ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|78 pages
Genres and cycles
chapter 4|10 pages
“It happens by accident”
part II|54 pages
Global and local cult cinema
part III|59 pages
Critical concepts
chapter 19|10 pages
Access all areas?
part IV|53 pages
Exhibition, distribution
part V|42 pages
Fandom
chapter 29|10 pages
The professionalised fandom of careers in cult
part VI|30 pages
Music and sound
part VII|54 pages
Aesthetics and intermediality
chapter 34|11 pages
Special effects and the cult film
part VIII|52 pages
Auteurs
chapter 39|10 pages
“You guys always bring me the very best violence”
part IX|57 pages
Actors