100 Cult Films: BFI Screen Guides 9781838710545, 9781844574087

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Acknowledgments

Above all, we would like to thank Rebecca Barden and Sophia Contento of the British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan for initiating this project, and for seeing it through all stages of preparation and execution. We are also grateful to the BFI stills archive for the assistance in the selection of pictures and illustrations, and to Belinda Latchford for the careful proofreading of the manuscript. We would like to thank the following for their assistance and generosity in sharing materials, offering peer advice and providing useful feedback: David Church, Caroline Hardman, Ian Hunter, Russ Hunter, Alexia Kannas, Dana Keller, Giovanni Memola, Julian Petley, Jack Sargeant, Jamie Sexton, Iain Robert Smith, Paul Smith, Dax Sorrenti and Aaron Taylor. We particularly owe thanks to Linda Fenton Malloy for the design of the cultsurvey.org website. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the Centre for Cinema Studies at the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia, of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant # 12R45147), of the Cult Film Archive and Department at Brunel University, and of Cine-Excess, the International Conference on Global Cult Film. We would also like to thank the cult distributors and exhibitors who have assisted with the provision of additional research materials and stills for this volume, particularly Martin Nash (Nouveaux Pictures), Roberta Lechurgo (Argent Films), Garwin SpencerDavison (Shameless Films) and Jean-Paul Dorchain of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. The authors also wish to thank all the cult directors and performers whose thoughts and critical comments have so enriched this volume. In particular, we would like to thank Dario Argento, Pupi Avati, Alex Cox, Ruggero Deodato, Jesús Franco, Lloyd Kaufman, H. G. Lewis, Christina Lindberg, (the late) Aristide Massaccesi, Takashi Miike, Franco Nero, George A. Romero and Brian Yuzna. Unless otherwise stated, these comments are extracted from wider interviews conducted by Xavier Mendik and are reproduced here courtesy of the author.

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Foreword

Only a book devoted to the phenomenon of so-called cult films1 could feature a list of titles that includes both It’s a Wonderful Life and Two Thousand Maniacs!. I guess the usual idea is that all the essays offered here are about movies that certain niche followers love but that remain obscure or unappreciated by the culture at large. You could therefore question the inclusion of popular, even beloved titles like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca. It’s certainly true that these arguably great movies have engendered their own devoted following, but their fans are as much mainstream as niche. Whereas devotees of Café Flesh and Don’t Torture a Duckling can be secure in the knowledge that their obsessions are pretty much defined, even enhanced, by the general unfamiliarity of the public at large with such films. So what makes a cult film? Does it have to be obscure, or commercially unsuccessful or critically dismissed? Obviously not. But it helps. Many of the films discussed herein fit one of the above descriptions, but others can be simply very extreme (Bad Taste, Man Bites Dog, Cannibal Holocaust), in terrible taste (Nekromantik, Pink Flamingos), artily impenetrable (El Topo) or just plain terrible (Manos, the Hands of Fate, Deadly Weapons). Some are all of these, and others are among the most interesting movies ever made. It’s all pretty subjective. Otherwise, why include the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and not the second? Why Suspiria and not Kill Baby Kill? Why Fight Club and not Blue Velvet? Chances are you may be able to answer these questions yourself after plowing through these fascinating remembrances, observations and ruminations on the ever-changing, ever-evolving phenomenon of cult film. You may even join the cult yourself. Joe Dante, June 2011

1. As opposed to Psychotronic films, which are a similar, but nonetheless specific offshoot. 100 CULT FILMS

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Introduction

In recent years, cult cinema has moved from the pulp periphery to the centre of critical debate. From initially being celebrated in fanzines and journalistic essays, the study of cult has now become a key part of film criticism and media/cultural studies theory. Numerous essays, collections and conferences have been devoted to the cult movie and the specifics of its viewing experience. Thanks to a number of significant studies (many of them listed in our ‘Key Reading’ section) cult films now constitute an established part of film studies. However, while these crucial studies have identified the aesthetics, theories and audiences of cult cinema, this has often occurred at the expense of a consideration of the movies themselves. This book offers an overview of some of the most influential cult movies of the last century. Unlike previous critical/journalistic approaches to cult (where film titles are often namechecked but left underexplored) 100 Cult Films offers detailed analyses of 100 films and their unique receptions that we believe to be instrumental to the canon of cult cinema. In essence, cult cinema depends on an uneasy ambiguity between audience celebration and filmic achievement (or occasionally, underachievement). Put philosophically, a cult-film experience relies on a drive, a search with a strong sense of involvement, without real aim, for some pure insight into a profound form of truth. Since that truth is hardly ever found, much of the search itself (its endless circularity, its level of expertise, its connectedness, its sharedness) becomes the focal point. The cult film experience is thus ‘wasteful’: a collective sentiment of shared emotions in the absence of purpose. Formulated a bit more practically, a cult film is a movie with a devoted following, but that following is inspired by a number of salient elements in the films. 100 Cult Films reflects that ambiguity. Among the elements of a cult film usually cited as significant in triggering that devotion (or in provoking debate around which followings can situate themselves) are well-travelled theoretical concepts such as transgression, abjection, freakery, utopia, exotica, ‘badness’, intertextuality and irony – most of which refer to some sort of clash or transfer between otherwise incommensurable forms of representation: beautiful and ugly, good and bad, common and unusual, close and far, serious and insincere. Each of these concepts upsets notions of normality and taste. Among the most visible articulations of these concepts are fractured representations of time (especially time travel, imaginings of the ‘end of time’ or the ‘wasting’ of time), a preoccupation with ‘little people’ (any kind of band of misfits or have-nots, really), controversial depictions of sex and violence (and very often sexual violence, especially rape), substance abuse (preferably with visual hallucinatory effects), critiques of capitalism (often disguised as critiques of ‘efficiency’) and, of course, depictions of religious cultism. If one looks at what is often presented as the canon of cult cinema it is remarkable (remarkable because it seems so redundant) that many of its films are actually about forms of religious sectarianism. But the elements that instigate a cult following can also be much more modest in scope and ramshackle in meaning – details such as rabbits, pigeons or bees, or slippages in acting performances or poor cinematography. Any combination of hammy acting, a full 100 CULT FILMS

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moon and a poorly executed depiction of a ‘bad drug trip’ (is this a description of a certain Vincent Price movie? Or The Big Lebowski, 1998?) can lead to a highly committed fan following. Often, these followings attain subcultural status: the links between Goth girls, otaku, metalheads, stoners, hippies, anarchists, slackers, sweders, drag queens, steampunks, cyberpunks, fanboys, Riot Grrls, ‘Dudes’ and rogues of any sort are abundant, and several of them have earned high-profile case studies. One important aspect this points to is that cultism is a form of connectedness, a way of engaging with culture in which links between kinds of marginal taste offer a path, or meaning, for life. It also means that the notion of cult cinema is closely linked to that of idiosyncratic, partisan and oppositional taste. This then has made objective and impartial definitions of cult cinema virtually impossible – though we acknowledge several brave attempts, including our own. In this book we would first of all like to let the films and their aggregate speak for themselves, and through our discussions of them we hope our own voice – sometimes of both of us, sometimes a single voice – becomes clear as well. Let us briefly overview the whole 100 films. To some extent, our selection reflects a consensus on what the core films in the canon of cult cinema are (Casablanca, 1942, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975, El Topo, 1970, etc). This consensus canon mostly contains films that have been discussed as cults both through their peculiar receptions and through their textual characteristics, and that can be regarded as both trendsetting and as exemplaric. Next to that, we have made an attempt to bring into view some of the presumptions underpinning that canon by including films from outside the Anglophone or Western spheres, films reflecting female and feminist approaches or films from outside centres of production and exhibition usually associated with cult cinema (such as experimental film, comedy, the musical, nontheatrical cinema). A handful of films was selected to provide a reflection on how personal tastes can clash with widely held views on cult cinema (Begotten, 1991, The Vanishing, 1988, Don’t Torture a Duckling, 1972, and some others we hope you will want to discover for yourself). Our selection makes every attempt to cover the global presence of cult cinema. We present films from eighteen countries. We have been careful not to give too much dominance to American cinema in our list – 55 of the 100 films hail from the United States. There are good reasons why so many cults have American antecedents: the authority of genres such as science fiction and horror, the long-lasting appeal of some classical Hollywood films, the eagerness of financial backers to ‘make it big’, the ready availability of trained crews in the fringes of the established industry and the purchasing commitment of American audiences (especially in college environments) are some of them. Wherever possible however, we have attempted to look beyond the US-centric scope of much of cult-cinema studies. Outside the US, several countries have developed national cult traditions of their own. Italy has become known for the giallo, mondo film and Spaghetti Western. Hong Kong has received recognition for martial arts (kung-fu) films, and heroic bloodshed crime thrillers. Japan has acquired a reputation for its erotic niche cinema, anime and horror (especially the wave of so-called Japanese horror or J-horror from the late 1990s onwards). The films of Dario Argento, Bruce Lee and Takashi Miike are among the most visible exponents of these cults. Giallo fans, martial-arts aficionados and ‘otaku’ have come to typify cult fans. Beyond these core nations, this screen guide also wants to call attention to the cult followings for films worldwide. The often unpredictable nature of cult receptions has seen countries not usually associated with the canon deliver great cult films: Belgium, 2

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Canada, Indonesia, Jamaica, Mexico, New Zealand and the Netherlands, to name a few. We are delighted our book contains a smattering of films from these countries. Several critics have argued that cult cinema is a form of genre cinema and/or consists solely of films that belong to particular genres. There is some truth in that. Its recent proliferation has given cult cinema the reputation of a genre. Critics, producers and distributors have started treating it as one. Within this process of genre creation, some traditional genres, such as horror, science fiction and fantasy seem well represented. Though perhaps fewer scholars would admit it, pornography too is a core component of cult as genre. And of course the marginalisation of the consumption of pornography sets it up as a cult – as a pathology of culture. But other genres (and genre-type categories of film) such as sexploitation, surrealism, anime, Spaghetti Westerns, road movies, gialli, martial-arts films and underground films, are also present. Our selection reflects this diversity. We have tried to balance films from genres traditionally associated with cult devotion, such as horror, science fiction or fantasy, with examples from types less often associated with cultism. For horror, quantitatively the most prominent genre, we have attempted to weigh entries across regions, decades and subgenres (Gothic, slasher, body-horror, rape-revenge …). It is also worth mentioning that we have tried to balance representations of generic reading strategies, such as camp, kitsch, hype, ‘coolness’, etc. Furthermore, we have made an effort to include films that defy genre classification altogether (Begotten, Eraserhead, 1977, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, 1988), and some that even though they belong to a genre are so poorly executed they refuse to be contained by it (Manos, the Hands of Fate, 1966). A few areas of cult cinema are only represented in skeleton fashion, namely classical Hollywood, blockbusters and musicals. For each of these formats, we have decided to only include those that were absolutely pivotal to our personal positions. The reason is that we believe these genres are represented in plenty of other books, writings, and indeed BFI Screen Guides that will more than honour their cultist aspects as well. The wide diversity of directors 100 Cult Films displays is another point worth noting. While some filmmakers have achieved notoriety and fame as cult directors, the majority of cult classics come from directors whose careers are not universally lauded. Cults develop incidentally, often against mainstream tastes. They are definitely unplanned, and some films become cult in spite of a lack of directorial skill. For a long time, ‘cult’ meant the kiss of death in business terms. And some cult directors have had such eccentric careers they made no more than a few films. All this meant that very few directors are represented by multiple films. Only six directors feature twice: Dario Argento, David Cronenberg, Peter Jackson, Terry Gilliam, Alejandro Jodorowsky and George A. Romero. They form the core of the cult auteur canon. The majority of these auteurs are male. It has been argued that cult films are ‘masculine’, partly because they often contain exploitation elements that can be said to ‘objectify’ women, but also that most of cult fandom carries a masculine ‘tone’. Indeed most cult-film overviews contain no films made by women at all. We made a conscious effort to rectify this – and we found it was actually not that difficult to do. Our book contains five films directed by women that we immediately felt qualified for inclusion: Deadly Weapons (Doris Wishman, 1974), Freak Orlando (Ulrike Ottinger, 1981), Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987), Tank Girl (Rachel Talalay, 1995), and Baise-moi (Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000). This is still a very small representation. It excludes films from Stephanie Rothman (Velvet Vampire, 1971), Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 1975), Catherine Breillat (Romance, 1999), Ida Lupino (The Hitch-Hiker, 1953), Dorothy Arzner (The Wild Party, 100 CULT FILMS

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1929) or Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, 2008), each of which could easily have made it into the selection. Because of cult cinema’s flirtations with, and challenges to, the margins of conformity, several of the films in our selection are by directors who have been embraced as creators of camp and queer cinema, thereby calling into question their ‘masculinity’. The presence of Kenneth Anger, Jean Cocteau, Harry Kümel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, John Waters and James Whale testifies to this. Indeed ‘queer readings’ of films are an integral part of the cult viewing experience. Furthermore, a few films in our list, while directed by males, are equally the work of other creative personnel, and are sometimes identified as feminist through actresses and/or screenwriters. That is certainly the case for films such as Ginger Snaps (2000) or Daughters of Darkness (1971). Some films also problematise the representation of gender in spite of their exploitational aspirations (Showgirls, 1995, Coffy, 1973, Angel of Vengeance, 1981, Lady Terminator, 1988). Finally, some films in our list have become known as ‘women’ cult films because of their female following (such as Dirty Dancing, 1987). We have tried to present a view of cult cinema that is balanced across the decades, but readers will discover in this book an emphasis on the 1970s and 80s – an emphasis 100 Cult Films shares with most other overviews (Danny Peary’s seminal collection is a notable exception). The reasons for the dominance of the 70s and 80s are numerous. Among them are the midnight-movie phenomenon, which flourished in the 1970s, the booms in genre fandom of those decades and the establishment of fringe film festivals. The introduction of the VCR changed repeat-viewing protocols in the 1980s, and it constitutes another reason why there is an emphasis on cult films from that decade. Another, more subjective reason for the dominance of the 70s and 80s lies in the age of the authors – it fully explains why 1987 is the single most prominent year in our selection. We are well aware that our rationales for selection will not please every cult fan or critic. Where are the films of Mario Bava, Werner Herzog, Jean Rollin or Nick Zedd? Why are there no films from Eastern Europe? Surely, films such as Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972), Danger: Diabolik (1968), Rape of the Vampire (1968), Of Freaks and Men (1998) or The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) deserve a place in this book? Where are British classics The Dam Busters (1955), Peeping Tom (1960) or any (any!) Hammer horror movie? And how is it possible that Rebel without a Cause (1955) and Titanic (1997) are not included? Such challenges are valid. Our only defence against them is that all of these films were seriously considered (and indeed all appeared in draft versions of the selection). If the format had allowed it, we would have squeezed these titles in and pretended there were still only 100 entries. We’d squeeze a few more in too. After all, a form of cinema that challenges the very notion of rationality should be able to also challenge that oh so Roman century limit, not? Danny Peary aforementioned overview gives an appendix list of several hundred more cult films, and in the Screen Guide to 100 Film Noirs, the authors end the book with ‘another 100 film noirs’. We decided to stick to just 100 and open a forum for comments online, on the website . On that site, we welcome feedback and invite readers to post their comments, and their ideas on which films they feel deserve a place in the 100 Cult Films. We look forward to hearing from you. The website brings us to the last point of this introduction. We had some difficulty choosing the 100th film. Relatively speaking, the first decade of the 2000s is underrepresented in our selection. Because cults often take a long time to appear on the cultural radar, many cult followings from 4

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that decade have not yet gained wide visibility. The Room, for instance, was originally released in 2003, and only in the last few years has it become a veritable cult around the world. For our book to address the most recent cults we designed an online poll. This poll launched on the website in March 2011 and ran for two months. It presented a selection of twenty-five films from the years 2004–10, all of which have some existing cult presence (some more than others). It asked respondents three questions: (1) their top-three choices; (2) an explanation for their choice; and (3) and their choice for the film in our list they felt was least likely to become a cult film (if one follows a certain oppositional logic one could argue that the winner in this category should be the 100th film in our selection!). The winner was determined through a combination of quantitative and qualitative results (i.e. the number of votes and the weight of arguments for or against a film). A full outline of the poll, the methods and the detailed, contextualised results, can be found on . After a photo finish, the winner of the poll was In Bruges (2008). It became our 100th cult film.

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2001: A Space Odyssey US, 1968 – 148 mins Stanley Kubrick

Fan devotion for Stanley Kubrick, and for 2001 in particular, is incredibly robust. It might as well be called a church or an ideology instead of a cult. 2001’s fans will defend their object of adoration with a fierceness and imperviousness few films enjoy. A large measure of that commitment is the result of 2001’s uncompromising vision and visual genius. Of all of Kubrick’s films, 2001 is the most ambitious, and the most mysterious. Its subject is no less than the history and destiny of humankind, from ‘the dawn of man’ (the first segment’s title) all the way to ‘beyond the infinite’ (the final segment). During prehistory a black monolith appears to a tribe of humanoid apes. Immediately afterwards they discover how to use tools and – subsequently – warfare. Flashforward to the year 2001. The black monolith has appeared again, near the planet Jupiter this time, and a team of astronauts is dispatched. Their mission is sabotaged by onboard computer HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain), who kills the astronauts. Only Dave (Keir Dullea) remains alive. He disables HAL and steer his craft into the monolith. A twenty-minute sequence of hallucinatory, near-abstract imagery ensues that is, simultaneously, a fertilisation scene, an intergalactic trip, a Mandelbrot sequence on acid, a travelogue before the dawn of time, a super-saturated hallucination and the surface of an eye – of perception itself. Dave finally finds himself in a baroque room. He has aged. As he sees his future self die, the monolith is there again. A star child is born. To the triumphant tones of Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’, the child approaches the planet earth. In the last image it looks us straight in the eye. 2001’s highly speculative imagery spawned considerable debate. Cosmic in its scope, the film touches on everything from human evolution to artificial intelligence. The black monolith may be a god, or nature at its most tremendous – the film certainly suggests, however obliquely, that people’s fates are bound up with forces in the universe that we do not fully grasp. There is also the motif of the battle of man-versus-machine: in order to survive, Dave has to eliminate HAL (the name is a pun on IBM, taking the preceding letters in the alphabet). Yet such speculation is almost pushed aside by the experience of the aesthetic achievement of 2001 as a ‘trip’. The film presents a fully furnished, hyper-detailed world, of which we get a highly distorted view. The revolutionary use of models to visualise the galaxy gives the story an overwhelming, epic scale. Camera angles are daring and, often, disorienting. The lighting is sharp and the film makes abundant use of highly saturated colours. The tempo is deliberately slow. This style makes watching 2001 a demanding, immersive exercise of endurance that – gradually – takes on the characteristics of a drug trip. As Mathijs and Sexton (2011) observe, for many 2001 ‘proved pleasurable to watch in a drugged state’. Almost as crucial as the visuals is 2001’s musical soundtrack. Kubrick ignored a specially commissioned track by Alex North (his composer for Spartacus, 1960), and instead opted for an eclectic selection of classical music. According to Kevin Donnelly, the role of non-diegetic music, especially of adagios and ethereal pieces 6

DIRECTOR Stanley Kubrick PRODUCER Stanley Kubrick WRITER Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke (story: Arthur C. Clarke) CINEMATOGRAPHY Geoffrey Unsworth SPECIAL EFFECTS Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Trumbull, Wally Veevers, Tom Howard EDITING Ray Lovejoy MUSIC Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss, Jr, Aram Khatchaturian, György Ligeti PRINCIPAL CAST Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Daniel Richter, Leonard Rossiter

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‘can physically affect viewers’. That is certainly true for the frightening, otherworldly excerpt from György Ligeti’s ‘Atmospheres’ that opens the film. Ligeti’s ghostly soundscapes reappear at crucial moments during 2001, as do long, punctuated silences and prolonged sounds (alarm beeps, computers’ drones, whirs and buzzes, pronounced breathing) – all creating a sense of vastness unparalleled in cinema. Kubrick’s employment of music supersedes functionality; rather than merely supporting the visuals, it carries them, and dictates their duration. 2001’s release at the height of the momentum of 1960s counterculture was ambiguous. As a trip with a philosophical undertone, it drew praise, but for many the film was not radical

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enough to become totemic for its generation. Over the years, however, its following grew steadily. As the science-fiction genre became more popular, 2001 became known as its ‘big bang moment’, a status it received not just from fanzine bibles such as Cinéfantastique and Starlog but also from a new generation of film-makers, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas prominent among them. Rewatching 2001 today is unsettling. The visuals and sounds are as strong and suggestive as before. With regard to one of its messages (don’t trust machines), one cannot escape the impression that what Kubrick warned for has happened: we have become incapable of turning the machines off. EM

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Akira Japan, 1988 – 124 mins Katsuhiro Otomo

The 1980s saw an acceleration of popular entertainment from East Asia, spearheaded by Akira, an apocalyptic epic anime based on a thirty-two-volume manga written by director Katsuhiro Otomo. It introduced a new kind of audience experience of deep immersion into a virtual, tentacled storyworld where not the narrative or plot, but the meandering asides, the detailed backgrounds, religious and philosophical speculations on the impact of technology on humans and the hyper-reflexive associations with other media texts create a dense network of possible meanings in which fans loved to get lost. This experience was exemplified by the term ‘otaku’ – basically fanboy 2.0. There is much to get lost in in Akira. The story’s post-nuclear neo-Tokyo is a complex maze of interconnected areas – it looks a bit like the inside of a body. The narrative of a cynical youth biker gang led by Kaneda and his protégé Tetsuo (who becomes tangled up in an experiment that gives him superpowers with which he can destroy the entire world), is one of brutal confrontation: state forces, revolutionary anarchic terrorists and lone, insecure teen rebels face off amid a set-up littered with casual moments of hyper-detailed violence. One example: when a gang member is run over by a motorcycle his arm twitches awkwardly as it passes underneath the machine. Police brutality is rampant, and there is cruelty everywhere (animals are killed, protesters executed, children bullied). Woven through this are references to all of cult cinema: biker gang leader Kaneda models himself on James Dean (red leather jacket and all); there are frequent nods to samurai and martial-arts films, to fairytales and superhero movies, to film noir and cyborg science fiction, especially when Tetsuo loses an arm and constructs an inorganic new one. There is even a cameo appearance of that most cultist of motives: a giant rabbit. Over all this rolls a pulsating soundtrack of drums, organs and choirs – there is no time for pauses or comfort in Akira; everyone is always on the edge. Akira’s reception at the time was mixed. There was admiration for the aesthetic innovations and the ‘urban’, ‘networked’ and ‘subtextured’ stream of details and interconnections. There were also concerns. Akira paints a bleak picture of a generation of ‘hedonistic fools’ in a futureless world of corruption, chaos, terror and eternal pain. This despair is reflected in cynical techno-philosophies, in anxieties over the abuses of ‘divine’ authority like the one that Tetsuo acquires, and which refer to Japan’s history of nuclear devastation. For many reviewers, Akira was part of the cyberpunk movement of dystopic and techno-driven science fiction, exemplified by William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer. But Akira transcends that generic tag. Its supernatural moments reveal a metaphysical reflection on the beginnings of space and time, the shared memories of humanity and the origins of knowledge (much of this is embodied by Kei, a girl medium fighting with the terrorists). It is an interrogation of spirituality in the face of science and destruction – two manifestations of the mystical life-force Akira, a boy whose childhood was destroyed. And it is above all a meditation on the right to have a future, a right that is hesitantly encapsulated in the unfinished phrase that 1 0 0 C U LT F ILMS

