chapter examines the imbrication of the New Wave with contemporaneous sf cinema, highlighted by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but with a special focus on two low-budget films of the 1970s that have developed a cult reputation and had clear links, textually or tonally, with the movement: Dark Star (1974) and A Boy and His Dog (1975). These two works share not only ideological terrain but also a certain mode of cult reception with New Wave fiction, coming to constitute — along with Kubrick's sf films of the period, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange (1971) — a kind of New Wave cinematic canon.

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.

The 1970s produced an increasingly independent and confrontational approach to cinema in terms of both narrative content and aesthetic display. Filmmakers broke violently with film-making conventions through splatter cinema, which sought to mortify audiences with scenes of explicit gore. This chapter examines the manner in which the science fiction (sf) genre was cultified not just through ‘splatter’ imagery, but through the ‘splattering’ of sf tropes themselves, particularly those surrounding the science/military machine and the creation of monsters, within the changing production context of the 1960s/1970s that privileged independent film production typified by cult auteurs George Romero, Larry Cohen, and David Cronenberg. It considers how the conventions of exploitation merged with sf to create a series of subversive texts, targeted at the growing cult cinema audience of the 1970s, whose ‘interests and concerns — drugs, rock music, sexual experience, alienation from their parents and established society — clearly surfaced in such films’. This new confrontational aesthetic made sf an ideal genre with which to express the cultural rupture at the heart of the decade.

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 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.

This chapter focuses on gender in the intersection of cult and science fiction (sf). Both cult and sf have often been regarded as masculine forms, and the pleasures of excess that cult films celebrate often include the visual pleasures of scantily clad female bodies, images frequently associated with pulp sf's lurid magazine covers of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet sf also has a rich history of interrogating gender attitudes, using images such as aliens to express and examine patriarchal fears. The chapter explores cult's claims to transgression in this context of gender difference, focusing on a number of low-budget sf films of the 1950s and 1960s that have attained cult status, including Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), Devil Girl from Mars (1954), The Astounding She-Monster (1957), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), The Wasp Woman (1959), Monstrosity (aka The Atomic Brain, 1963), Attack of the Puppet People (1957), and The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962). These films demonstrate a dialectic of indulgence and critique that characterizes cult sf's treatment of gender difference, revealing how such difference — as well as differences in educational, cultural, or economic capital — informs the ‘raid’ on legitimate culture that such films stage.

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.

This chapter focuses on Sean Connery, a star who deviated from the expected and challenged performance codes at a relatively early stage in his career, and did so perhaps most spectacularly within the realm of science fiction (sf). At the height of his popularity, Connery opted to deviate from the Bond persona, as well as from the mainstream performance codes embodied in his portrayal of agent 007 by choosing a role in John Boorman's sf effort Zardoz (1974), a film in which he played Zed, a rapist, killer, and truth seeker. The resulting film — and Connery along with it — was universally panned. But in bringing together elements of sf and fantasy, as well as some of the impulses established in the Bond films, Zardoz forced audiences to experience a kind of shock of difference, especially if they recognized the multiple conjoined characteristics, or paradoxes, built into the Connery persona and revealed by John Boorman's sf text. Connery's performance as Zed contextualizes one dimension of the cult film's ‘double feature’ character.

Joss Whedon's failed television series Firefly ran for just three months: September 20, 2002 to December 20, 2002. Yet the fans and the series' makers refused to let it die. Organized expressions of fan interest, such as postcard campaigns and paid advertisements, encouraged the production of a DVD, which the fans carried to first place in sales. This success, and the ongoing determination of the makers and the fans (who call themselves ‘Browncoats’, after the resistance fighters in the series), helped propel the production of the 2005 film Serenity, which continues the story of the Firefly universe. This chapter discusses how the ‘Browncoat’ movement arising from Firefly and Serenity sought to continue the spirit of those texts, extending them beyond the film and television experience and effecting a cultural impact as a result of various sorts of fan activities. Through such behaviours, the Browncoats effectively pose a question of who actually owns both the text that speaks meaningfully to people as it finds a cult life, and the very media through which it manages to gain that life.