ABSTRACT
Terms like cult, exploitation, midnight and underground movies or fi lms have frequently been used as synonyms of a wide spectrum of minor, psychotronic, or paracinemas.1 Although all these categories are closely related, they defi ne diverse sites of cinematographic culture and refer to different features. Exploitation cinema, for example, is an industrial, thematic, and aesthetic category that mainly refers to particular circumstances of production, but it can also refer to a separate category of consumption and exhibition. Exploitation fi lms are literally made to exploit the audience. Conversely, cult fi lms may have a range of different production circumstances (from expensive studio fi lms to poverty row quickies) and aesthetics (from classical to avant-garde) but are actually identifi ed as ‘cult fi lms’ by the audience. As Jancovich et al. have pointed out, the term cult refers to the ways in which fi lms are classifi ed in consumption. Generally, the fans self-consciously produce cult fi lms as “cult” objects, irregardless of whether the director may or may not share the fans’ subculture (2003: 1).