DIRECTOR Katsuhiro Otomo PRODUCER Haruyo Kanesaku, Shunzo Kato, Yutaka Maseba, Ryohei Suzuki, Hiroe Tsukamoto WRITER Katsuhiro Otomo, Izo Hashimoto (manga: Katsuhiro Otomo) EDITING Takeshi Seyama ORIGINAL MUSIC Shoji Yamashiro PRINCIPAL CAST (ORIGINAL VOICES) Mitsuo Iwata, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama, Tetsusho Genda, Hiroshi Otake

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ends the film ‘but someday we ought to be able to … because it has already begun’. Critics struggled with such themes, dismissing them as Zen babble. But otaku fans seized on them, as elements that enabled a never-ending debate, the flow of which is more important than any resolutions it might reach. As Hiroki Azuma (2009) observes, for the otaku fan the blips and links in the database are endlessly more fascinating than the results these yield (results that are open to abuse). Aren’t gods uninterpreted data-in-capsules? This split between critical discourse and otaku discourse has helped Akira achieve a firm cult

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reputation. It made otaku relevant as a force for gaining insights into cultural phenomena. Today, Akira has become a classic, the film that ‘brought the anime into the mainstream’. It has itself become part of a network of references, from Ghost in the Shell (1995) to The Matrix (1999) and Batman (1989). Actually, in the now widespread otaku fandom of anime, and in its function as exemplar of transnational cultism, Akira has become a sort of Akira – a boy whose childhood has been destroyed. EM

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Angel of Vengeance (aka Ms. 45) US, 1981 – 80 mins Abel Ferrara

With his debut movie The Driller Killer (1979), New York-based indie icon Abel Ferrara offered a powerful study of how the desolate cityscape leads to mental decline. In that movie, a young artist named Reno (played by Ferrara himself under the pseudonym Jimmy Laine) struggles with a fear of being submerged into the urban squalor that surrounds him. From its opening sequence, The Driller Killer is clearly established as a tale of urban psychosis. What ultimately haunts this character is the terror of being absorbed into the filth and debris of his city environment. This paranoia is evidenced early in the film, when a disgusted Reno discovers that his long absent father is actually one of the many vagrants who litter the city. It is to these spaces of filth and despair that Ferrara’s character is drawn, as he embarks on a murderous campaign against the dispossessed, who remind him of this wayward parent. It is a similar preoccupation with the abject cityscape that dominates Ferrara’s next movie Angel of Vengeance, which begins with the shocking image of the mute seamstress Thana (played by screenwriter Zoë Lund, under her birth name of Tamerlis) being dragged into the garbage-strewn alleyways and assaulted by a masked attacker (played once again by Ferrara). This opening violation is made all the more shocking by the fact that it is followed by a second sexual assault, perpetrated by an opportunist burglar lying in wait in Thana’s apartment. When the felon realises that the dishevelled young woman is unable to verbalise her distress, he also attempts to assault her before being overpowered by the heroine, who bludgeons him to death with the steam press she uses in her work. Rather than report the homicide to the police, Thana dismembers the corpse and distributes it across the decaying urban sprawl, before appropriating her former attacker’s handgun and enacting a campaign of execution against the male rapists, killers and peddlers who occupy the walkways of this unstable urban sphere. This campaign of vengeance climaxes at a standout carnivalesque party scene, when Lund’s character goes on a killing spree targeting all the males assembled at the fancy-dress bash (momentarily pausing at one potential victim dressed in a bridal gown, before his glistening moustache reveals his gender … and his fate). It is only when one of Thana’s female co-workers stabs her from behind, that the doomed heroine is able to utter her only dialogue in the movie: whispering the word ‘sister’ before she expires. As with The Driller Killer before it, Ferrara’s second feature stands in stark contrast to standard representations of Hollywood horror in circulation at the time, with both movies focusing on potential male, rather than female victims. In this respect, it is little surprise that Angel of Vengeance is one of the few maleauthored, independent rape-and-revenge movies from the 70s to gain a feminist reappraisal for its representation of women. It is also certainly true that Ferrara’s low-budget trailblazer provided a fruitful template for later mainstream representations of female vengeance/friendship such as Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991). 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Abel Ferrara PRODUCER Richard Howorth, Mary Kane, Rochelle Weisberg WRITER Nicholas St John CINEMATOGRAPHY James Momel EDITING Christopher Andrews ORIGINAL MUSIC Joe Delia PRINCIPAL CAST Zoë Lund, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto, Helen McGara, Nike Zachmanoglou, Abel Ferrara

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However, what makes Ferrara’s vision of female revolt so powerful is not just Lund’s magnetic performance, but also the highly stylised format in which her quest occurs. Using Thana’s inability to communicate verbally as a structuring narrative device, Angel of Vengeance is a movie where duration is foregrounded, with long passages devoid of discourse and drawing attention to the pro-filmic features in their own right. Added to this, the film’s soundtrack (composed by longtime Ferrara collaborator Joe Delia) enlists a variety of experimental audio effects to emphasise the heroine’s isolation within the male-dominated sphere of communication. These distorted speech effects are particularly marked in the film’s climactic disco

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slaughter scene, with the reverbed soundtrack and slow-motion images of Thana executing all the assembled males while dressed in a nun’s outfit constituting one of the most iconic sequences in the cultfilm canon. Following the release of the movie, Abel Ferrara and Zoë Lund continued their electrifying collaborations on a range of other gritty urban thrillers including Bad Lieutenant (1992). Lund’s untimely death from a drugs overdose in 1999 curtailed possibly the pair’s most interesting project, a biopic of porn’s classic burn-out male John Holmes, which was scheduled to be played by Ferrara regular Christopher Walken. XM

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Bad Taste New Zealand, 1987 – 91 mins Peter Jackson

In 1986, Australian musician and critic Philip Brophy published a groundbreaking article on the appreciation of cult horror films. Under the banner of ‘horrality’, Brophy claimed that the 1980s were seeing a turn towards the exhibition of gore and monstrosity as a goal in itself, and that horror film’s point of reference became other horror – a single-minded emphasis on gore through relentless intertextuality that, when used well, generated comedic as well as horrific results. One year after Brophy’s article the best possible instance of ‘horrality’ originated just around the corner: New Zealand’s Bad Taste. The title itself is a stroke of genius. It refers not only to the story and its meaning, but also to its affect. Bad Taste is in very bad taste indeed. The story concerns a bunch of very rude aliens who descend upon a town to harvest its humans as food for their intergalactic fast-food chain. Four alien hunters from a defence service foil this plan. In the process numerous aliens are slaughtered and maimed in inventive fashion. The hunters too suffer injuries (one of them has his brain ‘leaking’ out of his head during much of the film). Bad Taste gets its schwung from a unique combination of gore and gags. In one scene, a hunter called Derek (played by director Peter Jackson, who also plays an alien) is chased by an alien. When Derek runs out of ammunition he mimics the sound of a machine gun. The alien stops, grabs its chest and stumbles, only to realise it is not actually hurt and resume the chase. Derek reloads and shoots the alien as it falls upon his gun – the gun impaling the alien. When another alien approaches, Derek pushes his gun all the way into the body of the first alien and shoots the second alien (and a third) through the body his gun is stuck in. Needless to say, the yuk factor of Bad Taste is high. How could it not be in a film that connects cannibalism and fast food? Sheep dung, intestines, blood and other transgressive fluids also abound. This gore is offset with a lot of situation humour (skidding, slipping, stumbling) and intertextual references (to which the music and numerous props – a chainsaw among them – contribute). Bad Taste is not the first, and certainly not the best, film that mixes gore and gags. But whereas earlier splatter films such as The Evil Dead* or Return of the Living Dead (1985) still adhered to the basic rule of grounding its evil in some sort of lore, Bad Taste heralded a new direction: splatter for splatter’s sake without even a hint of allegorical hoopla. The result is that the politics of Bad Taste (if one can call it that) are all over the place. The film is partially offensive and reactionary. The name of the organisation employing the hunters, Astro Investigation Defense Service, abbreviates to a crude, blunt acronym, and the apology for torture raised more than one eyebrow (but then again the Reaganite 1980s had seen worse). Progressive stances are also evident: the idea that aliens see humans as food is a clever comment on the agro industry’s conflation of the edible and the abject, a point that is pressed by the prominent display of vomit on screen. Four years in the making, Bad Taste was for the longest time just an amateur hobby-job of a devoted horror geek (Jackson). After funding was received to complete the film, it entered a professional market, 16

DIRECTOR Peter Jackson PRODUCER Peter Jackson WRITER Peter Jackson, Ken Hammon, Tony Hiles CINEMATOGRAPHY Peter Jackson SPECIAL EFFECTS Peter Jackson EDITING Peter Jackson, Jamie Selkirk ORIGINAL MUSIC Michelle Scullion, Jay Snowfield PRINCIPAL CAST Terry Potter, Pete O’Herne, Craig Smith, Mike Minnett, Peter Jackson, Doug Wren

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where it made quite an impact. Sold at Cannes, and censored and cut in various regions, it gradually became, as Jim Barratt (2008) notes, a VHS dare-you-see cult hit. At least some of that fame was due to its poster, which featured an armed alien giving the audience (humanity) the finger – a big, fat, fast-food finger. By the time Jackson started the even more gross Braindead (1992), critics were hailing Bad Taste as a

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cult phenomenon, and late-night TV slots were devoted to screening it in double bill with the curious documentary of its production: ‘Good Taste Making Bad Taste’. Its reputation has only been enhanced since then and, after Jackson made it really big with The Lord of the Rings*, Bad Taste became a totemic reminder of his streetwise roots as a cardcarrying member of the hardcore clan of cult splatter. EM

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Baise-moi France, 2000 – 77 mins Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi

The beginning of the 2000s saw a series of French art films presenting explicit depictions of sexuality and violence. One of the innovations of films such as Romance and The Piano Teacher (2001) was that they explored the relation between sex and pain from a perspective that was also sensitive to women’s sensibilities. Of this wave, Baise-moi was the ugly duckling. It was far too exploitative to be issued an artistic passport. Virginie Despentes, a former sex worker, and Coralie Trinh Thi, a porn actress, were not of the ilk that critics easily label ‘auteur’. Nor did Baise-moi pull its punches: whereas other films of the wave interiorised sexual violence, Baise-moi blew it, ragingly, in everyone’s face. Based on a book by Despentes, Baise-moi tells the tale of two women, both victims of abuse, and the revenge they take on men and on the world at large. Nadine (Karen Bach, real surname Lancaume) is a prostitute in a deadend relationship. Manu (Raffaëla Anderson) is a slacker who is brutally gang-raped – a very shocking scene, one of several sex acts shown in graphic detail. After Nadine kills her roommate and Manu kills her brother, the two women team together for a maniacal killing spree that takes them through France. Along the way they pick up men, have sex with them and kill them. A home invasion and a raid on a swingers’ club too form part of their revenge on patriarchy. But the women soon realise the pointlessness of their point-blank-range campaign. Manu is shot, and Nadine is arrested before she can kill herself. ‘Censorship inevitably provokes controversy’, writes Scott MacKenzie (2002) in his study of the release of Baise-moi. The pornographic scenes, the ultra-violence, the total lack of moderation and the ‘hellish’ lowbudget video aesthetics generated furore. Baise-moi was temporarily banned in several countries, including its native France (the first film to be banned there for twenty-eight years). It also drew vocal defence: why suppress a film showing women standing up against the regimes that oppressed them? After the controversy had died down, Baise-moi found a niche following among cult fans. A study commissioned by the British Board of Film Classification found, to its surprise, that its fans would rather abandon it than see it as part of a legitimate form of culture (the French sex-arthouse wave). Instead, they regarded it as a rape-revenge exploitation film in the genre of Thriller: A Cruel Picture* and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), two films with which it shares a slightly (but only slightly) politically incorrect appeal. For these fans, the feminist perspective is an added bonus; the core meaning is the nihilist rampage and revenge itself. In a sad epilogue to Baise-moi’s travails, in 2005, at the age of thirty-two, Lancaume took her own life by overdosing on Vicodin. She had been unable to retire from the sex industry and had grown tired of the infamy Baise-moi had brought to her life. For Lancaume, Baise-moi was supposed to be an opportunity for a way into another, better life. It became instead a way out of life. That one fact, perhaps more than the entire film, illustrates the ambiguity of Baise-moi: the film in which women kill kills women. EM

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DIRECTOR Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi PRODUCER Philippe Godeau WRITER Virginie Despentes, Coralie Trinh Thi (book: Virginie Despentes) CINEMATOGRAPHY Benoît Chamaillard EDITING Aïlo Auguste, Francine Lemaître, Véronique Rosa ORIGINAL MUSIC Varou Jan (songs by X Syndicate, Season Act Disorder, Seven Hate, WEI JI) PRINCIPAL CAST Raffaëla Anderson, Karen Bach (Lancaume)

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Begotten US, 1991 – 78 mins E. Elias Merhige

The cult viewing experience often preempts or precludes ‘history’, ‘knowledge’ or ‘consciousness’. Instead it is irrational and illogical: a precultural or prehistoric state that supersedes the boundaries of the individual, a visceral feeling of being hit in the guts, which suddenly makes the inexplicable mystery of life visible – but that is also terrifying. Begotten tries to provoke this experience through the suggestion that the essence of humankind is profound violence. It features a succession of ritualistic, symbolic scenes preceded by a title that says: ‘Here lives the incantation of matter. Like a flame burning away the darkness. Life is flesh on bone convulsing above the ground.’ The first scene is shocking: in a cabin near a lake a robed, masked man disembowels himself with a razor. He convulses. Blood drips out of his mouth and his guts. As twitching pieces of flesh drop to the floor, the convulsing worsens. Grunts and growls are heard, against a background of crickets. Soon after, he is dead. The man is ‘God’ (Brian Salzberg), and what follows, in scenes often more shocking than this one, is a retelling of the genesis of humankind, in combination with Gnostic and pagan myths, and informed by orgiastic rituals. A blindfolded woman (Mother Earth) (Donna Dempsey) appears from underneath the corpse. She arouses the dead body and impregnates herself. The newborn (Son of Earth) (Stephen Charles Barry) too convulses heavily. Both he and his mother are assaulted by nomads (or are they pilgrims?). He is hanged and tortured and ‘gifts’ are extracted from his mouth as he vomits; she is repeatedly raped with a variety of objects. Another group of men appears, and dismembers both mother and son. On her grave grow flowers. According to Merhige, Begotten depicts ‘a time that predates spoken language. Communication is made on a sensory level.’ In an interview with Scott MacDonald (1998), he adds that the ‘drama of Begotten is the anthropomorphic rendering of forces that nobody can touch or see but that are right there at the edge of every moment’. In order to achieve a mythical, pre-aesthetic look, Merhige developed what he called a ‘Rorschach test for the eye’ – in a painstaking, time-consuming procedure each frame was rephotographed until grey tones were washed away and only starkly contrasting black and white remained. The speed of film too was manipulated. Imagery of nature (rushing clouds, bare trees, the moon, rock formations) creates a barren, desolate environment. Devoid of dialogue, the soundtrack consists of sparsely used music and unsettling sonoric effects. The acting, by Merhige’s theatre troupe theaterofmaterial, is reminiscent of the theatre experiments of Richard Schechner and Jerzy Grotowski, or the interrogations of violence and religiosity by performers such as Joseph Beuys, Hermann Nitsch or Genesis P. Orridge. To this day, Begotten operates largely under the radar of legitimate culture. Most reviewers avoid it. Time critic Richard Corliss (1991) called it a ‘druidical cult’ and summed up the film as follows: ‘no names, no dialogue, no compromise, no exit’. Begotten is not only difficult to watch, it is also difficult to find. 20

DIRECTOR E. Elias Merhige PRODUCER E. Elias Merhige WRITER E. Elias Merhige (story consultant: Tom Gunning) CINEMATOGRAPHY E. Elias Merhige SPECIAL EFFECTS E. Elias Merhige, Harry Duggins, Dean Mercil EDITING Noëlle Penraat ORIGINAL MUSIC Evan Albam PRINCIPAL CAST Brian Salzberg, Donna Dempsey, Stephen Charles Barry

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

According to some sources there exists only one copy of the film, on 16mm. Not surprisingly then, Begotten has been screened only a few times. A DVD release was so limited that most of its circulation is achieved through a semi-illegal copy circuit. Begotten became known a bit more widely after Merhige had some success with Shadow of the Vampire (2000). In 2006, it was followed by a sequel, the collaborative short Din of Celestial Birds. Gradually, Begotten

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acquired a niche reputation with fans of the paracinema circuit, who saw it as a ‘metaphysical splatter film’, one of the sickest films of all time. For some, it is equally a shamanic experience that supersedes explanation and interpretation, and that comes as close to a soulshaking exhilaration, as close to the rapture of the mythical cult of Dionysus that celebrates the violent origin of culture, as film can possibly come. EM

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Behind the Green Door US, 1972 – 72 mins Artie Mitchell, Jim Mitchell

The first feature directed by Artie and Jim Mitchell, this film is one of the most notorious and broadly distributed X-rated adult films of all time. Filmed largely in a private sex club by porn and strip club impresarios Artie and Jim Mitchell, Behind the Green Door (the title is a play on Jim Lowe’s 1956 number one hit ‘Green Door’) is part art film, part porno. In many ways the film is a cliché of arthouse pretention with its jazz soundtrack, wilfully artistic rather than robust, down-and-dirty sex scenes and its use of the kind of experimental shot set-ups one would not ordinarily associate with adult material. But prolonged, artfully filmed sex scenes and an audience that quickly became female-dominated, showed that Behind the Green Door had a broader reach than just a run-of-the-mill porn flick. Released in the same year as the equally infamous Deep Throat and part of a brief mainstreaming of adult content (what has sometimes been termed ‘porno chic’), both were said to have initiated a brief period when pornography became cinematic, reaching a broader, mixed-sex US audience. For what is for the most part a pornographic film with artistic elements, the film’s reception has been unusual. Undoubtedly part of its success stems from a series of clever marketing tricks employed by the Mitchell brothers, who took advantage of the fact that prior to the film Marilyn Chambers had been the face of Ivory Snow washing detergent, famously pictured holding a baby on their packaging and framed very much as the girl next door. They made great play of the brand’s advertising slogan ‘99 and 44/100’s % pure’, using it in press releases of the film. Unusually, the film was taken up by mainstream critics, who on the whole embraced it. While Behind the Green Door was not without its detractors, significantly it also drew support from various feminist groups who saw the enactment of its female protagonist’s sexual fantasies as both liberating and progressive (although many also vehemently opposed it, adopting a different reading). Chambers, unusual among porn actresses in that she could act, became something of a cause célèbre after the release of the film, developing a distinctive public presence, doing a string of chat shows and a host of

DIRECTOR Artie Mitchell, Jim Mitchell PRODUCER Artie Mitchell, Jim Mitchell WRITER Anonymous CINEMATOGRAPHY Jon Fontana PRODUCTION DESIGN Don Sidle ORIGINAL MUSIC Daniel Le Blanc PRINCIPAL CAST Marilyn Chambers

media interviews. The film is perhaps most famous for two set-piece sex scenes, one involving Chambers’s prolonged intercourse with a selection of trapeze artists and in what is literally the final shot, a scene showing her face being ejaculated upon in multiple repeat shots while the frame cycles through a variety of psychedelic colour schemes. The extent of Chambers’s fame and by extension the film’s notoriety is demonstrated by the fact that, after her untimely death, she received obituaries in several high-profile newspapers, including The Times. As a grim postscript to the film, Artie Mitchell was later killed by his own brother, Jim, in relation to an apparent spat over the effects of his spiralling drug addiction. EM/RH

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BFI SCREEN GUIDES

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La belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast) France, 1946 – 93 mins Jean Cocteau

The story of Belle and the Beast is a relentless and passionate, highly melodramatic celebration of beauty, wrapped in a naive yet exquisite fairytale – a fashion designer’s wet dream. Is it equally an indictment of the superficiality of such beauty? A moral undertone is certainly present in the way the early part of the film paints an opposition between the modest beauty of Belle (Josette Day) and the vanity of her sisters – an opposition punctuated by the crude, Breughelian setting of Belle’s village, filled with drunks, rowdy chickens and foul language (‘may the devil himself splatter you with dung’, comments Belle’s brother on his sisters). But as an aesthete pur sang, poet and writer-director Jean Cocteau ultimately believes beauty is its own end, its own morality, and the ethical compass gets disoriented by all the bravura of the dazzling spectacle that Beauty and the Beast presents. The mazes of the Beast’s castle and the enchanted forest are grandiose – one almost wants to leave the characters behind and wander it alone, escorted by glaring busts, magical chandeliers, invisible hands and numerous trompe-l’oeils. The operatic, choir-heavy music cuts across scenes to serve a constant mood of drama. The camera moves around lyrically, explores unusual framings and engages all kinds of trickery to maintain an atmosphere of dreamy surrealism. Compared to all this virtuosity, the characters are simplistic – though they look fantastic. Belle always looks pure – though critic Danny Peary (1981) notes, in horror, that she becomes flirtatious once the Beast becomes a handsome prince. The Beast of course is ugly. The end of the story, however, throws those simplicities overboard. The scenes in which Belle’s suitor Avenant dies and turns into a Beast (the Beast?), and the Beast first dies but then transforms into handsome Prince Ardent – all roles played by Cocteau’s muse Jean Marais – easily open themselves to vertiginous Freudian interpretations. The final, consummate shots see Belle and Ardent literally fly away, into the milky clouds. In sum, even in its narrative Beauty and the Beast knows no measure, no economy of action and delivery, the viewer is not given the chance to repose. Yet the wallowing in aesthetic ostentation amid ambiguity is also what gives Beauty and the Beast its cult appeal. After initial success in France, the film survived mostly through reruns for dedicated cinephiles. Over time, the reception of Beauty and the Beast shifted away from that cinephile following towards a more

DIRECTOR Jean Cocteau PRODUCER André Paulvé WRITER Jean Cocteau (story: Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont) CINEMATOGRAPHY Henri Alekan EDITING Claude Ibéria ORIGINAL MUSIC Georges Auric PRINCIPAL CAST Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély, Nane Germon, Michel Auclair, Marcel André

campy appreciation, a cult fandom that cherishes it for its failure to be more than only a celebration of aesthetic beauty, and that used the openly gay themes of Cocteau’s career, and his friendship with gay icons such as Kenneth Anger and Marlene Dietrich, to imbue Beauty and the Beast with queer overtones. Ever since the 1960s, then, the film has straddled two positions, partly one of the most exclusive and exquisite art-film cults, and partly a barely concealed invitation to read quizzical lines such as Belle’s evaluation of the Beast as inferences of more contemporary identity politics. ‘Sometimes his bearing is almost noble’, says Belle of the Beast, ‘At other times, he’s unsteady, and seems stricken with some infirmity.’ She concludes: ‘ce monstre est bon’. 100 CULT FILMS

