ABSTRACT
Transgression involves an apparent violation of accepted or imposed boundaries, especially those of social acceptability. Transgression in cult cinema functions as a threefold process with substantial degrees of overlap between the demarcations. Ideas of transgression are then taken beyond the confines of the cult texts themselves and are consolidated around audience engagement. Stephanie Watson’s conceptions of transgression refer to ‘The Cinema of Transgression’, perhaps the most cohesive manifestation of a subcultural ideology relating to film, transgression and aspects of ‘cult’. Transgressive content and the rules and regulations that govern such content in wider film culture are never the same and tend to be culturally and temporally specific. Instances of formal regulation and censorship are not only fundamental in constructing cult texts or groupings of cult films, but such instances can also give way to a productive third level of transgression in the formation of active subcultures.
