ABSTRACT
The conceptual mapping of horror would help to re-assess the potential of films preceding the 1960s and 1970s, a process leading to forgotten, neglected, or dismissed filmmakers and their films to be read and consumed as cult horror. The moment in Kendall R. Philipps’ canonical layout when mainstream and margin operate side by side comes with the chapters about the 1960s and the 1970s. Philipps’ canonical lineup ties horror to the emergence of New Hollywood in the 1960s, a cultural shift described by Peter Biskind as an era of unprecedented maturity and artistic achievement within the context of Sixties Counterculture. Horror’s political agenda stretches from left to right despite the genre’s inherently transgressive potential, so horror’s claims to cultural capital stretch from mainstream to the margins. Both the stylistic and auteurial variety of neo horror, as well as its various internal ambiguities, rifts, and ruptures would provide ample traction for the attitudes, standards, and practices of cult cinema.
