ABSTRACT
The problem is not that film marketing has usurped the concept, but rather that: when any film can be marketed commercially as a cult film — i.e. labelled a cult film before it has even been shown in a cinema — then the public relation business has labelled a tidal change in media culture. The condition for this interaction is first of all a distance of time, in several ways: as 1970s spectators people were watching a film made in 1946, but at the same time people were spectators on an opening night, as if the film had been made that same year. The internationally distributed, ritual performances of The Rocky Horror Picture Show audience are well analysed — ever since the film gained its status as a cult film after it had been scheduled in a small Greenwich Village cinema, from April 1976 until four or five years later.