EM

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Beyond the Valley of the Dolls US, 1970 – 110 mins Russ Meyer

Beginning at a point of curious crescendo that completes the fates of its various estranged characters, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls uses an extended flashback structure to chart the rollercoaster fortunes of a liberated female rock group and its male manager. The band, known as ‘The Kelly Affair’, takes its name from lead singer Kelly MacNamara (Dolly Read), who is revealed as having a close relationship with her manager Harris Allsworth (David Gurian) in the film’s opening reels. When Kelly decides to travel to Los Angeles to ingratiate herself with her wealthy aunt Susan Lake (Phyllis Davis), Allsworth and fellow band members Casey Anderson (Cynthia Myers) and Petronella Danforth (Marcia McBroom) also decide to travel along. Although Susan is revealed as sympathetic to Kelly and her potential claims on the family estate, the narrative exposes the naive quartet to the corrupt excesses of the Hollywood set. These encounters range from swinging drug and vice parties organised by effeminate but maniacal rock supremo Ronnie Barzell (John La Zar), to abusive relationships orchestrated by manipulative porn stars such as Ashley St Ives (Edy Williams) and male hustlers such as Lance Rocket (Michael Blodgett). The psychedelic gatherings that are depicted in the film are populated by ravaged and decaying characters, whose appearance underscores the deceptive dynamics of the so-called party scene. In the inevitable destructive relationships that follow, Allsworth seeks solace with a variety of sexual partners (including Casey), after losing Kelly to the devious Rocket. Unaware that he has made Casey pregnant from their brief encounter, Allsworth attempts to kill himself by jumping from a TV scaffold during the band’s performance. Casey in turn rejects heterosexuality entirely, having an abortion under the advice of lesbian fashion designer Roxanne (Erica Gavin), with whom she later has an affair. The fates of all the central protagonists are violently settled at one of Barzell’s carnivalesque gatherings. Having unsuccessfully attempted to seduce Lance Rocket, Barzell suddenly reveals that he is a transsexual and kills this would-be lover in a fit of rage. Having also dispatched Casey and wounded Petronella, the murderous ‘male’ is overpowered by the remaining members of the rock group. Benefiting from a screenplay by Roger Ebert, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls proves a more opulent production than some of the later ribald classics for which the director was famed. However, the film contains central features associated with the Russ Meyer universe. For writers such as Jonathan Crane (2000), the director’s cult sensitivities are expressed not only in his unique style of editing, camera operation and cinematography, but also in his distinctive representations of race and sexual desire. As with many of the other directors featured in 100 Cult Films, Meyer’s direct creative control over all key aspects of the film endows him with the multifaceted status of both maverick entrepreneur and cult-movie icon. 24

DIRECTOR Russ Meyer PRODUCER Russ Meyer WRITER Roger Ebert CINEMATOGRAPHY Fred J. Koenekamp EDITING Dan Cahn, Dick Wormell ORIGINAL MUSIC Stu Phillips PRINCIPAL CAST Dolly Read, David Gurian, Phyllis Davis, Cynthia Myers, Marcia McBroom, John La Zar

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This curious creativity is often expressed in Meyer’s distinctive styles of editing and composition, which are used to appropriate effect to convey the disenchantment of the characters and the general LA environment. For Crane, these stylistic features indicate Meyer’s systematic departure from the rules and regulations of mainstream movie-making. This subversion is further evidenced in the director’s parodic depiction of male and female sexuality, which became more pronounced as the 1970s progressed. Meyer’s cinema can be seen as upturning dominant male fantasies by polarising desire between

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gargantuan, insatiable females and impotent, inarticulate males. This crude but crucial dynamic is indicated in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls by the frequent low-angled shots of the bosom-laden central leads, who seem to tower over their male peers in both statuesque and threatening pose. Indeed, when one jaded male partygoer finds himself confronted with a seismic cleavage threatening to overwhelm him, he can only utter the words ‘Bad trip’, which seems a more than appropriate response to the dual fantasies and fears that Meyer’s women evoke. XM

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The Big Lebowski US, 1998 – 117 mins Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

The Big Lebowski is one of the most widely embraced cult films around, a movie with almost no detractors. Partly that is because Lebowski does not rely on single-genre fans, or speak specifically to underground and countercultural sensibilities (though there is an affinity with pothead subculture). And partly it is because each viewer aspires to a little bit of The Dude, the main character of Lebowski. The complex plot of Lebowski is almost insignificant. It is the detours and asides, the little fantasies and conversations that give it its feel. The outset is comedic: two Lebowskis, one an unemployed slacker (The Dude, Jeff Bridges) and the other a wealthy recluse (the Big Lebowski, David Huddleston), see their life paths cross and this leads to numerous misunderstandings including kidnapping, violence, financial scheming and peeing on a rug. Throughout the film, The Dude wants to leave these complications behind, and just go back to his favourite pastimes (marijuana, White Russian cocktails, and bowling), but time and again he is dragged back into the plot – most notably by the Big Lebowski’s daughter Maude (Julianne Moore), whose role is basically that of the Greek chorus, revealing essential details about characters, keeping the viewer informed of the larger scope, and offering The Dude a motivation (sex, mostly, and maybe even a ‘little Lebowski’). The tone is often deadpan serious, even threatening, with doom and gloom just around the corner. But once in a while lightness is injected, even literally in the case of a hallucination in which The Dude soars over Los Angeles. In the end, each character is more or less exposed as inauthentic, except for The Dude, the one individual who does not try to present himself any other than how he is, who remains devoid of ‘style’ or ‘class’ and just wants to drink White Russian cocktails and go bowling. After a disappointing release that was remarkable only because of critics’ surprise with what the Coen brothers were presenting after the big success of Fargo (1996), Lebowski quickly became a popular item on the home-viewing market (with a sought-after laserdisc edition that reportedly contains dialogue no other edition has). For a time, it seemed that that would remain its niche, The Dude’s slacker persona matching that of slacker viewers. But, as Barbara Klinger’s (2010) study of the various guises of the Lebowski cult has shown, the Lebowski experience gradually fanned out to a global engagement that includes home viewers, theatrical audiences and conventions and festival events. The most visible of these events is the annual Lebowskifest, which attracts thousands of fans impersonating their favourite characters, many of whom are not the main roles in the film but rather minor figures – even the White Russian cocktails, or bowling balls and cones are often subject to impersonation. In addition to these events, the cult of Lebowski also reveals itself in a literary fashion. Online fandom abounds with threads that seize on the f-bomb and filler-word-heavy, open-ended dialogue and that try to rewrite the dialogue without reverting to terms such as ‘Oh, man’, ‘You know’, ‘C’mon’, or ‘Fuck’ – words that make up about half of The Dude’s vocabulary. 26

DIRECTOR Joel Coen, Ethan Coen PRODUCER Ethan Coen, Joel Coen WRITER Ethan Coen, Joel Coen CINEMATOGRAPHY Roger Deakins EDITING Roderick Jaynes, Tricia Cooke ORIGINAL MUSIC Carter Burwell PRINCIPAL CAST Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, John Goodman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Steve Buscemi, John Turturro, David Huddleston

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Lebowski’s cult suits beer-garden partygoers and couch potatoes alike, public insanity and private immersion. At the same time, Lebowski retains a unique identity – a one-of-a-kind film that, like The Dude, fits no mould because it does not really oppose

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anything. In ‘Beautiful Boy’ John Lennon wrote, ‘life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans’. That is very true for everyone in Lebowski. Except for The Dude. He has already gone beyond that. For him life just happens, man. EM

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Blade Runner US, 1982 – 117 mins Ridley Scott

Blade Runner may well be the most densely webbed cult film. The amount of excogitation, intelligent and otherwise, that it has generated is astounding. It rivals that of fellow travellers in cult science fiction, Star Wars (1977–2005) and Star Trek (1979–2009). Unlike these franchises, Blade Runner is only one film, albeit one that exists in various editions, none of them thought of as definitive. That lack of a final version is already one explanation for the cult appeal of Blade Runner. Another lies in the profound paranoia and dystopia that underlie its story; quite different from the cheerfulness of Star Wars. Adapted from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by sci-fi icon Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner is set in the hi-tech, low-morality, filthy jungle that is futuristic Los Angeles. The hyper-detailed depiction of LA as an apocalyptic hellhole in which citizens from all races and walks of life suffer and corporations live above the law is for many a key component of the Blade Runner cult. The story follows the character Deckard (Harrison Ford), a ‘blade runner’ who is brought out of retirement to track down and exterminate ‘replicants’, humanlike beings who have been designed by the Tyrell Corporation to perform slave work on off-world colonies. Ever since replicants developed a desire to be human, and staged a bloody mutiny, they have been declared ‘illegal’. As he proceeds in hunting down his victims, Deckard grows increasingly suspicious about his mission, and paranoid about his own identity. His final opponent, replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer in one of his most memorable roles) saves his life, then puzzlingly declares that all ‘moments will be lost in time; like tears in rain. Time to die’ – a white dove flutters away from him as he shuts down for good. Did Batty save Deckard, and sacrifice himself, because he is a replicant too? Does he die to show moral superiority? The answer depends on the edition of the film one views. Blade Runner initially gained cult status as a sleeper. Upon release, it was a disappointment – though not an outright flop – at the box office. It also met with lukewarm critical response. It then, however, began to be shown on the midnight-movies circuit before gaining a larger following through its video release. Gradually, the cult following of the film intensified. Its intertextual nature especially attracted intense interest and devotion. Unevenly constructed out of other texts and inspirations, Blade Runner makes numerous allusions to other genres, such as film noir, horror and to particular films, including Metropolis (1927) and Bride of Frankenstein*, as well as incorporating religious symbolism into its textual orbit. The intertextuality partly fuelled what Matt Hills (2011) has called an ‘academic cult’, a near-scholarly mining for details that can be related to other films, to literature, to religion and to philosophy. This vast web of intertextuality is also linked to an at the time very hip postmodern scepticism towards ‘originality’, and an emphasis on artistic creation as ‘replicant’. Donna Haraway’s (1985) concept of the ‘cyborg’, as a humanlike being, but also as connections of messiness, incompleteness and discarded parts that challenge traditional ‘meaning’, is a favourite metaphor. Everything, from the film’s constant referencing of neon advertising, its impressive 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Ridley Scott PRODUCER Michael Deeley WRITER Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples (book: Philip K. Dick) CINEMATOGRAPHY Jordan Cronenweth SPECIAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR Douglas Trumbull EDITING Marsha Nakashima ORIGINAL MUSIC Vangelis PRINCIPAL CAST Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah, Joanna Cassidy, Joe Turkel

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architectural design, which mixed together elements from the past, present and speculated future – dubbed a ‘pastiche city’ – to its relentless paranoia and the emphasised difficulty of telling the difference between humans and replicants, points to an obsession with surfaces and, parallel to this, a crisis in detecting deeper levels of ‘reality’. Over the years, Blade Runner’s intertextual density has become complemented by the increasing proliferation of different ‘versions’ of the film. As soon as the film gained cult status, knowledge began to circulate that the theatrical release was not the only version of the film. Next to the American Cut, an International Cut existed, with small differences. There was also a television broadcast version, and much lesser seen ‘workprint’ and ‘San Diego Sneak Preview’ versions. A big change was the 1992 Director’s Cut, which went on wide international release. It included material, such as a dream sequence, which altered some of the fundamental understandings of plot and character (including the question of whether Deckard and his

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girlfriend were replicants as well). Ever since, fans have kept speculating about further versions, which could expand and enrich their knowledge and experience. This fan enthusiasm was validated in 2007 with a new Final Cut of the film, and a DVD box set that included five different versions. When the Final Cut was put on very limited theatrical release in October 2007, it promptly became the week’s highest-grossing film per screen. It is a powerful indication of the enduring status Blade Runner continues to hold, and an even stronger sign that the Blade Runner cult actually enjoys the coexistence of different versions. In the end, then, there is no ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ Blade Runner. Most fans reject the notion of any ‘authoritative’ version. Any cut is just another iteration of the complexity of the Blade Runner universe. This elusiveness mirrors perfectly the theme of the film, in particular the correspondence between ‘real’, ‘authentic’ humans and the simulated, replicant ‘copies’ over which these humans supposedly hold moral authority. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Blue Sunshine US, 1978 – 89 mins Jeff Lieberman

Although not the most productive of cult auteurs, New York-based indie icon Jeff Lieberman has managed to craft a series of prolific nightmare narratives that combine grindhouse thrills with an intelligent and ironic edge. Although his productions were initially framed as exploitation/drive-in fare, Lieberman often used the pulphorror format to make pointed political comments on American concerns of the day. From the rural perversity implicit in Squirm (1976) and the gender-based warfare evident in Just before Dawn (1981), Lieberman’s films led to him being hailed as a cult commentator on the damaged American psyche of the 1970s. Blue Sunshine remains Lieberman’s most sadistically satisfying and satirical movie to date. Here, the director subverts established exploitation imagery, which long associated substance abuse with teenage criminality (most famously Reefer Madness*, Louis J. Gasnier, 1936 and Marihuana, Dwain Esper, 1936), to consider the impact of former drug taking on older and more conservative members of society. Blue Sunshine focuses on the plight of Gerry Zipkin, an unlikely knitwear-clad hero (played by future soft-core auteur Zalman King), whose attempts to resolve a series of apparently random murders are hampered by police assumptions of his involvement in the crimes. Although all the homicides are committed by an apparently random cross-section of the community (from a photographer and genial party host, to a committed cop and a middle-aged babysitter), Zipkin discovers that all the killers consumed a bad batch of acid, nicknamed ‘Blue Sunshine’, while enjoying the Summer of Love as Stanford undergrads. Ten years after this drug-induced high, all the acid consumers begin to suffer from the same symptoms: violent headaches followed by a sudden and dramatic loss of hair and then violent mania and hysterical outbursts. As the bodies begin to pile up, Zipkin and his erstwhile girlfriend Alisha (Deborah Winters) discover a crucial link to the crimes in the form of Edward Flemming (Mark Godard), a shady politician running for Congress on a right-wing commerce-and-morality ticket. Having paid his way through university as a hippy dope peddler, Flemming is revealed as the distributor of the acid that had infected the community. The bizarre resolution of Blue Sunshine finds Zipkin doing battle with the politician’s infected aides in a frenzied finale set in a discothèque. With its emphasis on the misplaced psychedelic underpinnings to a more conservative mainstream society, Blue Sunshine’s horror motif is used by Lieberman to comment on the dissipation of the countercultural movement by the general banality and anomie of 1970s suburban America. As if to underscore this theme, it is significant that King’s character is frequently referred to as ‘Zippie’, evoking the fading spirit of the counterculture, while the character’s general dislocation and economic isolation within the suburban milieu is also described in political terms, having quit his last job ‘because the firm wouldn’t hire enough women’. While Zalman King’s low-key performance as Zippie contributes to a wider sense of the alienation afflicting the character, the collected class of infected political reactionaries is positively inspired 1 0 0 C U LT F ILMS

DIRECTOR Jeff Lieberman PRODUCER Joseph Beruh, Edgar Lansbury WRITER Jeff Lieberman CINEMATOGRAPHY Don Knight EDITING Brian Smedley-Aston ORIGINAL MUSIC Charles Gross PRINCIPAL CAST Zalman King, Deborah Winters, Mark Godard, Ann Cooper

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by comparison. Head, shoulders (and hairless) above the rest of the cast is Ann Cooper, whose portrayal of Wendy Flemming suddenly shifts from doting babysitter to eye-rolling, pill-popping maniac in a moment of pure histrionic excess. By combining these scenes of performative delirium with pulp commentary and on-screen carnage, 32

Blue Sunshine remains a curious reflection of the changing cult and cultural trends of the 1970s. Quite aside from its frequent countercultural references, the finale of the film, in which the horrific and the hairless go berserk at a Congressional afterparty in a disco, remains as inspired as it is offbeat. XM BFI SC RE E N G U I D E S

Brazil US, 1985 – 94, 132 or 142 mins Terry Gilliam

Science-fiction films often rely on idea more than plot. That makes them dangerous, but also vulnerable. They dare to imagine and explore alternative worlds, utopian or dystopian, and as such they stand as powerful indictments of those who use the dreary factuality of reality as a tool for suppression. But without the economy of action that plot-driven stories dictate, their ideas are easily taken out of context and misrepresented, even shuffled around. Most sci-fi films with strong cult reputations are anti-authoritarian and idealistic – they breathe a desire to escape from, or change, our overly structured societies. Is that why so many of them are subjected to the ‘sci-fi shuffle’, or the irrepressible urge of those in charge (bureaucrats, policy-makers and producers alike) to rearrange these films until they fit the mould? Together with Blade Runner*, Brazil must be the most infamous case of sci-fi shuffling. There exist at least three versions of the film, each of them with changes big enough to technically classify it as a different picture altogether. The biggest difference in length is no less than forty-eight minutes, between Gilliam’s own cut of 142 minutes (which was released outside the US) and a ninety-four-minute cut proposed by distributor Universal. Thanks to director Terry Gilliam’s persistence, the release of that short cut was limited to cable TV. A 131-minute re-edit was instead shown to American audiences. The story is part fantasy part Kafkaesque nightmare. In a totalitarian state ‘somewhere in the 20th Century’ (as the opening of the film has it), civil servant and daydreamer Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is asked to clarify a bureaucratic error. It brings him in touch with a woman he’s been fantasising about, and with a guerrilla resistance (labelled ‘terrorist’ by the rulers). Sam manages to save the woman from the police, but he is arrested. His guerrilla friend breaks him free and he rejoins the woman – but it is all a dream: in reality his mind has been broken under torture. The film ends with Sam humming the film’s theme tune ‘Brazil’ while staring into nowhere. Visually, Brazil is an orotund, baroque feast – it knows no measure. It was shot for the most part with extreme wide-angled lenses, which lend the story of paranoia a comedic tone (and a sense of speed and urgency). The wide-angle style captures every detail and emphasises how much each frame is filled to the brim with information. This is all tucked away within an overarching production design that mixes 1940s noir elements with kitschy gadgetry of the atomic age (mirrors, little TV sets, electrical household items) and futuristic elements – the whole mix could be baptised ‘retro-futurism’. The reception of Brazil was uneven. Critical opinion varied widely, as did audience figures. As Gilliam said: ‘the reaction was very polarised; there was no middle ground. They either thought it was fantastic, or terrible, awful, unwatchable.’ In Europe, the film was highly praised, but there too box-office figures proved mutable. Brazil was too big for arthouse theatres yet too intellectual for regular chains. The VHS became a treasured object, however, and much of the cult following for the film originated in student rooms where the tape would become the subject of idealist and political debate – of all strike and colour: Brazil was 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Terry Gilliam PRODUCER Arnon Milchan WRITER Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown CINEMATOGRAPHY Roger Pratt EDITING Julian Doyle ORIGINAL MUSIC Michael Kamen PRINCIPAL CAST Jonathan Pryce, Katherine Helmond, Kim Greist, Robert De Niro, Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Bob Hoskins

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adored by right-wing and anarchist militant groups alike. For Gilliam, Brazil was what scholar Ian Christie (1999) called his ‘watershed’. His career prior to the film was dominated by his membership of the Monty Python comedy troupe. Post-Brazil the Python shackles disappeared, but they were replaced by another obstacle: around Gilliam emerged a reputation for ‘stubbornness’ and ‘visionary madness’ and of ‘too high ambitions’, which impacted heavily on many of his subsequent projects. His struggles with studios, and the misfortunes that befell some other projects (such as the death of star

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Heath Ledger throwing the filming of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, 2009, into disarray) have made Gilliam a cult hero in the eyes of fans, a true maverick. Inspired by a wide variety of genres and formats (many of which are referenced visually, such as the Marx Brothers or Charles Chaplin), and in particular by David Cronenberg’s Videodrome*, shuffled and reshuffled Brazil functions as a sort of bottleneck for sci-fi: channelling all of sci-fi’s history and redistributing it through the numerous styles (such as steampunk) and films it has influenced. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Bride of Frankenstein US, 1935 – 75 mins James Whale

Taking up the narrative directly from the end of the original 1931 Frankenstein, this sequel begins with Mary Shelley (Elsa Lanchester) and her husband discussing the merits of her recent literary creation with fellow Gothic scribe Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon). This dialogue on the possibilities of expanding the mythical elements to the monstrous tale fades into the main fiction, whereby peasants are seen inspecting the burning tower in which they believe the monster has perished at the end of the previous Universal instalment. Having lost his young daughter to the monster, a grieving local father insists on entering the smouldering building to ensure the terminal status of the beast. To his surprise Frankenstein’s monster (Boris Karloff) has survived the blaze and kills several locals before escaping. Befitting his status as the rational mirror image to the monster’s libidinal drives, the limp body of creator Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) is also revived, and he is returned to the arms of his bride-to-be Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson). However, rather than consummate their impending union, Frankenstein becomes embroiled in further medical meddling after being blackmailed by his manipulative former professor, Dr Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger). Pretorius is determined to expand Frankenstein’s quest to reanimate life and reveals a series of miniature beings he has created as a primer to the couple’s future collaboration. When Henry resists these professional advances, henchmen kidnap Elizabeth and exploit his fear of the indestructible monster, who is now also under the evil professor’s control. Having taken shelter with a blind hermit played by O. P. Heggie, the monster begins to exhibit the first stages of basic social interaction, and indicates that he wishes to find a mate to quell his feelings of alienation. As a result, the evil professor creates a bride to match the obscenity of the monster’s naissance, and her ‘birth’ provides the central scene of the movie. However, when this newly created mate (also Elsa Lanchester), expresses her horror at Karloff’s appearance, the monster realises the fatality of his situation. Uttering the final lines ‘We belong dead’, he destroys the laboratory, killing his mate and Pretorius in the process. Quashing the myth that all horror sequels suck, James Whale turns in one of the most historically significant entries to the Universal series with this 1935 production. Boasting stellar performances from both Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester in the ultimate undead date movie, Bride of Frankenstein indicates the degree of cult seriality emergent across the series. This is immediately evidenced by the pre-credit reference to the star as just ‘Karloff’. This strategy, aiming to instil a degree of audience awareness of the burgeoning status of the star can be seen in key scenes in which the hulking monster is humanised: learning to talk, smoke and even fall in love. In her article ‘When the Woman Looks’, Linda Williams (1996) has discussed the ways in which classical horror spectatorship sets up a contradictory relationship between the (gendered) viewer and the monster, noting that feelings of anxiety and distress often accompany scenes of the transgressor’s 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR James Whale PRODUCER Carl Laemmle, Jr WRITER William Hurlbut CINEMATOGRAPHY John J. Mescall EDITING Ted Kent ORIGINAL MUSIC Franz Waxman PRINCIPAL CAST Boris Karloff, Elsa Lanchester, Gavin Gordon, Colin Clive, Valerie Hobson, Ernest Thesiger

