Cult Film as a Guide to Life

Fandom, Adaptation, and Identity

I.Q. Hunter

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781623563813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Cult Film as a Guide to Life investigates the world and experience of cult films, from well-loved classics to the worst movies ever made. Including comprehensive studies of cult phenomena such as trash films, exploitation versions, cult adaptations, and case studies of movies as different as Showgirls, Room 237 and The Lord of the G-Strings, this lively, provocative and original book shows why cult films may just be the perfect guide to making sense of the contemporary world. Using his expertise in two fields, I.Q. Hunter also explores the important overlap between cult film and adaptation studies. He argues that adaptation studies could learn a great deal from cult and fan studies about the importance of audiences' emotional investment not only in texts but also in the relationships between them, and how such bonds of caring are structured over time. The book's emergent theme is cult film as lived experience. With reference mostly to American cinema, Hunter explores how cultists, with their powerful emotional investment in films, care for them over time and across numerous intertexts in relationships of memory, nostalgia and anticipation.

Chapter 1

For Virgins Only: A Brief Introduction to Cult Film

I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

In the 1980s, to see Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which he had withdrawn from British distribution, I had to make do with a bootleg video picked up in a market. To see Pasolini’s emetic masterpiece Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975) in a print unmolested by the BBFC required a trip to Paris, where it was screened once a week at midnight in a cinema opposite the Pompidou Centre. I now have both movies uncut on Blu-Ray and over the last couple of months have purchased online or streamed from YouTube many randomly discovered cult films I never thought I’d see without some effort or expenditure – The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961), Deported Women of the SS Special Section (1976), Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977). As for reading material, Peary’s Cult Movies trilogy, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Incredibly Strange Films and other staples of cultists’ shelves in the VHS era are now supplemented by a bewildering plethora of Rough Guides, websites and listicles about cult film.¹ There are, for random example, no less than two full-length books on John Carpenter’s anti-Reaganite retread of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), They Live (1988).² Cult studies has meanwhile become a well-trodden, academically respectable field, with textbooks, undergraduate modules and numerous PhDs on the most esoteric cult-related topics.³ Instead of scarcity, which seems the natural state of cult, there is glut. This is truly, you might think, springtime for cultists.

In spite of such consumer plenty and the predictably extensive Wikipedia entry on cult film, it is nevertheless worth my returning to and expanding on the themes of the Preface in order to introduce the topic in more detail for the benefit of any cult ‘virgins’ out there (as Rocky Horror fans call newbies experiencing the film for the first time). There will be some slippage between a history of cult movies and a précis of academic writing on what is variously defined as a ‘genre’, mode or discursive category (though of course academics, like professional critics, can also be cultists and increasingly the two identities are irreversibly spliced like the BrundleFly in Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986)).

Although this chapter will focus on cult films, bear in mind that it may not be the film itself that is the centre of the cult. There are numerous cult directors such as Oscar Micheaux, Sam Fuller, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, Ed Wood Jr., Doris Wishman, Russ Meyer, Werner Herzog, David Lynch, Lucio Fulci, Stanley Kubrick, Tim Burton, Guy Maddin and the ‘Pope of Trash’, John Waters. In the auteurist perspective of much cult, they are often mysterious like Kubrick, tortured and visionary like talentless ‘Badfilm’ maestro Wood and British horror director, Michael Reeves, or outright bug-eyed crazy, like Fernando Arrabal, the Spanish surrealist director, who is interviewed on a DVD extra for Viva La Muerte (1971) winsomely peeking out from behind a chair he’s holding up in front of his face. There are also cult stars, starlets and character actors (Bruce Lee, Divine, Harry Dean Stanton, Dorothy Stratten, Judy Garland, Claudia Jennings, Dick Miller, Bruce Campbell), and cult performances, riveting in their charismatic strangeness, excess and tantalizing overlap with the actor’s off-screen persona (Crispin Glover, for example, who, in life as well as in Back to the Future and Willard (2003), seems as mad as a box of frogs). Stars’ cult may be distinct from the films to which they contributed, and linked, for example, to their continuing potency as cultural symbols after death. As Mikita Brottman says, ‘The deaths of Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Bruce and Brandon Lee ... were far more significant, culturally and ideologically, than the films they made.’⁴ Then again there are cult soundtracks (Vampyros Lesbos (1971), The Wicker Man (1973)), cult studios (Hammer, Amicus), and a fair few cult special effects maestros (Tom Savini, Rick Baker) and stop-motion animators (Ray Harryhausen, Phil Tippett).

But for now, to keep things manageable, we’ll stick to just the films.

What is – or was – a Cult Film?

To start with the simplest definition: a cult film is a film with a devoted following or subcultural community of admirers.

