1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema
The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema offers an overview of the field of cult cinema – films at the margin of popular culture and art that have received exceptional cultural visibility and status mostly because they break rules, offend, and challenge understandings of achievement (some are so bad they’re good, others so good they remain inaccessible).
Cult cinema is no longer only comprised of the midnight movie or the extreme genre film. Its range has widened and the issues it broaches have become battlegrounds in cultural debates that typify the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Sections are introduced with the major theoretical frameworks, philosophical inspirations, and methodologies for studying cult films, with individual chapters excavating the most salient criticism of how the field impacts cultural discourse at large. Case studies include the worst films ever; exploitation films; genre cinema; multiple media formats cult cinema is expressed through; issues of cultural, national, and gender representations; elements of the production culture of cult cinema; and, throughout, aspects of the aesthetics of cult cinema – its genre, style, look, impact, and ability to yank viewers out of their comfort zones.
The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema goes beyond the traditional scope of Anglophone and North American cinema by including case studies of East and South Asia, continental Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, making it an innovative and important resource for researchers and students alike.
Introduction: The Cult Cinema Studies Experience
PART I: GENRES AND CYCLES
Genres, Cycles and Modes
- ‘Naughty’, ‘Nasty’, ‘Culty’: Exploitation Film – Ernest Mathijs
- Underground Film and Cult Cinema – Glyn Davis
- Cult-Art Cinema: Defining Cult-Art Ambivalence – David Andrews
- "It happens by accident": Failed Intentions, Incompetence, and Sincerity in Badfilm – Becky Bartlett
- Cult Horror Cinema – Steffen Hantke
- Cult Science Fiction Cinema – Mark Bould
- Cult Comedy Cinema – Seth Soulstein
- The Italian Giallo – Alexia Kannas
- Latsploitation – Dolores Tierney
- Iranian Cult Cinema - Babak Tabarraee
- Rebels Without a Cause: The Bombay Cult Film – Vibhushan Subba
- East Asian Cult Cinema – Robyn Citizen
- Anime Is (Not) Cult: Gainax and the Limits of Cult Cinema – Rayna Dennison
- Blaxploitation – Harry M. Benshoff
- Cult Cinema and Gender – Brenda Austin-Smith
- Cult Cinema and Nostalgia – Renee Middlemost
- Oc/cult Film and Video – Anna Powell
- "It's like looking at your past crimes at a parole hearing": Transgression in Cult Cinema– Tom Watson
- Access All Areas? Anglo-American Film Censorship and Cult Cinema in the Digital Era – Emma Pett
- Cult Cinema and Camp – Julia Mendenhall
- Midnight Movies- Carter Moulton
- Drive-in and Grindhouse Theaters – David Church
- Blood cults: historicising the North American "shot on video" horror movie – Johnny Walker
- Cult Cinema in the Digital Age – Iain Robert Smith
- Cult Cinema and Film Festivals – Russ Hunter
- Conventions and Cosplay – Lynn Zuberbnis
- Grown Woman Shit: A Case for Magic Mike XXL as Cult Text – Amanda Anna Klein
- The Cut between Us: Digital Remix and the Expression of Self– Jennifer Ng
- The Professionalised Fandom of Careers in Cult: "Passionate Work" within Academia and Industry – Matt Hills
- Cult Musicals – Ethan de Seife
- Cult Soundtracks (Music) – James Wierzbicki
- Sounding out cult cinema: the ‘bad’, the ‘weird’ and the ‘old’ – Nessa Johnston
- Inside an Actor's Scrapbook. Heath Ledger's Aesthetic Practice of Unbalancing– Jörg Sternagel
- Special Effects and the Cult Film: Cult Film Production and Analogue Nostalgia on the Digital Effects Pipeline – Leon Gurevitch
- Production Play: Sets, Props, and Costumes in Cult Films – Tamao Nakahara
- Cult Film and Adaptation – I.Q. Hunter
- Cult Film – Cult Television – Stacey Abbott
- "It’s a strange world": David Lynch – Jeffrey Weinstock
- "You guys always bring me the very best violence": Making the Case for Joss Whedon’s The Avengers and Serenity as Mainstream Cult – Erin Giannini
- Anti-Auteur: The Films of Roberta Findlay – Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
- Anna Biller – Jennifer O’Meara
- Alejandro Jodorowsky and El Topo – Antonio Lazaro-Reboll
- Judy Garland – Steven Cohan
- From the Other Side of the Wind: Dennis Hopper – Adrian Martin
- Barbara Steele – Nia Edwards-Behi
- Bruce Lee: Cult (Film) Icon– Paul Bowman
- All He Needs Is Love: The Cult of Klaus Kinski – Ian Cooper
- Crispin Glover – Sarah Thomas
PART II: GLOBAL AND LOCAL CULT CINEMA
Global and Local Cult Cinema
PART III: CRITICAL CONCEPTS
Critical Concepts
PART IV: EXHIBITION, DISTRIBUTION
Cult Film Distribution and Exhibition
PART V: FANDOM
Cult Fandom
PART VI: MUSIC AND SOUND
Sound and Music in Cult Film
PART VII: AESTHETICS AND INTERMEDIALITY
Cult Film Aesthetics
PART VIII: AUTEURS
Cult Auteurs
PART IX: ACTORS
Cult Cinema Acting
Biography
Ernest Mathijs is Professor of Film Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He teaches and writes on cult cinema. With Jamie Sexton he has written Cult Cinema (2011). He is the co-author of 100 Cult Films and the author of The Cinema of David Cronenberg.
Jamie Sexton is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Northumbria University, UK. He is author of Cultographies: Stranger Than Paradise (2018) and co-author with Ernest Mathijs of Cult Cinema (2011). He is currently writing a monograph on American independent cinema and indie music cultures.