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helplessness or punishment. For Williams, the perverse attraction to these symbols of evil is premised on reciprocal feelings of sexual/social marginality experienced by some horror spectators. These impulses are certainly evidenced in Whale’s film, particularly in the scenes where Karloff’s creature is seen hunted, wounded and crucified by the murderous villagers, whom the director wishes to paint in a clearly cynical light. Equally, the often parodied scene of the monster taking shelter with the blind musician who teaches him the rudimentary skills of humanity, not only introduces a genuine warmth into the Gothic shocker, but also pushes the movie into the realms of pro-disability pulp horror, with both the blind and the unburied comparing their own aberrations from the male Symbolic ideal. While recent critics such as Elizabeth Young (1991) have read these masculine frailties as inferences on Whale’s own sense of

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sexual alienation, this queer reading seems confirmed not only by Ernest Thesiger’s highly feminised Pretorius, but also by a markedly hysterical portrayal of Henry Frankenstein by Clive, whose endless deferral of sexual relations with his future wife remains highly suggestive. Arguably, the same sex tensions that Young raises in the article ‘Here Comes the Bride: Wedding Gender and Race in Bride of Frankenstein’, represent a key point of debate within the movie, that also gain resonance from Elsa Lanchester’s brief but astounding performance as the monster’s reanimated wife. Beset with (a literally) electrified hairdo and wild, twitchy animalistic movements, she remains the ultimate symbol of resistance to masculine medical malpractice, whose rejection of her equally undead suitor further raises problematic issues of heterosexual union in the narrative. XM

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The Brood Canada, 1979 – 92 mins David Cronenberg

A bleak story about the disintegration of the nuclear family, The Brood gained an almost instant reputation as a repulsive film. Frank (Art Hindle) tries to shield his daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds) from his estranged wife Nola (Samantha Eggar), who is being treated for personality disorder in an experimental clinic, helmed by Doctor Raglan (Oliver Reed). Nola’s therapy encourages her to embody her rage. But she goes one extra step by – literally – giving birth to a ‘brood’ of dwarf-like creatures who brutally slay whoever she holds a grudge against: her mother, her father, her child’s teacher … . When Frank confronts Nola, she unveils these powers of procreation by showing him her body and by demonstrating how she reproduces life. Frank reacts in disgust and she dispatches the brood. But this time they go after Candice. Frank saves traumatised Candice (at the expense of Raglan), but in the final shot we see how Candice too has developed the first sign of her mother’s ‘disease’. A hereditary gender flaw, we are invited to wonder? The Brood was released during a time when Western culture was rethinking its attitude towards family, and family values, in the wake of economic crises, feminist criticisms and discussions of the representation of women in the media. Playing into this sensibility, and referencing his own messy divorce, Cronenberg presented The Brood as his version of Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) – only less cosy. Most reviewers found The Brood repulsive. Roger Ebert thought it was ‘reprehensible trash’. Yet critics also predicted that Cronenberg’s ‘cult status’ would ensure that The Brood would do well on the exploitation circuit, which it did. More even, The Brood’s explicit imagery and persistent atmosphere of terror and distress turned it into a poster film for the burgeoning ‘cult of horror’, and its very vocal and highly visible fan press. These fans appreciated how The Brood reflected topical cultural anxieties about the nuclear family in the same way that other horror films reflected suburban consumer angst or fear of nuclear holocaust, but they also celebrated its shock value. As one reviewer (James, 1979) put it: ‘Cronenberg knows his audience come seeking thrills and chills, and he obliges by getting under their skin and making their flesh crawl.’ Censors in numerous countries refused to pass The Brood uncut. Up to a minute of material was excised, including much of the crucial scene in which Frank confronts Nola – where we learn a lot about why Frank is ‘disgusted’. The censorship inadvertently made Cronenberg a spokesperson for artistic freedom of expression in Canada – which was experiencing political turmoil around that issue at the time. The Brood also became a cause célèbre in a lively academic debate. At a panel discussion at the 1979 Toronto Film Festival, led by Robin Wood, The Brood was singled out as a misogynistic pamphlet, typifying horror films’ depiction of women. In subsequent exchanges, Cronenberg and Wood locked horns on the subject. Many feminist critics, such as Barbara Creed (1993), sided with Wood and condemned The Brood. Other scholars 38

DIRECTOR David Cronenberg PRODUCER Pierre David, Claude Heroux, Victor Solnicki WRITER David Cronenberg CINEMATOGRAPHY Mark Irwin SPECIAL EFFECTS Dennis Pike, Jack Young EDITING Alan Collins MUSIC Howard Shore PRINCIPAL CAST Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle, Cindy Hinds, Robert Silverman

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defended Cronenberg’s viewpoint. The acrimony between the camps kept the debate alive, amused the popular press and fortified the film’s cult reputation.

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These days, The Brood remains a staple feature of the cult circuit, now no longer as a ‘point of contention’, but as a ‘cult classic’ that puts past contentions into perspective. EM

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Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari Germany, 1920 – 71 mins Robert Wiene

It has been called ‘the cult film par excellence’ and also the ‘first horror film of real, lasting quality’. Nearly a century old, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari is probably the oldest film around which an active cult exists. It is difficult to overestimate the novelty of Caligari. It was originally intended for Fritz Lang, yet landed in the lap of Wiene. It broke new grounds in production and set design (Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig and Walter Reimann), pioneering the style of German Expressionism that to this day remains one of the cornerstones of any horror film. Caligari also gave film history its first memorable tragic monster – the mummy-like somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt – later Major Strasser in Casablanca*), who succumbs to an impossible love and dies while chased by townspeople. Cesare’s owner, the crazy doctor Caligari (Werner Krauss), who keeps poor Cesare in a coffin, set the template for nearly every mad scientist for decades to come. The initial critical reception to Caligari was mixed. The reason for many critics’ unfavourable evaluation was confusion over the story’s authority, which is thrown off kilter by a convoluted climax and ending: when Caligari is accused of hiding Cesare, he flees to an asylum, and when the director of that institution is called upon to release the fugitive he himself turns out to be Caligari (and he confesses to an obsession with an eighteenth-century revolutionary mystic also called Caligari). On top of that comes a final twist in which the very narrator of the entire story is revealed to be insane, inmate of an asylum where he is a patient of … Dr Caligari. Added to that complexity are effects of horror and surprise, and strange, half-buried demands of obsession and fixation, plus an overwhelming sense of doom. It is no surprise that Caligari achieved some of its status by being screened in ciné clubs, where it became what Mike Budd (1990) called a ‘distinctive commodity fetish’. That was certainly the case in France, where, according to critics J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum (1983), Caligari ran continuously at the same Paris movie theatre from 1920 to 1927. Ever since, the film’s reputation as a ‘wretched story’ has worked as a magnet for viewers at odds with mainstream cinema, such as surrealist René Crevel. By the time of Crevel’s writing, the phrase ‘Caligari’s madmen’ (or ‘Caligari’s madness’) had entered into critical parlance. After World War II, German critic Siegfried Kracauer (1959) attacked the film for harbouring a reactionary ideology and for preparing, through its narrow choice between ‘either authority or chaos’, the nation for Nazism. Although Kracauer’s interpretation was later nuanced, it de-calibrated the status of Caligari for a long time. In spite of attempts by its screenwriters to recapture the copyright, Caligari slipped into the public domain, and that benefited its long-term cult reception. It enabled the film to feature in the company of trashy exploitation films as part of DVD box sets while simultaneously gracing the programmes of respectable cinemathèques. One notable characteristic of Caligari’s contemporary cult celebration is that much of it still takes place in movie theatres, through screenings that are accompanied by live electronic music. In fact, it almost seems a rite of passage for electronic composers and bands to have their ‘Caligari performance’. EM 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Robert Wiene PRODUCER Rudolph Meinert, Erich Pommer WRITER Hans Janowitz, Carl Mayer PRODUCTION DESIGN Walter Reimann, Walter Röhrig, Hermann Warm PRINCIPAL CAST Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover

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Café Flesh US, 1982 – 74 mins Stephen Sayadian (aka Rinse Dream)

After the decline of the porn-chic wave of the early 1970s, the trend to appreciate pornographic features dropped out of fashion. As Danny Peary (1981) summarised, ‘it stopped being chic to go to a porno film – it became a waste of time’. Even for cultists who had once cherished the porno as an assault on bourgeois morality, it became difficult to muster excuses not to see them as an affront to middle-class society. Porn was simply no longer an attack on conservatism. Even In the Realm of the Senses (1976) did not change that. But in the early 1980s Café Flesh did – or at least it almost did. Café Flesh is centred around a crude but effective political distinction. After a nuclear holocaust has wiped out the libido of most of the human population, two classes of people remain: a majority class of Sex Negatives (those who become sick just trying to have sex) commands a small minority of Sex Positives (those whose libido is unaffected). The Negatives have rounded up the Positives and brought them together as theatre troupes. They are forced to perform sex on stage in order to entertain the Negatives – it satisfies their nostalgia for the ‘good times’ they once had though they can never act on any arousal generated by the show because it would make them ill. The plot follows two girls, Lana (Michelle Bauer, pseudonym Pia Snow) and Angel (Marie Sharp), who attend some of these theatrical sex performances at the Café Flesh nightclub, a venue notorious for its master of ceremonies Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols), who heckles the audience of Sex Negatives. It soon becomes clear that both Lana and Angel are actually Sex Positives. As they are lured onto stage to perform with famed stud Johnny Rico (Kevin James) they discover the joys of unencumbered, unrestricted, liberating sex. More than through this unusual plot, Café Flesh astonishes through its anti-realistic aesthetics. The sex scenes occur on the nightclub’s stage, amid flashily coloured scenery and nearly abstract choreography. Often, participants perform their acts without emotion, almost mechanically. On-stage extras are dressed in outrageous costumes – imagine a sex scene with a trio of mature men in diapers and bibs on highchairs in the background stomping human bones onto their food trays. Tracking shots and cutaway close-ups reveal a continuously present audience of desperate-looking Sex Negatives, suffering and longing, and victimised by Max’s cynical riffing. Any scenes away from the stage look like they are set in nuclear bunkers and basements. This apocalyptic set is complemented by a remarkably upscale, electronic, new-wave music soundtrack (by Mitchell Froom, before he became famous as producer for Crowded House). Upon its release, Café Flesh generated a furore. Theatrical porn had become an anomaly, so its very presence in the market was exceptional. The film became a regular on the midnight-movie circuit in North America and Europe. It was not lost on critics that the film’s sexual politics provided a ready metaphor for contemporary anxieties about AIDS – a disease that was just starting to make headlines. At points, Café Flesh would also appear to be a textbook application of provocative postmodern theories that stress the 42

DIRECTOR Stephen Sayadian PRODUCER Stephen Sayadian, Francis Delia WRITER Stephen Sayadian, Jerry Stahl (aka Herbert Day) CINEMATOGRAPHY Francis Delia ORIGINAL MUSIC Mitchell Froom PRINCIPAL CAST Andy Nichols, Paul McGibboney, Michelle Bauer, Marie Sharp, Tantala Ray, Kevin James

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performative, disembodied and ‘surgical’ characteristics of the social presentation of the sexualised human body in a post-industrial world. Sadly, not much was made of this potential. Instead of standing as a revolutionary manifesto, Café Flesh sank into obscurity. It was briefly

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dragged out of invisibility when it was released on video (together with Thundercrack!*), and when two sequels were produced. To this day, Café Flesh remains a visually radical and viscerally unsettling experience. EM

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Cannibal Holocaust Italy, 1979 – 95 mins Ruggero Deodato

While many of the entries in this volume annex an element of theatricality to cult excess, Ruggero Deodato’s shockingly influential Cannibal Holocaust proves that paracinema can also subvert realist notions of authenticity, in order to produce startling and controversial imagery. In Deodato’s case, a background in actuality film practice and commercial advertising helped him create one of the most censored and controversial cult narratives ever released. As with many entries to the 1970s Italian ‘cannibal genre’ with which the director is frequently associated, Cannibal Holocaust charts the savage conflict between enlightened European ‘adventurers’ and the ‘barbaric’ Third World environments they uncover as part of their expedition. In contravention to earlier movies in this cycle, Deodato skilfully manipulates audience expectations surrounding the equation between the non-Western and the barbarous, by focusing on the disappearance of four film-makers exploring undocumented communities in the Amazon jungle. When Professor Harold Monroe (Robert Kerman) is sent to ascertain the fate of these intrepid explorers, he discovers that they have been savagely mutilated by local tribes. Managing to recoup the lost film footage the crew members had shot, Monroe returns to New York, ready to screen the material for a national news network. However, when the collected parties gather to view this macabre memorial to the dead cineastes, the images reveal the Western group as responsible for the unrelenting mutilation of wildlife, as well as the rape and torture of members of local tribes, who murderously rebel after the three men from the expedition violate a local maiden. It is the gradual realisation of the Europeans’ involvement in the brutal punishment (captured in the compelling closing scenes of the found footage), that creates a series of moral ambiguities rarely matched by other examples of paracinematic excess. However, what makes Deodato’s film truly disturbing is the pseudo-realist manner in which he depicts the violence contained within these vicious lost reels. By mixing real footage of (still unwatchable) animal slaughter enacted by the film crew, with staged fictional inserts purporting to show their fate, Cannibal Holocaust occupies a purposefully uncomfortable space that exposes moral contradictions in the realist frame. As a result, Cannibal Holocaust is a film that has to be endured, rather than enjoyed. The paradoxical position that the film adopts in relation to its viewer is reiterated at the level of the score, with veteran composer Riz Ortolani creating a strangely melancholic series of ballads that sit uncomfortably against the sheer excess of carnage created by the Western explorers. While Cannibal Holocaust’s controversial depiction of actual animal slaughter reignited debates about film moralities within the European cult text, the integration of these real-life inserts into the fictional footage of the explorers’ demise actually added to the film’s controversy, leading some campaigners to confuse Cannibal Holocaust with ‘snuff’ footage. In more recent years, Cannibal Holocaust’s pro-filmic poetics have led to a reevaluation of the film, in part assisted by its influence on more mainstream realist terror flicks such 44

DIRECTOR Ruggero Deodato PRODUCER Franco Di Nunzio, Franco Palaggi WRITER Gianfranco Clerici CINEMATOGRAPHY Sergio D’Offizi EDITING Vincenzo Tomassi ORIGINAL MUSIC Riz Ortolani PRINCIPAL CAST Robert Kerman, Francesca Ciardi, Carl Gabriel Yorke, Luca Barbareschi

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as The Blair Witch Project (1999), as well as the increased exposure of real-life atrocities to the new internet generation. As Deodato has himself commented to this author: ‘The incredible thing is that if I ask a youth the question today – ‘Is it worse to see Cannibal Holocaust or to see those internet images of a decapitation in American-occupied

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Iraq? ‘– And we all saw those. And they all say Cannibal Holocaust! … I am speechless!’ As this volume goes to press, Deodato is himself preparing a new 2011 director’s cut of Cannibal Holocaust, re-edited to fit better with twenty-first-century sensibilities. XM

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Casablanca US, 1942 – 102 mins Michael Curtiz

Casablanca is a mixture of everything Hollywood can be, and could not be. The story revolves around Rick’s Café, a bar in the North African town of Casablanca during World War II. Casablanca is a frontier zone, and Rick’s Café in particular is a halfway house squeezed between shifting allegiances. The café’s owner, the cynical American Rick (Humphrey Bogart) enjoys this limbo position. He draws a big profit from wheelers and dealers who try to con his rag-tag multinational clientele of desperate refugees. Shady schemer Ugarte (Peter Lorre) and the corrupt prefect of Casablanca and representative of Vichy France, Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), in particular, have a knack for disregarding moral values. Then Rick’s old flame Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) shows up, with her virtuous, resistance-hero husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). As Rick and Ilsa reacquaint themselves over the melody of ‘As Time Goes By’, and recall their Paris romance, Rick realigns his priorities. With the help of Renault (who accuses Rick of being a sentimentalist), he helps the couple escape, effectively putting the love of his life on a flight and out of his life. As Rick and Renault see the plane leave, they turn to each other. Says Rick: ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’ There has been much speculation over the potential subtext in that last line. After all, earlier on Renault had already indicated: ‘if I were a woman, I’d love Rick’. Such speculation is symptomatic of the diversity of interpretations of Casablanca that exist. Part of the explanation lies in the myths that circulate around its production. The script was rewritten extensively during shooting, and the actors were often in the dark about their characters’ story arcs. This imbued performances and dialogues with a life of their own. Institutional intervention has added to the desire to read into Casablanca. Speculatively Richard Maltby (1996) has observed how the lack of clarity about what happens during a scene when ‘time goes by’, as Ilsa visits Rick late at night in his quarters (did he offer his courage in return for sex?), was the result of the actions of the Hays Office in charge of Hollywood’s self-censorship. Because of the context within which Casablanca was produced, references to out-of-wedlock sex and gay love had to remain oblique. Ultimately, knowledge of such possible interventions affects how viewers see Casablanca: as a true love story, or a cynical parody of love. This equips Casablanca with an ambiguity that explains much of its cult appeal. It has also given many of the lines standalone status. ‘Here’s looking at you kid’ and ‘we will always have Paris’ are among the best-known quotes. Saying lines out loud is a much-loved form of audience participation during Casablanca screenings. At the time of its release, critics wondered aloud about what the film was trying to be – as if they too felt a disconnect between what the film was and what it could not be. After a lukewarm run in 1942, it was shelved. When it was re-released one year later it did well at the box office, and even won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Then it was forgotten again. After the death of Bogart in 1957 however, Casablanca developed a devoted and very vocal following. The cult reception of Casablanca was initiated in the Brattle Theater in Cambridge (Boston, Massachusetts), home of Harvard University. The Brattle’s Bogart retrospectives, usually 46

DIRECTOR Michael Curtiz PRODUCER Hal B. Wallis, Jack L. Warner WRITER Julius Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch (play: Murray Burnett and Joan Alison) CINEMATOGRAPHY Arthur Edeson EDITING Owen Marks ORIGINAL MUSIC Max Steiner PRINCIPAL CAST Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt

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programmed around final exam week, drew excited audiences. The screenings quickly turned into ritual events, with audiences shouting the lines and embracing the film’s nostalgia. The cult reception was boosted by the adoption of Bogart as an idol by the upcoming French new wave. In Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960), Jean-Paul Belmondo’s petty thief Michel Poiccard borrows his attitude from ‘Bogie’. By the time Woody Allen spoofed the Bogie cult in Play It Again Sam (1972), Casablanca had already become a phenomenon. Casablanca has been a point of reference in movies ever since (and its attitude towards love is reflected upon poignantly in When Harry Met Sally, 1989). In 2006, Steven Soderbergh virtually remade the film with The Good German. 1 0 0 C U LT F ILMS

The cult of Casablanca inspired Umberto Eco to write a famous essay (1986) that explained how a film’s stylistic ricketiness, its ambiguity, intertextuality, and unevenness were more likely to draw cult followings than ones delivering wholly furnished storyworlds that do not allow audiences a place in their midst. Today, Casablanca remains one of the world’s favourite cult movies. Most recently, theatres and television networks have established Casablanca as a Valentine’s Day fixture – the perfect movie for sentimentalists who want to feel like martyrs. It is yet another instance of a reception warped out of the orbit of planned consumption that touches the heart of viewers across the world. EM 47

Un chien andalou France, 1928 – 16 mins Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí The surrealists of the 1920s were probably the earliest filmgoers to turn their love of movies into a form of cult connoisseurship. They loudly contested the highbrow dictate of taste by championing slapstick comedy (especially the films of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton), Westerns, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari*, and what Ado Kyrou called ‘demented films shown in local fleapits’. They also built up a cult following for Louise Brooks. The film they loved most, however, was one of their own: a bath of ‘bad’ and scandalous imagery that Jean Vigo called ‘a kick in the pants’. The opening scene of Andalou is a direct assault on the spectator’s activity of movie-viewing. It is a full moon night. On a balcony a man (Buñuel) is sharpening a razor, running it across his fingernails to assess its sharpness. As a cloud slides across the moon, a young woman’s eye looking into the camera is opened wide. In extreme close-up we see the razor slit her eye, destroying her power to see. Even today there are few who do not flinch when they see this scene for the first time. Andalou offers several other shocking moments: there is nudity, sexual assault, drooling, a severed hand, dead animals – as befits surrealism these are primarily ‘dream images’, pulled from the collective subconsciousness of co-directors Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. It is mostly Buñuel’s film. Dalí’s on-set contribution was limited to the donkeys-and-piano scene, for which he altered the look of the already rotting donkeys so that they appeared to be ‘freshly dead’. In an attempt to break down filmic continuity, five intertitles of Andalou present misleading clues. The first one, ‘Once Upon a Time,’ appears chronological, but the others mash up the logical progression of time. In addition, the editing switches abruptly between locations, so as to disrupt any logical sense of time and place. For repeat viewers, however, the disorientation is only relative – much of the progression does make sense, for instance, in the continuation of characters’ actions and emotions across the story. The immediate reception of Andalou was controversial, though often romanticised in retrospect. According to his biography, at the premiere Buñuel hid behind the screen, his pockets filled with stones, ready to defend himself against violent reprisals from those disapproving of the film. Reportedly, there were some riots at screenings (there is a scene in Henry & June, 1990, relaying Henry Miller’s reaction, showing one such disturbance). Controversy aside, Andalou became a cause célèbre because it came at the tail end of the surrealists’ ‘intuitive period’, just before the movement began to structure and dogmatise – immediately before it became a church, so to speak. Andalou shares the privilege of being a pre-church cult with only a few other films: Germaine Dulac and Antonin Artaud’s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), and Buñuel and Dalí’s next collaboration, L’Âge d’or (1930), a longer film, and already more organised in its sustained attack on the bourgeosie and the Catholic Church. Almost a century old, Andalou still features on theatre programmes today, though its presence can be explained by its prominent place on film-school curricula, where it continues to attract controversy, and is often prefaced with a warning for the faint-hearted (my own Andalou baptism, in 1987, saw two people faint). EM 1 0 0 C U LT F ILMS

DIRECTOR Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí PRODUCER Luis Buñuel WRITER Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí EDITING Luis Buñuel MUSIC Richard Wagner, Maurice Ravel PRINCIPAL CAST Pierre Batcheff, Simone Mareuil, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí

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Coffy US, 1973 – 91 mins Jack Hill