The word ‘is’ should be regarded with caution in that sentence, given the hazy status of ‘cult film’ these days. It is, was, usually (but certainly not always) a film without broad audience appeal, such as a rediscovered classic; a ‘midnight movie’; or a marginal, trashy, bad or exploitation film. Typically, a cult film is ‘transgressive’ – a word that will come up a lot in this book – in matters of representation, taste or technical competence. Cult films are frequently associated with genres such as exploitation, crime, science fiction, anime (Japanese cartoons) and horror that are acquired tastes and seem in some way oppositional, though there are also numerous art movies (Persona (1966)), documentaries (Grey Gardens (1975)), underground films (Chelsea Girls (1966)), musicals (The Wizard of Oz), and Westerns (Johnny Guitar (1954), The Searchers (1956), even, God help us, Heaven’s Gate (1980)) that make the final cut. Such films are generally either mainstream ones revived years later by dedicated fans in a spirit of nostalgia or revisionism, or commercially unsuccessful films appropriated soon after release by an enthusiastic and usually subcultural audience (countercultural, gay, punk (The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980)), pagan (The Wicker Man), Mod (Quadrophenia (1979)). Having discovered that the films speak to them, cultists celebrate either privately through repeated viewings or socially by, for example, dressing up at screenings. Cult films, which may have crashed at the box office, typically find an audience by word of mouth or on video and DVD or online. Harold and Maude, Blade Runner and Streets of Fire (1984), for instance, were commercial and critical failures on first release and only later became ‘cult classics’, eventually repackaged as such on video and DVD, classed as cult on Netflix, or rereleased to cinemas on the basis of their acquired cult reputation. In other words, films become rather than are born cult. As John Waters once said, nobody wants to direct a cult film because that invariably means birthing a failure. Cult films are adopted orphans and what defines them is the intensity of their fandom ‘beyond all reason’, as J. P. Telotte, quoting Andrew Sarris, put it in one of the first academic collections on the phenomenon.⁵

Cult films are not defined by their textual qualities so much as by wider criteria such as those outlined below in a representative online guide to cult in Bright Lights Film Journal, which lists the distinguishing marks of this ‘super class’ of movie.⁶ Like any genre or retrospectively defined class of film, such as film noir or the ‘mindfuck’ puzzle movie (The Sixth Sense (1999), Inception (2010)), the cult film is a discursive formation, in other words, a term of art constructed by rough agreement by audiences, distributors, critics and so on as it circulates through culture⁷:

1. Marginality	Content falls outside general cultural norms
2. Suppression	Subject to censor, ridicule, lawsuit, or exclusion
3. Economics	Box office flop upon release but eventually profitable
4. Transgression	Content breaks social, moral, or legal rules
5. Cult	following Generates devoted minority audience
6. Community	Audience is or becomes self-identified group
7. Quotation	Lines of dialog become common language
8. Iconography	Establishes or revives cult icon.^8

That is a pretty fair summary of how ‘cult film’ is currently understood and mobilized in talk about movies. You’ll notice that the content of a cult film is left vague beyond its being somehow transgressive or outside the mainstream, though even that is questionable if we invite The Princess Bride and Dirty Dancing through the portals of cultdom. The tension between ‘cult film’ implying, on the one hand, a certain kind of film (offbeat, under the radar, and possibly offensive) which is loved by a self-selecting audience of outsiders and, on the other, any film which has acquired and sustained a fan following well beyond its initial release is an issue we’ll return to throughout the book.

The prehistory of cult can be traced back to the early days of cinema and, for example, the cult of Rudolph Valentino, and the Surrealists’ delight in photogenie and sexual subtexts that made King Kong (1933) such a favourite of theirs.⁹ Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton point to the tradition of cinephile criticism, such as MacMahonism in France, named after the Le MacMahon theatre in Paris, which lauded maverick B-movies and directors through its magazine Présence du Cinema, and the ongoing tradition of cult criticism or at any rate cultish approaches to watching films.¹⁰ Cult is related to cinephilia more generally, which is a personal love of cinema itself rather than a specific film or kind of film, and typically fixes on what Paul Willemen described as ‘the cinephiliac moment’: ‘the fetishizing of fragments of a film, either individual shots or marginal (often unintentional) details in the image, especially those that appear only for a moment’.¹¹ Cult films might well be defined as those films that allow for the maximum number of cinephiliac moments. For the cinephile, the cinema is a holy place with unique emotional and physical satisfactions. While this often implies a distinctly elite, intellectualized attitude to watching movies, it shares with cult an obsessive belief in cinema and its powers of transformation. Sexton has explored the little discussed early uses of cult and associated terms in film culture, and shows that cult originally had a largely negative meaning, implying an irrational attachment to the worthless products of the cultural machine, and only acquired its current more positive use from the 1960s.¹² You could certainly argue that film criticism has always involved a degree of cultism, in the sense of ornery cinephile attachments to the culturally devalued. Auteur critics such as Andrew Sarris (who collected his reviews in Confessions of a Cultist) were cultists by any definition, with their ‘bromantic’ devotion to directors like Fuller and Orson Welles and championing of what Manny Farber called ‘termite art’ against the mainstream.¹³ Parker Tyler, who wrote about Orson Welles ‘as big cult hero’, helped divert cinephile criticism into a new and camp tradition.¹⁴ Even Cahiers du Cinéma’s ‘category E’, denoting films that only seemed under the sway of the dominant ideology but whose contradictions split apart under the pressure of appropriately applied analysis, was arguably a cult category. It legitimized an elite audience of insiders reading films like John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939) and directors like Douglas Sirk in satisfyingly special and bizarre ways inaccessible to his films’ intended mass audience or indeed to virtually anyone else. Cult requires a sense of difference from this imagined Other of clueless consumers of mainstream Hollywood. The development of cinephile enthusiasm for film involved the strenuous recuperation of popular genre cinema, on the assumption not only that it was a serious art form in need of boosting ...