ABSTRACT
Writings on cult cinema, both popular and academic, lack much engagement with cult cinema’s sonic elements. It is difficult to conceive of the ‘sound’ of cult cinema without initially thinking of music, given that some cult cinema scores have simultaneously a cult following for the musicians alongside a cult following for the film or film’s director. This chapter provides an opportunity to consider other elements of the sound of cult cinema, including dialogue, sound effects, and non-narrative/non-semantic aspects such as noise. It highlights relevant past work that explicitly, and implicitly considers sound in cult cinema, or cult cinema in sound studies. The chapter attempts to map out definitions of cult cinema and shifts these definitions to focus upon cult cinema’s sonic properties. The cult ‘canon’ tends to be dominated by genre films, the dominant characteristics of a film’s soundtrack can cite it within particular genre conventions, that is, certain types of sounds are associated with certain genres.