Often working with ‘King of the Bs’ Roger Corman, director Jack Hill carved out a distinctive cult niche during the 1970s, by helming features oriented towards teen and urban American drive-in audiences. In particular, Hill specialised in women-in-prison films (most notably The Big Bird Cage, 1972), teen gang flicks (such as the iconic Switchblade Sisters, 1975) and blaxploitation revenge epics such as Coffy. With its distinctive visual edge, pulsating musical score and wry political commentary, the cinema of Jack Hill was not only a mainstay of Corman’s emergent New World Pictures empire, it also became an influential cornerstone for more contemporary American cult auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino. Arguably, the brutal blaxploitation thriller Coffy represents one of the highlights of Hill’s career, which also built upon his existing working relations with icons such as Pam Grier and Sid Haig. The film’s dynamic opening sets the scene for the narrative that follows. Here, a gangland pusher who unwisely proclaims that he has more women than he can handle: ‘I have even got white tail!’ is tempted to a drug den on the promise of seducing a semi-conscious but sexually voracious African American female ‘user’. At the crucial point of coitus, the mysterious female reveals a pump-action shotgun and decapitates the ill-fated suitor with a single blast. This lethal angel is revealed to be Coffy (Grier), who oscillates between saving lives as a ward nurse on the night shift, and expelling those male figures who push junk on her days off. As we discover, Coffy’s quest is initially premised on a vendetta to avenge her younger sister, whose life was wrecked because she got hooked on heroin while still at school. The sequence where Grier’s character visits this sibling and narrates the contemporary plight of African American teen addiction adds a distinct educational dimension to the film. The sequence underscores the extent to which many blaxploitation entries from the decade can be viewed as combining exploitation and social-problem elements in their exposé of the contemporary black condition. However, social allusions aside, the trajectory of Hill’s narrative errs on the side of all-out violence, rather than vérité realism, when Coffy widens her retribution to include the mobsters responsible for a violent assault on the reforming black cop Carter (William Elliott). Adhering to the exploitation rhetoric associated with female representations within the genre, Grier takes a sabbatical from her ward duties to go undercover as a Jamaican prostitute working for dope and doll pusher King George (Robert Do Qui). In one memorable scene of same-sex excess, Coffy proves her sexual and fighting prowess by taking on King George’s catty female harem, dispelling her would-be assailants with the razor blades concealed in her oversized afro. Although it would be easy to dismiss the often salacious and sexualised representation of Grier’s body in this scene, and the film as a whole, her cult persona in these 1970s films does add an important female corrective to the masculine bias of blaxploitation cinema. Indeed, Hill’s film even offers a cynical commentary 50

DIRECTOR Jack Hill PRODUCER Robert A. Papazian, Salvatore Billitteri WRITER Jack Hill CINEMATOGRAPHY Paul Lohmann EDITING Chuck McLelland ORIGINAL MUSIC Roy Ayers PRINCIPAL CAST Pam Grier, William Elliott, Robert Do Qui, Booker Bradshaw, Sid Haig

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

on the regressive linkage between phallic power and subcultural politics through the figure of Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw), Coffy’s duplicitous lover who is running for Congress on the blackpower ticket. Although Brunswick gives a speech accusing the white system of being responsible for the contemporary enslavement of the black community through drugs and vice, the film’s finale reveals him to be funded by the same drugs cartel responsible for the decimation of the communities he claims to represent. Although Brunswick 100 CULT FILMS

sanctions the killing of Coffy in the closing scenes, she manages to evade her executioners with various novel tactics that include killing Sid Haig (here cast as an Arabic henchman) with a concealed razor-sharp hair grip. Confronting her former suitor in the film’s climactic scene, Coffy coldly rejects his claim that ‘I did this for my brothers and sisters.’ Shooting Brunswick in the genitals, Grier’s character replies ‘You shouldn’t talk to me about sisters – I’ve got one!’, which seems to stake out a further separatist stance to this urban cult film classic. XM 51

Daughters of Darkness (Les lèvres rouges) Belgium/France/US/Germany, 1971 – 100 mins Harry Kümel

‘Dracula in Marienbad’, read one of the advertisements for Daughters of Darkness. ‘It’s lesbian time in Transylvania!’ shouted another. The first ad stresses the exquisite artfulness of Daughters; the second its exploitative trashiness. Both have merit. Daughters is both the most sensual vampire art film and the most artsy vampire sexploitation picture, and its lasting cult appeal comes from the ambiguity that that straddling of high- and lowbrow cultures brings. Prodigal director Kümel intended Daughters to be

DIRECTOR Harry Kümel PRODUCER Paul Collet, Pierre Drouot WRITER Harry Kümel, Pierre Drouot, Jean Ferry CINEMATOGRAPHY Eduard Van Den Enden

a commercial picture, with erotic as well as violent scenes […] . It was just a question of getting a young and

EDITING Gust Vershueren, Denis

beautiful couple to fuck as much as possible, with a maximum of bloody scenes in between. A real commercial

Bonan, Fima Noveck

machine! But we thought that wasn’t enough, so we also decided to include erotic and chic elements. In that

ORIGINAL MUSIC François De

respect we were the predecessors of Emmanuelle.

Roubaix PRINCIPAL CAST Delphine Seyrig,

The story is based on the legendary blood countess Elizabeth Bathory. A vampire countess (Delphine Seyrig) and her female servant (and lover) seduce a honeymooning American couple in a large, eerie hotel in the Belgian beach resort of Ostend. The servant (Andrea Rau) and the husband (John Karlen) are killed, and the countess is gruesomely impaled, but not before she has infected the American girl (Danielle Ouimet), who becomes the new vampire. Shot on location in a hotel of old grandeur, Daughters’ atmosphere is akin to that of Last Year in Marienbad (1961). It is slow, tranquil and meditative, and filled with sensual, Freudian innuendo. French new wave muse and feminist activist Delphine Seyrig, also from Marienbad, portrays the countess as a mix between Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo (Kümel is an admirer of Von Sternberg). Colourful minor characters, such as a mysterious ‘mother’, and mesmerising images of the Grand Guignol hotel interior as well as gloomy impressions of the sea at night add surrealist overtones. Interspersed are some of the era’s most audacious sex scenes – with one very explicit shower scene heavily featured in promotional material. Though Daughters was released at a time when vampiresploitation films were popular, its artistic passport and its immensely complicated production process (the result of no less than thirteen co-financers) resulted in a public presence that was all over the place – the film is known under at least a dozen different titles, in three language versions and in various cuts. This inevitably confused local distributors, and the release became a mess. Daughters ran successfully in New York and Paris, and met with hostility elsewhere. Variety insisted that the film demanded ‘a special sell if isn’t going to be lost in the mire of the conventionally bloody exploitation market’, and for a while that was exactly what happened. Gradually, however, it found a footing at college campuses and gay and lesbian festivals in the US and in European cinematheques. This 52

John Karlen, Danielle Ouimet, Andrea Rau, Fons Rademakers

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new frame of interpretation set it up as a cult film that had moved from catering to ‘aficionados of soft-porn’ to one that in its appeal to a ‘large contingent of lesbians curious about the film’s advertised display of lesbianism’ could function as a proto-feminist exploration, ready to be ‘re-discovered’. In other words, Daughters had become valuable. Ever since, the cult of Daughters has deepened. Small-scale fan communities (especially Gothic and lesbian vampire fan

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communities, such as the ones around fan-fiction writer Pam Keesey) affected its status by adopting it as an antidote to the saccharine, abstinent vampire films of more recent years, and by seizing on its interrogation of victimisation. Daughters continues to exude a hypnotic attraction. Too slow, deliberate and moody for fast consumption, it gives fans a glimpse into vampires’ oceans of time, while still producing jolts of perversity. EM

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Dawn of the Dead US, 1978 – 126 mins George A. Romero

Commenting in a recent interview about the sustained influence that his debut zombie feature has had on the contemporary horror film, George A. Romero stated:

DIRECTOR George A. Romero PRODUCER Claudio Argento, Alfredo Cuomo, Richard P.

I am puzzled that Night of the Living Dead remains such an influential movie. We made it at a certain time, it had

Rubenstein, Donna Siegel

a certain kind of anger that had to do with the disappointment of the film-makers in the fact that the sixties

WRITER George A. Romero

didn’t work. I am surprised that people are still affected by it.

CINEMATOGRAPHY Michael Gornick, John Coquillon

This somewhat nihilistic assessment of the film’s impact can be attributed to the frustrations relating to the death of a radical change that the era had been supposed to herald. This ambivalence is clearly referenced in the finale of Night of the Living Dead*, where the uninfected black survivor is killed by a redneck squad who mistake him as being infected. In the absence of such subcultural political interventions, 1970s American horror developed a similar pessimistic tendency, which is clearly referenced in the tour de force that is Dawn of the Dead. This sequel added not only colour and extended SFX to the zombie mythology, but also boasted a powerful musical overdrive delivered by Dario Argento’s house group Goblin. The film is also pivotal for expanding key themes that had originated in Romero’s debut. Whereas the finale of Night ends with an image of (violently) reconstructed social order, Dawn begins with a sequence of total media chaos, as national networks try to contain the spread of contagion, which has clearly spiralled out of control since the first movie. It is this lack of social cohesion that the movie reveals as irreversible, befitting the more downbeat message that permeates the narrative. It is also a level of nihilism that exceeds the social and racial preoccupations of Romero’s debut. However, in one clear political corrective to the gender representations of the first film, the opening scene of Romero’s sequel replaces the image of a catatonic woman with that of a controlling heroine. This transition is enacted through the figure of Fran (Gaylen Ross), one of the TV-station managers, whose symbolic power in relation to the male fragility depicted is evidenced in this early scene, by her ability to control the flow of misleading media information against the wishes of her ratings-hungry male superiors. This establishes an interesting gender dynamic equating femininity with integrity, which dominates the remainder of the narrative. In stark contrast, the males of the movie respond to the threat of encroaching infection by adopting an increasingly armoured and ultimately futile approach to dealing with the undead. This weaponised response is clearest in one key early scene in the movie, when a SWAT team attempts to storm an urban tenement, where the predominantly African American and Latino communities have been ritualistically hoarding the bodies of former friends and families. The scene bristles with both bloodshed and unrestrained racism, when one soldier massacres the tenement dwellers on the 1 0 0 C U LT F ILMS

EDITING Dario Argento, George A. Romero ORIGINAL MUSIC Dario Argento, Goblin PRINCIPAL CAST Gaylen Ross, Ken Foree, David Emge, Scott H. Reiniger

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basis of their ethnic affiliation, rather than their potentially infected status. Romero here powerfully contrasts this irresponsible group behaviour with the lone iconic figure of Peter (Ken Foree), an African American trooper whose heroic individuality complements the figure of Ben (Duane Jones) from the director’s earlier film. However, despite this character’s considerable intellect and fighting prowess, this early scene (which shows how Peter’s gun jams at the key moment of physiological exposure to a basement full of writhing corpses) hints at the recognition of male fragility that underpins the narrative. This traumatic preoccupation with male performance and the politics of survival becomes even more pronounced in the film’s iconic central scenes, where Fran and her edgy lover Stephen (David Emge), along with Peter and fellow SWAT renegade Roger (Scott H. Reiniger) hole up in an abandoned shopping mall populated by the undead. This locale, and Romero’s frequent images of bumbling zombies adhering to long-held shopping patterns represent the director’s pointed satirical commentary on the alienating effects of consumption. However, as Tony Williams (2004) has argued, this socioeconomic subtext does not preclude problematic issues of masculinity:

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Despite consumerism’s goal of targeting female shoppers by lavish displays of material goods, Dawn of the Dead ironically reveals that the mall has more fascination for the three males rather than the solitary female who accompanies them on the journey.

It is this masculine obsession with the mall and its pleasures that proves the group’s undoing in the film’s closing scene, when marauding gangs and the monstrous undead battle to reclaim the venue. Ironically, the cynical view of late capitalism that Romero exhibits in the movie also extends to his wider views on the so-called golden age of dark horror from which this narrative emerged: You make the assumption that the seventies was an important time for horror. I hung up on horror at the end of 1968 and I don’t know how far it went! I think that some of the stuff that went on into the seventies was not socially or politically motivated, because this was the time that Hollywood really discovered the commerciality of horror. I suspect that it was this aspect, more than any intention on the part of the film-maker that made horror so popular, and made it so much money!

XM

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Deadly Weapons US, 1974 – 75 mins Doris Wishman

As revenge films go, Deadly Weapons is perhaps one of the most bizarre. The narrative revolves around the use of Polish-born Chesty Morgan’s infamously gargantuan bosoms as weapons of mass distraction. A popular hit on the exploitation and grindhouse film circuit of the 1970s, the film even inspired a sequel of sorts, Double Agent ’73 (1975). Again filmed by Doris Wishman and again featuring Morgan’s breasts as the ‘stars’ of the show, it is almost interchangeable with Deadly Weapons in stressing that Morgan’s main assets are physical rather than theatrical. Morgan’s acting is wooden and the plots of both are absurd beyond belief – not that that mattered much In Deadly Weapons, Morgan – credited here as Zsa Zsa, presumably as a bizarre exploitation film reference to Zsa Zsa Gabor – plays Crystal, a marketing ‘executive’ out for revenge. After her boyfriend is offed by the mob, she attempts to track down those responsible for his death and kill them one by one. The ‘deadly weapons’ in question are Morgan’s 73FF breasts, which she uses to quite literally smother her victims to death. But there is a twist in the tale as Crystal ultimately discovers that it was her father who had ordered the hit. It is tempting to read the smothering as a kind of frenzied form of forced breastfeeding and undoubtedly psychoanalytical readings of Wishman’s film might work in this direction. But this ignores the film’s nature as exploitation cinema and its recourse to enlisting any gimmick that might attract an audience (of whatever kind). Marketing for the film focused upon Morgan’s oversized bosoms, often displaying a naked drawing of her wrapped in nothing but a measuring tape (carefully positioned across her breasts and clearly displaying her vital statistics). In many ways Deadly Weapons represents an almost perfect example of the logic of exploitation cinema: a film advertised and marketed solely on the unfeasibly large size of its main actress’s breasts. As Moya Luckett (2003) has noted, the lure of films such as Deadly Weapons lies in the ever-present promise of the ‘unveiling’ scene. Morgan’s breasts never appear to be far away from being unveiled. Luckett is only one of several feminist scholars who have studied the films of Wishman (Tania Modleski and Elena Gorfinkel have also analysed her oeuvre), and that unusual academic attention has helped to enhance the cult reputation of both Wishman and Morgan. In fact, it ensured that they remained a cause célèbre. A rum combination of Morgan’s unusually large breasts, the terrible acting, the presence of cult porn icon Harry Reems (of Deep Throat fame) and the general absurdity of the premise all combine to make Deadly Weapons a prime cult property. But Wishman herself is important here too. Often labelled ‘the female Ed Wood’, she produced a number of sexploitation films in the 1970s that were wildly popular on the grindhouse circuit and that cemented her reputation as an important female trash filmmaker. Chief among these was Deadly Weapons. As one website recently put it, to see it is to disbelieve it! EM/RH 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Doris Wishman PRODUCER Doris Wishman WRITER Judy J. Kushner CINEMATOGRAPHY Juan Fernández EDITING Lou Burdi PRINCIPAL CAST Chesty Morgan, Harry Reems, Phillip Stahl

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Debbie Does Dallas US, 1978 – 80 mins Jim Clark

In their recent and incisive analysis of 1970s porn, Darren Kerr and Claire Hines (2011) have argued against the continued dominance of Gerard Damiano’s breakthrough hit Deep Throat (1972), as the prevailing model by which to examine wider erotic traditions from the decade. In so doing, the authors point to other key examples of adult cinema as also providing pertinent templates later adopted by the industry. While clearly influential, Damiano’s film also represents a model of porn in transition: that of an industry moving from underground marginality towards becoming a (distorted) symbol of mainstream sexual mores, while also altering its narrative modes from short, theatrical ‘displays’ to full-length, integrated fictional explorations. By the time of Debbie Does Dallas’s release in 1978, some of the key American pornographic industry markers had been established. These included the centrality of character-driven plots, often with a suburban or upwardly mobile setting, as well as an eye to current trends, demographics and markets. In the case of Jim Clark’s film, the emphasis is on the exploitation of the long-established co-ed sex aesthetic, with couplings and carnality occurring within the comforting milieu of campus settings and other markers of Middle America. Here, cheerleading Queen Debbie (Bambi Woods) is given two weeks to raise the funds for a trip to Texas to take up a place among the Texas Cowgirl Cheerleaders. Calling on her seven same-sex colleagues for assistance, the female fraternity all agree to get jobs in the local neighbourhood to finance this sporting endeavour. These subsequent posts: in the local youth bookshop, library, candlestick outlet, sports store and tennis court all give rise to the inevitable couplings upon which the fictional erotic universe is premised. However, it is interesting to see how each job involves its own individual narrative, each with specific identifiable stylistic particularities. Here, a variety of optical effects, under-cranked hand jobs, distortive POVs at the point of orgasm, as well as a porno prog-rock score all add an off-kilter air to proceedings. As interesting to note is the way in which the film attempts to incorporate a female separatist rhetoric into the narrative, with the cheerleaders expelling their regular jock boyfriends to focus on turning (middleclass) tricks for Debbie’s advancement fund. Equally, their subsequent clients: a twitchy effeminate sportsstore fantasist, a stoned-out bookstore owner, as well as the leering local prof at the college library clearly indicate that the debasement of the male ego-ideal remains firmly planted at the centre of the film’s narrative. In this respect, an interesting gender dynamic can be identified in the depictions of Debbie Does Dallas: female starlets are not just sexy, but savvy in their ability to exploit masculine foibles, while the males depicted exhibit a comic desperation indicative of their sexual undoing. Key to these male tragicomic renditions is the criminally underrated actor Robert Kerman (here billed under his porno pseudonym Richard Bolla), who is cast in the film as the sexually frustrated sportsstore 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Jim Clark PRODUCER Jim Clark WRITER Maria Minestra CINEMATOGRAPHY Billy Budd EDITING Hals Liptus ORIGINAL MUSIC Gerard Sampler PRINCIPAL CAST Bambi Woods, Richard Bolla

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owner Mr Greenfield. Kerman here excels with a pantheon of performative gestures that convey his thwarted desires and even more dissipated masculine drive. As he reveals to the heroine in the film’s climactic scene, his teen dream of becoming the quarterback who dated the head cheerleader was wrecked because ‘I was too small.’ This revelation does little to dispel some of the implicit issues of lost male potency underpinning the movie. Indeed, even the closing fantasy inserts, which use stock baseball iconography to imply that Greenfield has finally reached his magical touchdown with Bambi’s character, seem to function more as ironic critique than comforting conclusion.

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If only for the curiously edgy portrayal of the male sexual psyche that Kerman conveys, Debbie Does Dallas deserves its status as a significant signpost in the development of porno chic. The actor starred in over 100 adult features, as well as being inducted into the Adult Video News (AVN) Hall of Fame in 1997. Arguably, Kerman’s acting credentials beyond the skin-flick sphere were also ably demonstrated in movies such as Umberto Lenzi’s Eaten Alive (1981) as well as Deodato’s 1979 macabre magnum opus Cannibal Holocaust*. Kerman has gone on record as claiming that the later title’s extreme imagery and scenes of animal cruelty cast a curse over the production, which sabotaged his flourishing career in the process. XM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Deep Red (Profondo rosso) Italy, 1975 – 126 mins Dario Argento

Although broadly categorised as a ‘horror’ director, the cinema of Dario Argento speaks directly to the Italian traditions of detective fiction that became popularised under the label of giallo. The term (which refers to the yellow dustjackets placed around detective novels) became synonymous with a series of films delineating the fate of male amateur detectives who, compromised by involvement in a crime, are forced to go outside of the law to mount an unofficial investigation in order to prove their innocence. Often this investigation results in the exploration of distinctly psychoanalytical themes, which evidence subversive gender strategies and the return of near-repressed and perverse primal desires. It was the international success of Argento’s debut giallo, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), which sparked the rapid proliferation of similarly themed and titled productions during the cycle’s peak period of 1970 to 1975. The first instalment in Argento’s so-called ‘Animal Trilogy’ (featuring terms associated with birds, felines or insects in their narrative enigmas), the film was marked by a truly ingenious gender twist that reveals a former female victim of sexual assault as the film’s sadistic killer. Later entries to this cycle included Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972), in which an unidentified ‘male’ aggressor is exposed as the wife of the key protagonist, whom she is punishing for his presumed effeminate qualities. By the time of Deep Red, not only had the giallo largely exhausted its public popularity, but Argento had become increasingly interested in combining the supposedly distinct world of ‘rational’ detective fiction with the macabre traditions of supernatural horror. The film centres on a psychic who discovers a dark and incestuous secret relating to the murder of a patriarchal figure in the mind of an unidentified audience member at one of her seminars. This dark sexual secret is referenced in the oblique opening to the movie, which evokes Freudian notions of the primal scene, via a bloody struggle between two unidentified figures being played out against a child’s nursery rhyme. It is the knowledge of this primal crime that leads to the psychic’s violent murder, which is witnessed by Marcus Daly (David Hemmings), an English musician living in Rome. As with Argento’s previous male leads, Marcus becomes entangled in a crime that he has fundamentally misjudged and this obsession forces him to adopt the role of detective. The character is helped in his investigations by the tormented pianist Carlo (Gabriele Lavia) and the rambunctious female journalist Gianna (Daria Nicolodi), whose resourceful qualities provide sharp relief to the foibles of the main lead. Although Marcus believes that Carlo is in fact the murderer, having tried to conceal an Oedipal wounding of his own father, the final scenes of the film upset even this interpretation. Here, the real killer is revealed to be Carlo’s mother Marta, a faded actress with incestuous leanings, played in wonderfully erratic mode by former 40s Italian icon Clara Calamai. Commenting on the psychoanalytial themes underpinning Deep Red, Argento stated: 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Dario Argento PRODUCER Claudio Argento, Salvatore Argento WRITER Dario Argento, Bernardino Zapponi CINEMATOGRAPHY Luigi Kuveiller EDITING Franco Fraticelli ORIGINAL MUSIC Goblin PRINCIPAL CAST David Hemmings, Gabriele Lavia, Daria Nicolodi, Macha Méril, Clara Calamai

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I think you are the man you are or the woman you are because of the experiences you have had when you are a child … . It’s important because cinema is essentially Freudian, it occurs between the dark and dreams, between reality and what we can no longer recall. For me cinema, even more than real life, is pure Freud.

While these libidinal themes make Deep Red transgressive, the film is also transitional in terms of Argento’s development as a cinematic stylist. Here, on-screen splatter is framed by winding long takes, ambiguous point-of-view camerawork and radical splits between sound- and image tracks. The film’s allusion to the arthouse

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techniques pioneered by directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni is more than coincidental. Indeed, with his casting of David Hemmings as the ill-fated amateur sleuth, Argento is clearly recalling the actor’s similar casting as Thomas in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). While Thomas uncovers an assassination hidden in the apparently innocent contours of a photograph, Marcus unravels a murder mystery that entangles and implicates his closest associates. Whereas Thomas is literally swallowed up by his investigation during the ambiguous finale of Blow-Up, the climax of Deep Red finds Hemmings’s character seriously wounded after failing to recognise the film’s female killer as the mother of his closest Italian companion. XM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Dirty Dancing US, 1987 – 100 mins Emile Ardolino

According to critic Vera Dika (2003), the nostalgia-heavy films of the 1980s can be regarded as ‘recycle’ films that celebrate their unawareness of history so that they can repeat it endlessly. This is true for Dirty Dancing: the film’s story is only concerned with the very present – a ‘now’ that the theme song identifies as the best time ever. Among the many films of the 80s that celebrated nostalgia through tales of mild youthful rebellion, Dirty Dancing initially stood out as the ugly duckling. It lacked the budget, glitz, star power and marketing machinery that fuelled, for instance, Back to the Future (1985) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). It looked cheap, a bit crude even – not helped by a cast that were excellent dancers but far less accomplished actors (whose characters, on the surface, represent a rag-tag band of working-class misfits and outsiders), or by including a market-unfriendly, sensitive issue such as abortion in the plot. The setting in a special-effectsfree early 60s remote summer camp also did not do much to present the film as glamorous or exciting. But Dirty Dancing had one scene, which starts with the now immortal line ‘nobody puts Baby in a corner’ and featured the theme song ‘I’ve Had the Time of My Life’, performed by veterans Bill Medley (‘Unchained Melody’) and Jennifer Warren (‘Somewhere up Where We Belong’), that captured the zeitgeist’s hunger for nostalgia in a way no other film of the decade did. It is the imbalance between this dance scene and the rawness of the rest of the film that gives it its edge. For the film’s distribution, home-viewing pioneer Vestron gambled on a video market that had previously only proven stable for horror and exploitation films. It worked. Dirty Dancing quickly became the top-selling and -rental tape of the 1980s – a veritable video cult. Initially, the attraction revolved almost uniquely around the swooning adoration of teen girls and mature female fans for intergenerational heartthrob Patrick Swayze (already thirty-five at the time). But, even after the initial excitement had worn off, Dirty Dancing surprisingly sustained a considerable niche of fans. These followers were not as vocal as one usually assumes cultists to be, but their existence was very evident in sales figures. The film continued to do well as a video rental, a characteristic it shares with another cult film known for its loyal and not always vocal female following, Titanic (1997). Over the course of the years the cult of Dirty Dancing has become more multifaceted. When openly gay director Emile Ardolino died of AIDS in 1993, it opened the eyes of critics and audiences to the maturity of the film’s subtexts. Swayze’s appearance, against type, as an evangelical paedophile in Donnie Darko* helped fan-boys look more favourably upon the film. Swayze’s death, in 2009, lent the film’s nostalgia yet another dimension. Today, Dirty Dancing is an industry unto itself, stretching across numerous platforms and re-releases. The kernel of its cult appeal, however, remains and, over time, the opening lines of ‘I’ve Had the Time of My Life’ have invited us to see the film not only as unabashed ahistorical narcissism but equally as a meditation on the coming of age and passage of ‘time’ itself. EM 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Emile Ardolino PRODUCER Linda Gottlieb WRITER Eleanor Bergstein CHOREOGRAPHY Kenny Ortega, Emile Ardolino EDITING Peter C. Frank ORIGINAL MUSIC John Morris PRINCIPAL CAST Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey, Jerry Orbach, Cynthia Rhodes

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Django Italy/Spain, 1966 – 93 mins Sergio Corbucci

In his classic study Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl Marx to Sergio Leone (2006), Christopher Frayling has identified the importance of the ‘foundational variant’, through which Italian popular genres use a successful template to proliferate additional and related titles during peak periods of popularity. One of the key cult case studies Frayling employs in his analysis is Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 Western Django, which starred the (then) unknown actor Franco Nero. Employing the socio-historical perspective that later paracinematic theorists have also adopted in discussion of the Italian cult text, Frayling argues that the phenomenal success of Django was not only due to its excessive violence (with scenes of ear-severing and hand-crushing punishments leading to it being censored and even banned in some territories), but also because Nero’s icy portrayal of an immoral, profit-oriented antihero impacted with Italian audiences experiencing rapid social change as part of the economic miracle. For Frayling, Django, which begins with the image of gunslinger (Nero) dragging a coffin into a shanty town, and ends with a vendetta-led massacre in a cemetery after the hero has been brutalised by a bandit gang, reveals a narrative device that can be described as the ‘servant of two masters’ plot. Here, the gunslinger reveals both an amoral and alienated composition, whereby he attempts to exploit rivalries between local gangs in order to maximise his own financial gain. Although Frayling notes that traditional markers of Italian stability (such as the family) are replicated in these classic Western formats, they either function as as an inhibiting factor to the resolution of conflict in these texts, or else as an emotional support network unavailable to the ‘rootless’ antihero. In this respect, the author argues that Django’s impact can be registered at a domestic level (with the newly enfranchised industrial worker also increasingly having to choose between competing loyalties). As Nero has himself commented in an interview with this author, ‘These films were about the workers, and the worker is like ‘The Man with No Name’. We never know who the workers are, they have no names.’ Beyond the film’s Italian influence, Django’s international reception has drawn out interesting subcultural readings of race and ideological resistance from non-Western viewers. As Nero has stated,

DIRECTOR Sergio Corbucci PRODUCER Sergio Corbucci, Manolo Bolognini WRITER Sergio Corbucci, Bruno Corbucci CINEMATOGRAPHY Enzo Barboni EDITING Nino Baragli, Sergio Montanari ORIGINAL MUSIC Luis Bacalov PRINCIPAL CAST Franco Nero, José Bódalo, Lorendana Nusciak, Eduardo Fajardo

I think a movie like Django appealed to those countries undergoing revolution! I will never forget that I went once to South America and at the hotel they did not enter my real name, they just put ‘Django’ on the hotel register! It was the same in Germany and in Japan, in many other countries around the world the term seemed to appeal to a rebellious spirit, to the non-conformist.

In purely industrial terms, the impact of Django can be deduced from the endless sequels and spin-offs that Frayling charts in Italy after 1966. Not only did the movie propel Nero into European stardom, but it even managed to eclipse the reputation of the more mainstream work in which the actor has subsequently appeared. 1 0 0 C U LT F ILMS

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While the film’s cult cachet could be seen to derive from the appeal of the lone gunslinger, it can also be clearly linked to changing social and economic patterns occurring in Italy at this time. Django’s sadistic preoccupation with scenes of male torture and violation also spoke to masculine fears about the changing status of masculinity in this new 66

technocratic Italian sphere. In this respect, it is interesting to note that Nero’s later Spaghetti roles in films such as Colt Concert (Lucio Fulci, 1966) and Corbucci’s A Professional Gun (1968) reveal an increasingly feminised and brutalised construction, which the actor later reprised in his 1970s rogue cop pairings with director Enzo G. Castellari. XM BFI SC RE E N G U I D E S

Donnie Darko US, 2001 – 113 mins Richard Kelly

Paranoid, spectacular and confusing, it is almost impossible not to see Donnie Darko as both a prophetic reflection on, and a pastiche of, a mood change in American culture – woven around symbols of liberty and oppression such as guns, religion, freedom of speech, school boards and time travel in a world without a future. At the centre of the film’s complex web of interconnected obsessions is the story of troubled teenager Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) in the Halloween week preceding the presidential elections of 1988. Suffering from chronic sleepwalking, Donnie survives the crash of a jet engine into his house, right after a giant rabbit (called Frank) warns him that the world will end in twenty-eight days, six hours, forty-two minutes, and twelve seconds. Though this apocalyptic prediction, which recurs throughout the film, supplies the plot with stringent countdown suspense, Donnie Darko’s real tensions lie in its highly unusual modes of stylisation, such as sudden motion changes, jumps, extreme angles, audacious tracking shots, a prominent soundtrack, lighting tricks and numerous genre mixes (high-school drama, horror, science fiction). The ending, in which Donnie foils a child pornography ring, and discovers how to travel in time and save his girlfriend’s life by sacrificing his own, is both exhilarating and convoluted, a mix of a drug-induced trip, teen angst, somnambulist meditation and maniacal hallucination brought together in an increasingly apocalyptic chain of events. Donnie Darko was declared an ‘impressive failure’ after only one screening at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001. The American theatrical reception was also lacklustre, though the release on Halloween weekend, October 2001, was traditionally a prime time for darker, more adult fare. But the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11th had dampened audiences’ appetites for endtime narratives. As one critic put it: ‘why seek out talking rabbits warning of the end of the world when it already seemed to be happening?’ Eventually, Donnie Darko did find its niche audience. Successful latenight slots at European fantasy-film festivals helped it gain a ‘cool’ status – audiences gradually came to appreciate its lack of a generic niche and warmed to the self-reflexive atmosphere, the philosophical tone (especially the debates about time travel) and the numerous allusions to genre classics, such as Stephen King’s It (which Donnie’s mom reads), E.T. (1982), Halloween (1978), Frightmare (1983), and The Evil Dead* (which is playing at the local cinema Donnie visits). Simultaneously, Donnie Darko began a midnight run at the Pioneer Theater in the East Village in Manhattan that would last twenty-eight months. Of course, with its motifs of the uncanny, heavy symbolism, campy pop sensibility and plentiful drug references, Donnie Darko fits the characteristics of the midnight movie perfectly. Equally important, however, was its status as virtually the last ‘true’ midnight movie, at least in New York’s scene. While the phenomenon still lingers on, especially in re-releases and outside the Big Apple, the change in mood after 9/11 rendered the 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Richard Kelly PRODUCER Adam Fields, Nancy Juvonen, Sean McKittrick, Drew Barrymore WRITER Richard Kelly EDITING Sam Bauer, Eric Strand ORIGINAL MUSIC Michael Andrews PRINCIPAL CAST Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, Jena Malone, Noah Wyle

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countercultural subversion and ironic outrageousness of the Manhattan midnight movie a thing of the past. Near the end of 2002, audiences discovered Donnie Darko in yet another fashion, approaching it as retro nostalgia for the gloomy atmosphere of 80s new-wave music. The film’s soundtrack, featuring songs by bands inextricably linked to the era (Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, Echo and the Bunnymen – rabbits, again), became popular at college campuses, and Gary Jules’s rendition of Mad World, and later also the inventive video clip by Michel Gondry, became indie hits. The fact that Donnie Darko not only touted ‘cool’ bands, but also 80s matinee idol Patrick Swayze, from Dirty Dancing*, and even playfully ‘tainted’ the legacy of the popular television series The Smurfs by discussing the sex lives of its characters, reinforced the idea that the film perfectly encapsulated popular culture’s memory of the decade. Donnie Darko’s cult reputation further accelerated through the internet and various DVD editions – in this respect, it is probably one of the first ‘digital film cults’. Much of this reputation centred around the imagery of the rabbit skull, which became an iconic emblem for ‘emo’ youth

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cultures, but which also triggered a plethora of tangential speculations on the film’s meaning. Various interpretations claimed the film carried influences from Alice in Wonderland, and from Harvey (1950), Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama made into a film starring James Stewart, about a giant invisible rabbit rooted in celtic mythology. Via its mentions of 80s US politics, especially those of George Bush Sr and Michael Dukakis (‘I am voting for Dukakis’ is the first sentence in the film), Donnie Darko was also linked to more contemporary politics, such as right-wing attempts to censor school curricula or the 1999 Columbine high-school massacre (still fresh in audiences’ minds) – the latter connection was further facilitated through references to anti-depressants, guns and Goth culture and succinctly summarised in the phrase ‘they made me do it’ that is carved into Donnie’s school grounds. The persistence of such interpretations eventually led to a critical reappraisal of Donnie Darko as a form of pop-cultural historiography that was also topical in its political assessment of American culture. To date, it remains one of the most popular campus films around the world. EM

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Don’t Torture a Duckling (Non si sevizia un paperino) Italy, 1972 – 102 mins Lucio Fulci

While the cinema of Dario Argento and the wider Italian giallo cycle of the 1970s have frequently been considered for their psychoanalytical interpretations, as well as for reflecting changing patterns of Italian socio-economic development, very little attention has yet been paid to the ways in which the cycle also reflected longstanding regional divisions. Indeed, it is noticeable that the trope of an amateur detective forced to travel from the (relative) security of the urban space to the archaic South in order to solve a crime remains a key feature of many key entries completed between 1970 and 1975. If this pattern points to the existence of an Italian cult subcycle that I would term the Mezziogorno giallo, then these longstanding (and often ideological) constructions of the barbaric and sexually subversive nature of rural life are even more pronounced in those gialli that are set primarily in the South. These often deal with Northern criminological investigations into prior transgressions within this archaic landscape. A key example of this is Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling, in which detectives and journalists from Milan are drafted into the backwoods of the rural locale of Achendura, to apprehend a culprit who has been kidnapping and dispatching young boys there. From the outset, Fulci’s keen eye for the Southern scenery captures the essential incompatibility between Northern-inspired technological advancement and the more traditional modes of existence that it is gradually replacing. For instance, the film’s iconic opening juxtaposes the somewhat incongruous outline of a new motorway edged into the dirt track of the village, against close-up shots of the near mystical female Maciara (Florinda Bolkan) delving into the filth at the side of the viaduct in order to expose the foetus of a young child buried there. The striking imagery, exposing the gulf between the two Italys is also reflected in Riz Ortolani’s strident opening score, which mixes a jagged classical string composition with a traditional Italian folk ballad as if to signify an aural incompatibility between Italian modernism and its macabre Other. Moreover, the spatial dichotomy of this opening scene comes to take on distinctly gendered connotations that reinforce the film’s disjuncture between the rational modernistic structures of (masculine) advancement/surveillance and the feminine, fleshy, irrational landscape. The female association with the natural landscape extends to include a psychic and libidinal dimension in the infantile echoes puncturing the soundtrack during Maciara’s frequent excavations of the soil. As we discover, although not the killer in the narrative, she (and the rest of the townsfolk) are responsible for the illegal concealment of the corpse of her illegitimate child years earlier, thus further conflating illicit acts with the Southern soil upon which modernist advancement is now intruding. It is a violent incongruity that is recognised by the disenchanted Milanese police inspector who finds Maciara bludgeoned to death by the side of the new motorway after locals have wrongly assumed 70

DIRECTOR Lucio Fulci PRODUCER Renato Jaboni WRITER Lucio Fulci, Gianfranco Clerici CINEMATOGRAPHY Sergio D’Offizi EDITING Ornella Michele ORIGINAL MUSIC Riz Ortolani PRINCIPAL CAST Florinda Bolkan, Marc Porel, Tomas Milian, Barbara Bouchet, Irene Papas

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

her to be the child-killer. As he comments, ‘A horrible crime … bred of ignorance and superstition. We construct gleaming highways, but we are a long way from modernising the mentality of people like this.’ The resolution of the film reveals the child-killer to be the local priest Don Alberto Avallone (Marc Porel), who is dispatching

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young boys so that they will not be contaminated by the adult temptations of female flesh, thus initiating a theme of male perversion shielding innocence, which Fulci would later explore more controversially with The New York Ripper in 1982. XM

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Edward Scissorhands US, 1990 – 105 mins Tim Burton

Cool, cute and cruel – Scissorhands holds a special position in cult cinema, hovering in between popular and niche circuits. That position is partly the effect of fans’ genuinely heartfelt love that has not diminished with repeated viewings. It is also partly the result of the unique place that its two major creative talents, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, occupy in popular culture. While neither eschews the mainstream (and indeed both experienced massive exposure to it before they joined forces on this film), their articulations of singular vision and naive idealism in Scissorhands are very much anchored on the sidelines of culture – among the desperate rebels, misfits, and outcasts that Scissorhands represents so well. The story is structured as a fairytale: on a snowy night an old lady reveals to her grandchild the tale of Edward (Depp), a lonely, incomplete creation who, after the death of his ‘inventor’ (Vincent Price in his final role), lives in a decrepit Gothic castle up on a hill. Instead of hands he has giant, razorsharp scissors – with which he frequently cuts himself whenever he is nervous. Discovered and adopted by a local Avon lady (Dianne Wiest), he briefly becomes a hot item who exposes some of the absurd rituals of suburbia. But tumultuous events and a broken heart cause his renewed exile to the castle, where he still lives today, making ice sculptures that cause it to snow. Scissorhands borrows heavily from German Expressionist film, in particular Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari*. The mostly silent Edward is himself a mix between Caligari’s Cesare, Charlie Chaplin’s tramp and the mysterious Kaspar Hauser. Inspiration from post-punk fashion and some elements from steampunk (especially the scene that shows the ‘inventor’s’ cookie machine with which he makes Edward’s heart) add to the vision. Scissorhands did well at the box office and it endeared itself to critics. It was the start of a long-lasting collaboration between Burton and Depp (who wrote that the film saved his life). The film’s elaborate design and simplistic yet disarming narrative would become Burton’s trademark. Depp plays Edward as a sensitive, awkward soul behind a grotesque mask and the part became a template for future roles in his career – and he too turned into an object of cult adulation. Scissorhands also quickly became an essential film for Goth subculture, as described by Paul Hodkinson (2002). Together with Hellraiser* perhaps, a film with which it shares a penchant for ornamental facial disfigurement, Scissorhands exemplifies the Goth fascination with victimisation – in the form of scars, sacrifice, submission, sharp objects and self-inflicted cuts, and the romantic beauty of isolation, darkness and doom. In fact, Scissorhands addresses these fascinations so well that it has come to represent a rite of passage into Goth-dom – a position the widely spread Scissorhands iconography in Goth fashion is a testament to. ‘They didn’t wake up’, Edward answers when asked where his parents are. For Murray Pomerance (2005) this makes Edward a dreamchild. He is ‘a highly imaginative character’, whose ‘awareness of what we call reality is radically underdeveloped’. These references to childhood innocence are a main reason 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Tim Burton PRODUCER Denise Di Novi, Tim Burton WRITER Caroline Thompson (story by Tim Burton and Caroline Thompson) CINEMATOGRAPHY Stefan Czapsky PRODUCTION DESIGN Bo Welch SPECIAL EFFECTS Stan Winston EDITING Richard Halsey ORIGINAL MUSIC Danny Elfman PRINCIPAL CAST Johnny Depp, Winona Ryder, Dianne Wiest, Anthony Michael Hall, Kathy Baker, Vincent Price

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why Scissorhands’ appeal extends beyond Goth, Burton or Depp cults. The film begs us to nostalgically remember our childhood and revalue it. The words ring true for cult fans too, often pigeonholed

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and self-identified as marginalised – the sacrificial lamb of film culture in much the same way that Edward is the suburb’s scapegoat. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali) Italy, 1977 – 85 mins Aristide Massaccesi (aka Joe D’Amato)

Whether battling to expose rapists, cannibals or snuff-movie directors, manipulating male mystics or samesex suffering in authoritarian prison regimes, the Black Emanuelle series of the 1970s came to exemplify the extreme fusion of sex and death that underpinned many Italian cult genres of that decade. The franchise is most closely associated with the notorious Italian exploitation supremo Aristide Massaccesi (aka Joe D’Amato), who crafted an unpalatable but influential series fusing scenes of eroticism with either humiliation, violence or implied threat. The cycle featured the Indonesian actress Laura Gemser as a photojournalist who scoured the globe exposing not only herself, but also acts of violence and injustice perpetrated against women. In true exploitation fashion, the series had been ‘hijacked’ by Italian film-makers from the earlier and more polished French template of Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle* (1974). While drawing liberally from Jaeckin’s original source material (Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel of the same name), Italian producers not only changed the race of their heroine, but even reduced the spelling of her name from two ‘m’s to one, to avoid any legal wrangles. While Massaccesi was not the only director who deployed the talents of Laura Gemser as the intrepid sexual explorer, his efforts are significant for the ways in which they used pseudo-documentary techniques to repeatedly equate the heroine’s ambivalent ethnicity with the extreme acts of savagery under investigation. In Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Gemser investigates the existence of cannibals in the Amazon jungle, after secretly photographing ancient tribal markings on the vaginal lips of a female mental patient in the film’s opening scene. This improbable discovery leads the heroine to seek out the services of famed anthropologist Mark Lester (played by Gemser’s long-term collaborator and real-life husband Gabrielle Tinti), in order to mount an expedition to the region. Lester links Emanuelle’s photographs to the continued existence of cannibalism in various parts of the globe, which he exemplifies by screening some documentary footage of a ritual execution. This shocking imagery (featuring the graphic castration and consumption of a man’s penis) reveals the importance of the Italian mondo tradition of cinema to the Black Emanuelle series. Here, faux-factual data are enlisted to expose the more shocking and salacious aspects of the developing world from a privileged Western perspective. As with the mondo tradition, Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals employs wide-angle shots of the New York skyline and the Amazon to create a series of connections between the industrial and primitive spheres. While the mondo characteristically used an authoritative voiceover to provide coherence to the random and ribald scenes these films contained, in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals this function is assumed by Tinti’s character, who frequently narrates facts about the Amazonian tribes to a bemused Emanuelle (most surreally in the film’s finale, when the pair casually discuss tribal customs while watching their travelling companions being disembowelled and eaten nearby). 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Aristide Massaccesi PRODUCER Gianfranco Couyoumdjian WRITER Aristide Massaccesi CINEMATOGRAPHY Aristide Massaccesi EDITING Alberto Moriani ORIGINAL MUSIC Nico Fidenco PRINCIPAL CAST Laura Gemser, Gabrielle Tinti, Mónica Zanchi

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By linking extreme scenes of violence with sexuality, Massaccesi’s Black Emanuelle films pushed the use of these documentary techniques to the extreme, often leading to myths that these productions were in fact snuff movies. However, the director has himself dispelled this rumour in interview, claiming that ‘these are mock documentaries which I did myself. I shot these myself and then added marks and scratches to make it look realistic, but these were not real

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documentaries.’ What the director’s realist excesses do confirm is the centrality of racial dynamics to the series as a whole. This is evidenced by the ease with which the black heroine slides into the savage landscape under review, often being mistaken for a ‘native’. In the case of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Gemser even disguises herself as an ancient Amazonian water goddess in the finale, in order to rescue her white lover Isabel (Mónica Zanchi) from the cannibal lair. XM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Emmanuelle France, 1974 – 105 mins Just Jaeckin

Much of the cult status of sex films hinges upon volatile combinations of free sex and forced sex – liberation and domestication, seduction and submission. Emmanuelle, the model for decades of exotic erotica, achieves this combination through a neocolonialist setting, a marginal place at the edge of acceptable culture that, to Western eyes, is not really obscene yet much more than merely naughty. The link between exotica and erotica is amplified from the very beginning of the film. The opening shows us Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) in her Paris home, surrounded by nude paintings and photographs, sculptures of predatory animals, and a jungle of house plants, through which she strolls in a half-opened, semi-see-through peignoir that accentuates the contours of her body, seemingly unaware of her allure to the viewer – bored but free. Emmanuelle travels to Thailand upon the instigation of her diplomat husband, who wants to introduce her to what he calls its culture of truly liberated pleasure. The connotation of the Far East location and a ‘cult of the pleasure of the senses’ (as Emmanuelle calls it) quickly lead to sexual adventures. A fashion photographer, director Jaeckin cannot help but turn Bangkok and the Thai countryside into a decadent but alluring tourist brochure. Musical interludes showing boating tours, horse rides and chic colonial clubs are interspersed with seedy sex and chance nudity, such as a notorious scene in a nightclub in which nude dancers perform ‘tricks’ with cigarettes. The framing of women in Emmanuelle is very much in the tradition of what John Berger (1972) described as the ‘voyeuristic male gaze’. ‘Women appear’, Berger wrote, and ‘men act’. Indeed, the first time Emmanuelle has sex (with her husband) one of the household’s male staff peeks through the door. He encourages one of the girls to watch too. As she does, he gropes her, chases her into the jungle garden and rapes her. On another occasion, we observe Emmanuelle having sex with a passenger on a plane while being watched by another male passenger – with whom she subsequently has sex, in the washroom. At the culmination of her ‘liberation’, and much under the influence of a philosophical tutor called Mario (Alain Cuny), Emmanuelle too is raped. Only when she engages in lesbian encounters is this element of violence absent from the sex act. Upon its release, Emmanuelle caused furore. It was a box-office success in France (125,600 admissions in its first week), censored in the UK and part of the porn-chic wave in the US. Its run at the Parisian Paramount Theatre lasted a full decade. For many, Emmanuelle was a despicable film. Its rape scenes and its imperialist tone offended numerous critics. But over time it also accumulated much support for pulling pornography away from ‘the raincoat brigade’. Part of the long-term appeal of Emmanuelle lies in its ambiguous portrayal of female sexuality. This was emphasised in the poster for the film and VHS release. It showed Emmanuelle staring vacantly yet confidently into the camera, her breasts uncovered, her legs crossed, in a draped wicker chair – a variation of the movie’s last shot. In this image, Emmanuelle throws the 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Just Jaeckin PRODUCER Yves Rousset-Rouard WRITER Jean-Louis Richard (novel: Emmanuelle Arsan) EDITING Claudine Bouché ORIGINAL MUSIC Pierre Bachelet PRINCIPAL CAST Sylvia Kristel, Alain Cuny, Marika Green, Daniel Sarky, Christine Boisson

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‘male gaze’ back at the viewer. The poster became iconic as a symbol for the permissive 70s in its display of both the sexually liberated yet submissive woman and the confident female aware of her power. This perception was helped by the impression that Emmanuelle’s sexual appeal seems less artificial than that of more recent pornography or soft-core, an impression reinforced by the appearance of Kristel: slender, lanky, with short hair, slightly boyish features and no ‘supersized’ accentuations of the breasts or hips. The scandal and success of Emmanuelle spawned numerous sequels. There are more than twenty feature and television films in the

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official franchise and several unofficial spin-offs based on the same source material – of which Black Emanuelle (1975) is best known (its star Laura Gemser appears in a small role in Emmanuelle II, 1975). Several of the sequels featured Sylvia Kristel, but after Emmanuelle 3 (aka Goodbye Emmanuelle, 1977) her role was limited to that of the narrator. Of particular note are Emmanuelle 5 (1987, directed by Walerian Borowcyk and set during the Cannes film festival), and Emmanuelle 7 (1993, which weaves virtual reality into its story). Many of the later episodes in the television series are ironic and parodic in tone, further cementing the cult status of the original. EM

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Enter the Dragon Hong Kong/US, 1973 – 98 mins Robert Clouse

The flagbearer for the first concerted wave of martial-arts cinema, Enter the Dragon is one of the few nonWestern films to enjoy continued cult status. It is also the definitive fight film – a field in which it connects almost all subgenres and regions. In early discussions Dragon is often featured in the company of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films and acrobatic fight films, such as King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (1971, with which French fans in particular were obsessed). In more recent overviews, Dragon finds itself compared to kinetic gangster films such as The Killer* or the Western fight films of Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Quentin Tarantino. Because it channels pretty much every preceding Asian martial-arts film and influenced literally every fight film that succeeded it, and because of its transgressive subject matter and transnational profile, Dragon is the ultimate ‘crossroads’ cult. At the middle of these crossroads stands Bruce Lee, the film’s star and, at the time of the film’s release already a mythical figure and cross-cultural icon. In Dragon, Lee plays a Shaolin Temple martial artist (also called Lee) who reluctantly leaves his mostly meditative existence to capture super-villain Han (Kien Shih) – who has been eluding international authorities and whose guards were once responsible for the death of Lee’s sister. Lee enters a martial-arts contest on Han’s Island in order to gain access to the villain and then proceeds to fight his numerous thugs. The spectacular fights of Dragon form the epicentre of the film’s narrative. Lee confronts opponents individually and in massive group fights (him against the hordes). Individual fights often occur in ‘contest’ formats governed by strict rules – which are then broken by opponents, a transgression punished by Lee. The group fights are generally fast successions of microcontests, with multiple adversaries challenging Lee (a young Jackie Chan among them). As chaos gradually engulfs the island, Lee corners Han in a labyrinthine mirror palace, where merely ‘detecting’ his opponent requires all of Lee’s skills. Han initially wounds Lee by scratching his torso with an iron claw. Lee licks his own blood, feeds his own anger as it were, and impales Han on a spear. Dragon is the quintessential Lee film – it is also very much about Lee: his character is called Lee and is a martial artist; Lee choreographed fight scenes, and directed the opening sequence in the monastery. Of mixed Asian and Western upbringing, transgressive and transnational at the same time, Lee also perfectly fits the internationalist and multidimensional presentation of Dragon: the fights themselves mix various traditions; fellow contestants Roper (John Saxon) and Williams (Jim Kelly) are white and African American respectively (and Williams’s attitude throws up some blaxploitation overtones too); and the setting combines traditional, even stereotypical, Oriental architecture with hi-tech Western props and gadgets – the latter in an attempt to give the story a James Bond-like appeal. Lee himself was about to break into international stardom at the time of Dragon. His burgeoning popularity owed much to an original mesh of skills and presentation (called the way of the intercepting fist) that was the combination 80

DIRECTOR Robert Clouse PRODUCER Raymond Chow, Paul Heller, Bruce Lee, Fred Weintraub WRITER Michael Allin CINEMATOGRAPHY Gil Hubbs FIGHT CHOREOGRAPHY Bruce Lee (stunts by Jackie Chan, Biao Yuen, Sammo Hung Kam-Bo and ChingYing Lam) EDITING Kurt Hirschler, George Watters ORIGINAL MUSIC Lalo Schifrin PRINCIPAL CAST Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Jim Kelly, Ahna Capri, Kien Shih, Robert Wall, Angela Mao Ying, Jackie Chan

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of fight techniques, acrobatics and athleticism, meditative and philosophical Zen Buddhist derivations, of cinematic realism and of some horror imagery and weaponry (again of mixed Asian–Western origin – the nunchakos and the iron claw are two good examples, the blood on Lee’s torso was a very unusual image at the time). But a sudden accident prevented Lee’s ascension – and of course it accelerated his cult. Lee died under mysterious circumstances when Dragon was released, at the age of thirty-two, and his death ignited enormous hype. As a ‘legend’, Lee became more totemic than life would ever have let him become. Lee’s kung-fu style set off a worldwide craze, and led to 100 CULT FILMS

numerous imitations. Some of these, such as The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978), or Five Deadly Venoms (1978) acquired massive cult followings as well, and in general, hyperbolic martial-arts films remained popular with audiences around the world. But Lee’s realism remains incommensurable, and it has secured him, and Dragon, a spot in the canon of cult cinema. Paul Bowman (2010) points out that everything about Lee crosses boundaries. He and his films are at the same time mythical and trivial, stereotypical and innovative, Orientalist and progressive. Lee is indeed an in-between figure, and as such his place is very much at the crossroads, in between directions – a unique direction unto himself. EM 81

Eraserhead US, 1977 – 85 mins David Lynch

David Lynch is one of the most widely recognised cult directors. Films such as Blue Velvet (1986), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) open up plenty of space for interpretive discussion. Lynch has, perhaps more than any other director, successfully merged the abstruse and the populist to create highly anticipated experimental feature films. Eraserhead was the film that first established his cult credentials and it remains his most compelling work. Shot in black and white, featuring striking chiaroscuro lighting and set in a dilapidated, industrial environment, Eraserhead follows the meek character of Henry (Jack Nance, sporting a kind of electrified pompadour). Near the beginning of the film he is invited to visit his girlfriend Mary (Charlotte Stewart) at her parents’ house. It is revealed that she has just had a baby and that he is obliged to marry her. The baby is extremely deformed, a mutant-like creature wrapped in bandages. After moving into Henry’s small apartment, Mary soon leaves because she cannot sleep through the baby’s crying. Abandoned to look after the baby on his own, Henry experiences several surreal episodes, including an encounter with the ‘lady in the radiator’ (dressed like an angel but with severely distended cheeks), a liaison with his neighbour and a dream sequence in which his head falls off and is taken to a factory to be turned into pencils. As Eraserhead progresses, it becomes more difficult to tell the difference between Henry’s real life and his nightmares. While the film does follow a plot of sorts, it is driven more by thematic preoccupations than cause–effect logic. The latter part of the film increasingly uses sounds and images in an abstract sense, as associational motifs. The world of Eraserhead itself represents a parallel reality, a rickety industrial wasteland in which the machinery is creaky and electricity is always on the verge of cutting out. This otherworldliness is reinforced by the film’s uncanny soundtrack, which never fails to freak audiences out. With Alan Splet, Lynch created a distinctive atmosphere by using analogue equipment, recording a large number of sounds and treating them using a graphic equalizer, reverb and a filter. Much of the soundtrack is composed of prominent hisses, drones and crackles and acts as an intense marker of the film’s harsh, industrialised world. Michel Chion (2001) notes that the sound ‘is animated by a perpetual pulsation’ and is like the ‘micro-activity’ of a machine’s particles, creating a sense of unease that contributes to its horror-like, nightmare quality. Eraserhead’s visuals and sound convey the notion that Henry and, by extension, all of mankind, are deterministically chained to biology/nature. In this sense, a man in a planet, glimpsed at the beginning and at other occasions, can be interpreted as a God-figure operating levers to keep the unsteady machinery of life in motion. This would explain why Mary’s mother repetitively moans or her dad freezes in motion while staring at Henry: they are machines that have momentarily malfunctioned. The mutant baby is a symbol of this world’s defective operational flow. Then, however, at the end of the film Henry rebels and destroys the baby (who just previous to this seems to cackle at him, almost taunting him). This act of abject violence (of 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR David Lynch PRODUCER David Lynch WRITER David Lynch CINEMATOGRAPHY Herbert Cardwell, Frederick Elmes EDITING David Lynch SOUND David Lynch, Alan Splet PRINCIPAL CAST Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph, Jeanne Bates, Laurel Near, Judith Anna Roberts

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infanticide, a deep taboo) is his first attempt to intervene personally in this mechanical universe. As a sacrifice, it is an act of destruction that is also, perversely, an act of creation – Henry is now a God-figure. That explains why, after Henry destroys the baby, the man in the planet is seen as struggling to remain in control before the planet explodes. In this sense, the film is a solipsistic affair: it is all about Henry awakening to consciousness and rebelling against the passive part he has been allocated. It took around five years to complete Eraserhead. Lynch started with a grant from the American Film Institute but ran out of money during shooting and completed the film with the help of private financial assistance. There was only a slight hope that Eraserhead would reach a substantial audience. Yet it became a true ‘crossover’ film on the midnight-movie circuit. Distributed by Ben Barenholtz – the ‘guru’ of New York’s alternative film scene – it played for almost a year at the Cinema Village before proving popular on the midnight circuit across North Amercia and Europe. Cult connoisseurs J. Hoberman and

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Jonathan Rosenbaum (1983) have written that Lynch and Barenholtz ‘created an almost miraculous achievement: an avant-garde hit, an intellectual splatter film-cum-thirty-five-millimeter nightmare sitcom of the urban soul’. Still, Eraserhead’s distribution and cult status did not occur without calculation. The film self-consciously addresses the then fast-developing body-horror genre and it leans heavily on the traditions of the surrealist film and the American experimental film (in particular Stan Brakhage). It also tapped into the emerging punk aesthetic. In the hands of someone like Barenholtz, such a film was destined for midnight-movie success. The initial massaging of Eraserhead’s cult reception notwithstanding, the long-term reaction to the film has been impressive. The film still shocks viewers, cutting right through each new generation’s self-applied layers of cynicism, sarcasm and snarky attitude. New filmgoers express surprise, and unease, with the depth of the film’s impact. In that perpetual journey of continued rediscovery and renewal lies perhaps Eraserhead’s largest cult legacy. EM

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The Evil Dead US, 1981 – 94 mins Sam Raimi

Though not the first, Evil Dead is probably the most perfect, archetypical cabin-in-the-woods film, the one against which all others are measured. Five friends travel to a remote cabin where they discover Necronomicon, the Book of Death. Once the book and its demons are exposed, all hell breaks loose. As the friends fight for survival, their relationships are severely tested. Several of them become possessed by the evil powers. In the end, the only survivor, Ash (Bruce Campbell) is about to get into his car, when an invisible evil force rushes through the woods and the cabin towards him. He turns around and screams in terror. The End. Much more than the story, which is basically a summary of chasing clichés and speculations on cult possession (including the Oriental origin of the possession), it is the style of Evil Dead that attracts attention. For a low-budget film, the make-up effects are remarkably convincing. A wide variety of tools (among them a fireplace poker, a necklace, a shovel, an axe and, most totemic, a chainsaw), are resourcefully employed in defence against the monsters – leading to plenty of squirting, dripping, transgressive, yukkie fluids. Evil Dead spends a lot of screen time detailing ways to penetrate, impale or dismember possessed bodies. Also impressive is the cinematography, which quickly became known as ‘pyrotechnical’. Evil Dead avoids the motionlessness and claustrophobia of ‘isolated house’ movies by moving the action in and out of the house and by creating the impression – through racing tracking shots – that the woods surrounding the cabin are as possessed as the monsters in the cellar moaning ‘join us’. As Kate Egan (2011) has pointed out, much of the cult appeal of Evil Dead lies in its use of the metaphor of ‘friendship’. Notions of tested friendships and kinships run through the film. Stories of the making and planning of the film also highlight how Raimi, Campbell and Robert Tapert worked as a band of friends, a practice antithetical to the film business’s usual mode of operation. Partisan friendship also became an important factor in the ways in which fans rallied around the adverse criticism the first Evil Dead film attracted. Evil Dead was originally presented at the Cannes film market in 1981, where most distributors shunned it. It was banned in several countries, and censored and cut in many other territories – it has taken some regions over twenty years to make an uncut version available. New Line Cinema picked it up for a limited release in the autumn of 1981, but it wasn’t until 1983, after rave reviews in the fan press, that the company granted the film a wider run. The cult following for Evil Dead developed for the most part after its video release. It was among the first films to be labelled a ‘video nasty’ in the UK. One of the scenes raising objections from many commentators featured the rape of a female character by a possessed wood vine. The controversy quickly helped the film gain a staunch fan following. That was further enhanced with the near carbon-copy sequel Evil Dead II (1987), which adopted a hyperbolic comic-book tone for its violence, and a third film Army of Darkness, in 1993. For some fans, the second and third films are even bigger cults because they exemplify so well late-1980s, early-1990s mannerist, self-reflexive horror. 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Sam Raimi PRODUCER Robert Tapert, Bruce Campbell, Sam Raimi WRITER Sam Raimi CINEMATOGRAPHY Tim Philo SPECIAL MAKE-UP EFFECTS Tom Sullivan EDITING Edna Ruth Paul ORIGINAL MUSIC Joseph LoDuca PRINCIPAL CAST Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, Richard DeManincor, Theresa Tilly

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Over time, the cult of Evil Dead dispersed into other areas. The 2003 Evil Dead Musical yanked the trilogy out of the horror niche. Campbell, Tapert and Raimi also inspired separate cult followings. Raimi and Tapert collaborated on the television series Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), and Raimi became a Hollywood A-lister through his direction of the Spiderman franchise. Arguably the biggest following has

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developed for Campbell, who has become a marker of fan-devotion through a series of pointed cameos, niche roles (Maniac Cop, 1988) and self-reflexive appearances – as Elvis Presley in Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) and as himself in My Name Is Bruce (2007). The confluence of his star image with the persona of his Evil Dead character Ash has turned Campbell/Ash into one of the most popular figures in horror fan lore. EM

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Fight Club US, 1999 – 139 mins David Fincher

Opening at a point of potentially murderous conflict between two intertwined male characters, Fight Club tells the backstory of a disenfranchised white-collar worker, whose technological alienation in an increasingly commodified sphere leads to him suffering from alienation and insomnia. Narrating his story via a complex flashback, the unnamed protagonist (Edward Norton) outlines how he sought to combat these feelings of anomie by seeking out self-help groups with likeminded and ‘damaged’ male individuals. In the course of his therapeutic journey, the narrator encounters a variety of marginal masculine figures such as ‘Bob’ (Meat Loaf), a former body builder whose exposure to excess steroids has resulted in his body developing ‘bitch-tits’, while his presence at a testicular cancer awareness event has further cast doubt on his phallic potential. Alongside Bob, the narrator also encounters Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter), whose obsession with ‘therapy encounters’ mirrors the narrator’s own predilections. Although there is conflict between the pair, a frisson is instantly apparent, and the couple continue to circulate in the same self-help circles until the narrator’s apartment is vandalised in an apparent arson attack. Destitute and isolated, Norton’s character seeks assistance from Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a flamboyant rule-breaker who impressed the central protagonist on a business trip. When Durden agrees to house the narrator in his ramshackle abode, the central lead is exposed to the Fight Club of the film’s title, a violent arena of male masochism, where differing characters compete in brutal conflict to confirm their own virility. While the narrator’s increasingly violated body leads to his further isolation from his corporate profession, the male camaraderie with Durden is complicated when Singer enters into an extreme sexual relationship with Pitt’s character. Recruiting more disenfranchised men to the Fight Club cause, Durden initiates ‘Project Mayhem’, a militarised campaign against the alienating structures of corporate capitalism that have sapped the virility of the modern male. While these attacks begin with minor instances of vandalism, the narrator becomes increasingly concerned by Durden’s tactics, and the degree of violence they entail. In the film’s crucial scene, Durden’s motivations and backstory are finally revealed, with the narrator’s realisation that this violent alterego is actually an aspect of his own split personality, who he destroys with a gun blast to his own head. Finally freed from this phantasmagoric projection, Norton’s character is reunited with Marla, and the pair watch the orchestrated series of bomb blasts that represent Project Mayhem’s finest hour. Although director David Fincher’s world-weary, neo-noir Se7en had exhibited a nihilistic edge, this was far exceeded in Fight Club, which became a problematic release for Twentieth Century-Fox, primarily for its anti-capitalist rhetoric and possible neo-fascist inclinations. The film gained a second life on home video, where attuned cult audiences identified with the themes of contemporary isolation at the movie’s core. As 88

DIRECTOR David Fincher PRODUCER Ross Grayson Bell, Art Linson, Ceán Chaffin WRITER Chuck Palahniuk CINEMATOGRAPHY Jeff Cronenweth EDITING James Haygood ORIGINAL MUSIC Dust Brothers PRINCIPAL CAST Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter, Meat Loaf

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an interesting historical indicator, Fight Club’s themes of phallic alienation being redressed through direct, violent interaction mirrored new masculinist movements that sought to reverse the increasing feminisation of the contemporary American male. The film’s emphasis

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on issues of identity loss also evoke Lacan’s notion of the Real, with the central character’s constantly changing physical appearance, ambivalent narration and problematic relations to language structures confirming this cine-psychosis interpretation. XM

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Flaming Creatures US, 1963 – 45 mins Jack Smith

Is Flaming Creatures the most scandalous art film ever, more subversive than Un chien andalou*, a film to which it is sometimes compared? Or is it, as A. L. Rees (1999) suggested, a piece of camp infantilist chaos? Its sexual transgressions and rape-orgy are certainly guaranteed to challenge viewers’ perceptions – and that is a core trait of cult film. Flaming Creatures was shot on outdated, army-surplus film stock, giving it a washed-out, junkshop glamour feel – fashion footage from another planet. The story plunges in and out of a series of bacchanalia, many of them performed by transvestite friends of director Jack Smith. We witness them apply lipstick and discuss its qualities, colour and suitability for fellatio. Images of male genitalia, some in extreme close-up, are on display. About ten minutes in, a flirtatious scene develops into groping, a rape, an orgy involving multiple participants and then, against a chorus of piercing screams, the entire scene starts to shake violently as if the earth itself wants to join in, and swallow Smith’s camera. Because of the bad film stock and the shakiness it is difficult to see what goes on exactly, but as feet, tongues, penises, breasts, flower leaves, bits of food and shredded clothes pass in front of a frantically vibrating camera, one impression prevails: this is one of the most powerful filmic metaphors for Dionysian abandonment ever. The aftermath of the orgy is more subdued and lyrical. Most of the ensuing performances and tableaux restage B-movie scenes, subjecting them to an ornamentalised queer reinterpretation (like his fellow experimentalist Kenneth Anger, Smith is an avid fan of Hollywood’s underbelly). As the camera lingers over two drag queens and erotic activity is renewed, the Everly Brothers’ ‘Be Bop a Lula’ closes the film. Upon its premiere, Flaming Creatures left audiences stunned. Ken Kelman (1970) wrote, after one of the first shows at the Bleecker Street Theatre, New York, 1963:

DIRECTOR Jack Smith WRITER Jack Smith CINEMATOGRAPHY Jack Smith ORIGINAL MUSIC Bizet, Everly Brothers PRINCIPAL CAST Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Mario Montez, Maria Zazeela, Joel Markman, Arnold Rockwood, Judith Malina

When the first show was over, a clique, a claque of six or so, back on the west side applauded. And I, all alone, east of the aisle up frontish, applauded, amid the numb and blind. [I] thus no doubt branded myself a clappy pervert, crap happy degenerate, slobbering sadist.

Kelman’s description captures a key aspect of the midnight movie: the sense of a truly unique, forbidden experience, a countercultural feeling. Controversy soon followed. In December 1963, the Tivoli Theater in New York refused to screen the film and the police started to raid screenings. From there on, Flaming Creatures ran into trouble everywhere. One of the most widely reported incidents occurred at the experimental film festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, around Christmas 1963. After the film was ejected from the festival, members of the jury, including Jonas Mekas, staged an improvised New Year’s Eve screening that was interrupted by scuffles, discussions, and riots. 90

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The continued opposition to Flaming Creatures helped to politicise underground and experimental cinema and consolidate a fraternal spirit with other communities of outsiders, such as the gay liberation movement, and lowbrow exploitation fans. That fraternisation would be of huge significance for the cult-film scene

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from the late 1960s onwards. Today, Flaming Creatures’ underground reputation endures, as does the opposition towards it. The film has never been officially released on DVD and people wishing to view it have to obtain low-quality bootleg copies or watch it online in semiillegality. EM

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Freak Orlando Germany, 1981 – 126 mins Ulrike Ottinger

Freakery and surrealism are integral to cult film. Both are also inspirations for Freak Orlando, a portrayal of physical deformity with fantasy, religious allegory and glitzy plastic pop mythology mixed in. This mix combines to create a sharp critique of consumer society in the shape of a homage to pop culture (or is it the other way around?). In passing, Freak Orlando references, and ridicules, cult films such as Freaks*, El Topo*, Scorpio Rising (1964), The Milky Way (1969) as well as an array of horror icons – witches, zombies and Frankenstein’s bride. According to Ottinger, Freak Orlando proves that ‘myth is a living torso’. The prologue shows us a desolate landscape through which walks that most mythical of characters – the pilgrim – in whose path appears a living woman’s nude torso that functions as a well. The pilgrim solemnly drinks from her breast. She then enters Freak City, a neon-lit shopping mall where people are wrapped in plastic and latex. The sudden switch from medieval to modern imagery – and often the clash between them within scenes – is part of what Ottinger calls the ‘mythification of the modern’. The rest of Freak Orlando is divided into five episodes, or stages, that represent different eras in human history. Each is dominated by the character of Orlando (Magdalena Montezuma), a goddess who in her bizarre commercial adventures in and around marketplaces is aided by ‘freaks’, be they seven dwarfs, sideshow artists or Siamese twins. Each stage gives Orlando an additional identity so that in the end there is Freak Orlando, alias Mrs Orlando, Mr Orlando, Orlando Capricho, Orlando Orlanda and Orlando Zyklopa. After a successful tour of Europe, her final act is to award a trophy to the winner of the festival of ugliness. A crucial part of the reflexive tone of Freak Orlando is actress Delphine Seyrig, who appears as a key supporting character in each episode. Seyrig had become known as a muse and role model for European arthouse and feminist cinema, in films such as Last Year in Marienbad (1961), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Jeanne Dielman, and India Song (1975). She had also been a prolific presence in Euroinspired action and exploitation films, most notably Daughters of Darkness*. In many of these films, as in Freak Orlando, Seyrig exudes a commanding, though silent, presence – quietly in charge yet content to let it appear otherwise. It won Seyrig an equally silent but deeply committed fan following. That following helped garner a cult status for Freak Orlando as well. The initial release of Freak Orlando was disappointing, even in the arthouse market that glorified so much of the New German Cinema at the time. After a few festival showings, it was largely overlooked. Near the end of the 1980s, Ottinger briefly became a ‘hot item’ among feminist film critics, but that attention did not extend to Freak Orlando. It did not help that the film long remained unavailable for home viewing – it is still scarce because of Ottinger’s tight rein on its availability. However, the combined factors of the film’s frank address of freakery and Seyrig’s status helped it appear, nearly clandestinely, on the paracinema circuit of 92

DIRECTOR Ulrike Ottinger PRODUCER Renée Gundelach WRITER Ulrike Ottinger SET DESIGN Ulrike Ottinger COSTUMES Jorge Jara ORIGINAL MUSIC Wilhelm D. Siebert PRINCIPAL CAST Magdalena Montezuma, Delphine Seyrig, Albert Heins, Eddie Constantine, Galli, Claudio Pantoja, Hiro Uschiyama

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‘psychotronic cinema’, where it developed a niche reputation as a film celebrating and exposing our times’ ‘sideshow attractions’. ‘As a goddess do you believe in God’, Orlando Zyklopa is asked in the Freak

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City shopping mall, ‘or only in my plastic bag?’ The fusion between the sacred and the disposable is crucial to the cult reputation of Freak Orlando. Part treasure, part trash. EM

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Freaks US, 1932 – 64 mins Tod Browning

Freaks is one of very few cult films on which there is unanimous agreement. Not a single overview excludes it. Because of its explicit representations of disability and freakery (a term used here in accordance with David Church’s [2011] application), the film is often linked to the genres of the horror film and the exploitation film. At the same time it poses a challenge to the terms ‘shocking’ and ‘monstrous’. Freaks employs a multiple-layered framing technique to bookend its main narrative, as if the film is merely confirming how not we but others treat freaks. First, a message title historicises the subject matter. It asks viewers to forego the ‘revulsion with which we view the abnormal, the malformed and mutilated’ but also to be aware of the strong code of ethics of these ‘blunders of nature’. Next, a sideshow announcer beckons us to gather and behold ‘the most astounding living monstrosity’. We then move to yet another framing device, the circus. Here, we are presented with the basic plot. Short person Hans (Harry Earles) is infatuated with colleague circus artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), much to the displeasure of his fiancée Frieda (Daisy Earles, Harry’s real-life sibling). We are then introduced to the other members of the ‘freak troupe’, which include Siamese twins (the Hilton twins Daisy and Violet), a half-boy (Johnny Eck) and a ‘living torso’ (Prince Randian). Again a framing device is evoked: a forest scene shows the freaks dancing and playing when they are confronted by a farmer who wants them evicted. As their chaperone begs for mutual understanding, we see elaborate close-ups. ‘How many times have I told you not to be frightened?’ Madame Tetrallini (Rose Dione) berates her freaks. She is also asking the same of the viewer, of course. Though Freaks ostensibly aims to present this group as ‘normal people’, its story still stresses the adverse relationship between them and ‘more normal’ artists, notably trapeze artist Cleopatra and strongman Hercules (Henry Victor) – whose parading of sensuality and posturing of muscular strength function as ideals of such normality. We never see the freaks ‘at work’ in the circus. We only see them in

DIRECTOR Tod Browning PRODUCER Tod Browning, Irving Thalberg, Harry Rapf (reissue producer: Dwain Esper) WRITER ‘Tod’ Robbins CINEMATOGRAPHY Merritt B. Gerstad EDITING Basil Wrangell PRINCIPAL CAST Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates, Henry Victor, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Rose Dione, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton, Johnny Eck, Prince Randian

their daily lives: chatting, cleaning, doing chores, in family situations. While this obviates the need to show the sideshow arena, it also forces us to continue to see the freaks as children with no professional status, and it still demonstrates the freakery of each of them (we see the living torso light a cigar, the armless lady drink wine, the half-boy walk on his hands …). Ultimately, Hans is betrayed by his love for Cleo. During their wedding banquet she refuses to be accepted into the family of freaks. ‘Gooble Gobble, we accept her, one of us’, they chant incessantly, as a large bowl of wine is passed from mouth to mouth (sharing fluids), and offer it to her to drink from. Cleo, drunk herself, refuses, throws the wine in their faces, and insults them: ‘Freaks!’ she shrieks. Soon after, Cleo strikes up an affair with Hercules, and the two poison Hans. When the freaks discover this, they avenge themselves, in a scene that represents a stylistic break from the rest of the film. The night they attack is filled with clichéd stylistics, such as heavy rain, mud, thunder and lightning (all of which create an environment of impurity), ominous music, fast editing and expressionistic lighting, 100 CULT FILMS

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suggesting the freaks indeed are about to reveal themselves as monsters. Hercules is killed and Cleo is maimed, turned into a freak herself. These two scenes and the framing of the narrative explain much of the ambiguity that has ensured the cult status of Freaks. In spite of the firm reputation of its director, Tod Browning (who had explored deviancy in his work with Lon Chaney and who had also directed Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, 1931), and although it had MGM behind it, Freaks was no box-office success. It was banned from release in several countries and, under the title Forbidden Love, it ended up as a circus attraction itself, making odd appearances as part of exploitation double bills distributed by Dwain Esper. In the late 1960s and throughout the 70s and 80s the film became a recurrent feature on the midnight-movie circuit. Around that time, it became

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embedded in various subcultures, such as the punk movement (the Ramones turned ‘gabba gabba hey’ into a warcry for misfits). Freaks also delivers a distinct comment on class relationships. ‘Most big people do’, says Hans when Cleo asks him why he thinks she is laughing at him. The parallel between little people and poor people is one that Patrick Kinkade and Michael Katovich (1992) noted in their sociological study of cult films. In its references to ‘communality’, Freaks also offers the implication that little people are, in social stature, not merely poor, but also lack individual identities, and exist only in multiples (twins, mobs, gangs, troupes, etc.). ‘Offend one, and you offend them all’, warns the announcer at the beginning of Freaks; and ‘the hurt of one is the hurt of all’ says the introductory message. Such conflations of deviance, size, poverty and community give Freaks a lasting political significance. EM

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Ginger Snaps Canada, 2000 – 108 mins John Fawcett

‘I’d rather be dead than be what you are’, says Brigitte (Emily Perkins) at one point to Ginger (Katharine Isabelle), as she witnesses her sister transform into a werewolf but also into a sexually assertive woman. Brigitte mourns not just the transformation of her sister into a monster, but her turning into a ‘normal woman’. Much of the cult status of Ginger Snaps relies on that double conversion, and on the subtexts and inferences of the links between ‘becoming a werewolf’, ‘becoming a woman’ and breaking up friendships. Before the transformation starts, Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald are ‘the morbid sisters’, marginalised outsiders within their high-school community, alienated from their parents, self-declared radical Goth girls bonded by a macabre fascination with death, horror and suicide. Their pact states ‘out by sixteen or dead in this scene – together forever’. The self-referential credit sequence of Ginger Snaps shows exactly what is to be understood by this: Ginger and Brigitte photograph each other in various performances of suicide attempts, all of them with strong overtones of punk nihilism and gloomy melancholy. Some of the notes in their staged suicides read ‘no comment’, ‘the end’, ‘I am leaving this place forever, without thought, without hope, without work’. They paint themselves as victims of a cruel and conformist world, yet through their faked performances they raise a middle finger to the very notion of ‘victim’, reappropriating the concept as it were. It turns out the pictures are part of the Fitzgeralds’ school project and, after they present it in class, the shocked teacher exclaims: ‘Well, that was sick, wasn’t it?’ The transformation of Ginger into a female werewolf breaks the pact between the sisters. As the genre dictates, the monster needs to die and eventually Brigitte kills her sister, but not before she too becomes ‘infected’. As a small Canadian film, Ginger Snaps’ initial release went almost unnoticed, except on the genre festival circuit. But it really took off when it was released on DVD. Its unique multiple transgressions between normalcy/deviance and victim/perpetrator led to not one but several small cult reputations. The sisters’ morbidity and outsider status, as well as the film’s soundtrack, found a niche following within Goth and emo subcultures – where it remains one of the most fondly discussed horror films. Tellingly, perhaps, one of the moments most resonant with fans of Ginger Snaps hinges on a misunderstanding. When Ginger attempts to slit her wrists with a kitchen knife she sighs ‘wrists of a girl’, and then gives up. Many fans actually report hearing it as ‘wrists are for girls’, a harbinger of Ginger’s imminent transformation into a more empowered but also infinitely more troubled being. As a largely female project (screenwriter, stars and production managers), and a horror film with strong female protagonists, Ginger Snaps also found a cult reception with female viewers. For many, it was even more a girls’ movie than a horror film. It has also attracted a remarkable amount of academic attention, especially from feminist scholars, who jumped on lines such as ‘there’s something wrong, like more than you being female’ to theorise the metaphor of the ‘menstrual monster’. And as an innovation in the genre it was hailed as a masterpiece by the bible of horror 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR John Fawcett PRODUCER Karen Lee Hall, Steven Hoban WRITER Karen Walton EDITING Brett Sullivan ORIGINAL MUSIC Mike Shields PRINCIPAL CAST Katharine Isabelle, Emily Perkins, Mimi Rogers, Kris Lemche

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cultists, Fangoria (in an article entitled ‘girl power bites back’). In some more radical interpretations, fans see the bond between Ginger and Brigitte as a mirror for a lesbian relationship. These themes of isolation, deviant sexuality and bodily transgression were further explored in a sequel, Ginger Snaps: Unleashed (2004) and a prequel,

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Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004). Their superior special effects (by the world-renowned KNB-FX crew) further detailed numerous stages of the transformation of the female body into the hairy wolf – a generic symbol of masculinity that is thoroughly deconstructed here. EM

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The Gods Must Be Crazy Botswana, South Africa, 1981 – 109 mins Jamie Uys

A film about idolatry, worship, revolutionaries and the futility of time, set against the background of the clash between tribal and modern cultures, and in an exotic part of the world, surely has the potential to gather a cult following. Yet The Gods Must Be Crazy has had difficulties sustaining such a status. An outlandish oddity at first, a crazily successful rage next, it also quickly found itself relegated to the depths of vulgar, offensive and politically incorrect cinema, only to be slowly reinstated as a film with insights of ambiguous and critical (though perhaps unintended) value. The story is that of a man and his struggle with a bottle. One day in the Kalahari bush, a hunter, Xi (N!Xau), finds a Coca-Cola bottle that has fallen out of an airplane. At first, Xi and his tribe find the tool very handy but, as their use of it becomes more inventive, the tool begins to cause rifts in their community. It is decided that Xi needs to cast the bottle off the edge of the world. During his odyssey, Xi encounters some of the banalities and eccentricities of Western civilisation – including anthropologist Andrew Steyn (Marius Weyers), former journalist turned schoolteacher Kate (Sandra Prinsloo), and a band of revolutionaries led by Boga (Louw Verwey). After some bizarre adventures, Xi reaches the edge of the world, gets rid of the awful bottle, and returns a hero. Filmed mostly on location in South Africa amid its astounding natural landscapes, and featuring amateur actors from a variety of tribes, Gods is visually amazing, even to the Western colonial eye accustomed to Africa. The ostentatious drive of the plot (basically a thinly veiled ‘hero’s journey’) is underscored by a clever combination of slapstick silliness (replete with fast motion) and satirical and ironic asides, such as the opening montage contrasting the life of the bushmen in the Kalahari desert (with its ‘beautiful blonde grass’) as a sweet utopia of peace and shared care with urban life, where everyone ‘has to look busy’ as a kind of wildlife gone wild. After breaking local box-office records, it took nearly four years before Gods gained a worldwide release, in 1984. In the years running up to that general release it gradually developed a fan following via screenings at arthouse cinemas in North America and Europe. After this release, and a string of sequels, a backlash came. Critics asserted that the film’s adoption of a Botswana origin in order to escape the Apartheid boycott smacked of insincerity. For years, Gods was also accused of recuperative neo-colonialism (of reasserting the superiority of the modern human) and of the underhand reinforcement of the racial and ethnic stereotypes perpetuated by Apartheid South Africa – of white superiority (that ‘beautiful blonde grass’). In spite of that criticism, Gods remains a valid comment on culture. As a tongue-in-cheek reflection on the phenomenon of cargo-cults, Gods takes a stab at the very business of ‘categorising’ cultures. Cargocults are a form of idolatry inspired by technological manifestations of modern civilisation, which, anthropologists argued, developed among tribal communities after World War II. One of the most common examples is that of tribes on islands in the Pacific Ocean that started to ritually worship warplanes they had 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Jamie Uys PRODUCER Boet Troskie, Jamie Uys, Gerda Vanden Broeck WRITER Jamie Uys EDITING Jamie Uys ORIGINAL MUSIC John Boshoff PRINCIPAL CAST Marius Weyers, Sandra Prinsloo, N!Xau, Louw Verwey, Michael Thys

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seen traverse the skies – they believed these vehicles were, or carried, gods that would bring wealth and good fortune to the island. In Gods the little Coca-Cola bottle is such a vehicle. But that bottle-god or any other gods are never really treated reverently by Xi and his tribe – it is more as if they tolerate godly presences instead of being dominated by them. The real sufferers from cargo-cultism are the Westerners with their addiction to technology, their daily schedules ruled by a just-in-time economy that they think carries the promise of fortune.

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The real cult value of Gods lies in its opposition to the cargocult of over-regulated time. Phrases such as ‘in the Kalahari it’s always Tuesday, or Thursday’ reflect a deep dissatisfaction with corporatised, compartmentalised, impersonal timelines and deadlines (in which the individual ‘never has time’). That dissatisfaction appeals to cultists who seek out experiences, such as midnight screenings and wasted time, which defy and rupture the ‘proper’ passage of time. Gods asks us to ever so briefly imagine a moment in which the management of time only meets the desires of the individual – an anthropometric time. EM

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Godzilla (Gojira) Japan, 1954 – 96 mins Ishirô Honda

Every few years, Godzilla pops its monstrous head above the waters, rising out of its slumbering cult status to assert itself as one of the most relevant comments on how mankind’s insatiable and irresponsible tinkering with powers beyond its management and control leads to freakish, and invariably destructive, consequences – be these tsunamis, earthquakes or nuclear meltdowns (or all of these together, as Godzilla’s native country Japan had the misfortune to experience in 2011). At such times, Godzilla is transformed into more than a cult phenomenon; it is an immediately recognisable popular icon, a cultural tag through which attempts to understand life itself can be channelled. Godzilla is a kaiju, a giant monster movie, influenced by the then popular King Kong (re-released in 1952). The eponymous creature rises out of the sea to wreak havoc on villages and cities. Nothing can slay Godzilla, except a device that is even worse – in this case, the Oxygen Destroyer, which kills all life in the sea. Inevitably, that device is used (only once, the inventor sacrifices himself), and Godzilla disappears. But the seeds of paranoia are sown. Was its appearance only the beginning of the apocalypse? Will it return? Godzilla’s basic story is to be understood against the background of Word War II and the trauma of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. There is also a more direct inspiration, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon) incident, in which a Japanese fishing vessel was contaminated by fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Island. Chon Noriega (1987) points out, however, that the metaphor of Godzilla resonates far beyond nation-specific situations. The film forces viewers worldwide to acknowledge that any foreign presence can be viewed as the intrusion of the much feared ‘Other’ into our cosy little lives. Godzilla is transgressive because it points to our own fears, our own monstrosity. Two inferences are crucial. The first is that, while Godzilla is a monster (a villain), it only acts after provocation. It attacks whenever its peace is disturbed – when scientists, investigators and the military attempt to bring it under control. The message is that nature (or the nation of Japan) should not be provoked. The second inference is that there is a shared responsibility, a common guilt that the monster taps into. Our own creation, Godzilla only throws back at us what we invested in it. When we stare the monster in the eye we see in it our own monstrosity. These implications, and the political backstory, caused American distributors to recut the film for its US release, and forcefully insert an ‘American viewpoint’ in the form of actor Raymond Burr (who ‘reported’ the story in one long flashback). Though a common practice in the distribution of exploitation film at the time, it is inviting to read into this mutilation of the original an act of Godzilla-creation itself. But such considerations quickly became mute in a wave of sequels and spin-offs. Because Godzilla returned of course. The first sequel was released only six months after the original, and a steady stream of like-shaped, though not necessarily like-minded, films followed. Most of these do not match up to the original – the giant insect Mothra is one of a few remarkable exceptions. Since the 1960s, Godzilla’s success has developed into a 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Ishirô Honda PRODUCER Tomoyuki Tanaka WRITER Ishirô Honda, Shigeru Kayama, Takeo Murata CINEMATOGRAPHY Masao Tamai, Sadamasa Arikawa (effects photography) EDITING Terry Morse ORIGINAL MUSIC Akira Ifukube PRINCIPAL CAST Akira Takarada, Momoko Kôchi, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura

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multimedia franchise. A 1998 Hollywood remake was a bit of a flop, but the cult fan following remains undiminished. Politics aside, Philip Brophy (2002) suggests that at least part of that cult status is the result of the destructive immaturity of Godzilla. Unlike most Western monsters, Godzilla is void of sexual lust for humans – but he does love to smash things. Welch Everman (1993) 104

adds: ‘Kids love Godzilla and his huge buddies, probably because the scaly heroes are always making messes and never have to clean up afterward.’ The combination of transgression and immaturity places Godzilla firmly in a permanent cultist framework; the film’s unabashed celebration of destruction invites us to find ambivalent pleasure in our own badness. EM BFI SCREEN GUIDES

The Harder They Come Jamaica, 1972 – 120 mins Perry Henzell

Having established overseas exploitation empires in regional outlets such as the Philippines, Roger Corman’s New World investment in Jamaica in the early 1970s produced one of the most historically significant and iconographical cult entries of the decade: The Harder They Come. Directed by native-born Perry Henzell, this countercultural musical odyssey stars reggae musician Jimmy Cliff as Ivanhoe Martin, a naive youngster who moves to Kingston with dreams of becoming a pop star, only to face deprivation, deception and a descent into criminality. The film’s pre-credit sequence establishes Martin’s incompatibility with the harsh new urban landscape he inhabits, with the scene revealing the ease with which street peddlers defraud him of his cartful of belongings. These scenes, intercut with documentary footage of Kingston’s real dispossessed, also establish the powerful social dynamic that underpins Henzell’s film. This sociological element is further developed in the critique of the major social and cultural institutions that bedevil the protagonist’s progress. From the patronising bias of organised religion (which critiques the so-called excesses of modern black music, only to reduce its congregation to near-erotic hysteria with musical renditions), to the local police force (which is revealed as working hand in hand with criminal gangs to ensure the flow of drug money across the island). Even the modern music industry of which Cliff’s character remains so enamoured, is revealed as corrupt and dehumanising, shelving the young singer’s title tune ‘The Harder They Come’, only to re-release the song to cash in on his status as a gun-toting outlaw in the film’s final scenes. This track, along with other Cliff and Desmond Dekker signature hits that dominate the soundtrack, come to convey an important subcultural value of resistance at the core of The Harder They Come. As writers such as Lindsey Campbell (2008) have noted in recent work on Cliff’s film, the use of specific songs such as ‘007 Shanty Town’ persuasively locate the fictional hero in the same marginal zones as the real-life migrants flocking to Kingston at the time of the film’s production, with other tracks such as ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ effectively conveying the adversities confronting the newly arriving communities. However, rather than merely describing the manifest social inequality evident in Jamaica at the time, the soundtrack to The Harder They Come also uses reggae and Rastafarian culture as a symbolically antiauthoritarian weapon against the hypocrisy that the disenfranchised hero faces. This subcultural status is confirmed in the final closing reels, when Martin goes on the run, having made a deal with the police officers protecting one of the locale’s most lucrative drug traders. Although the final section of the movie has often been conflated with American blaxploitation imagery of the lone rebel male at odds with the symbols of orthodox authority, Lindsey Campbell has identified a far more transnational set of diverse influences at play in the movie. While the accoutrements of American culture 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Perry Henzell PRODUCER Perry Henzell WRITER Perry Henzell, Trevor D. Rhone CINEMATOGRAPHY Peter Jessop, David McDonald, Franklyn St Juste EDITING Seicland Anderson, John Victor-Smith, Richard White ORIGINAL MUSIC Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, the Slickers PRINCIPAL CAST Jimmy Cliff, Janet Bartley, Carl Bradshaw, Ras Daniel Hartman, Winston Stona

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are certainly present in Cliff’s fantasised outlaw persona (from GI Joe comics, playboy mags and Americana ephemera), an early scene of the protagonist transfixed by images of Franco Nero as Django* also reveals a debt to Eurotrash symbols of resistance. Indeed, this transnational set

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of influences impacts not just on the sounds of the movie, but also on the imagery, with distinctly trippy, European visuals (including psychedelic POV shots) accompanying Ivanhoe Martin’s transformation into cult outlaw icon. XM

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Harold and Maude US, 1971 – 91 mins Hal Ashby

Who could fail to be at turns transfixed, bemused, amused and confused by a film whose opening-title sequence sees its protagonist methodically preparing to hang himself and then being completely ignored by his mother as she enters the room, has an apparently trivial phone conversation and then berates her son for making a nuisance of himself? The film’s quirky first scene sets the tone for what comes thereafter. Harold and Maude follows the story of Harold (Bud Cort), a young man with a wealthy, pushy mother who arranges a series of blind dates for him (which Harold seeks to ruin by pretending to commit suicide during each of them in increasingly elaborate ways, ranging from setting himself on fire to performing ritual hari-kari). As a pastime he attends funerals (at least fifteen, he confesses to his psychologist), where he eventually meets seventy-nine-year-old Maude (Ruth Gordon), a free spirit who, like Harold, is at odds with society’s norms. After striking up an unlikely friendship – followed by even more unlikely romance – the two take part in a series of what can only be described as bizarre escapades (liberating a tree from its sidewalk prison as it looks ‘asthmatic’, lunching on a building site next to a fully active bulldozer and stealing a highway cop’s motorcycle, to name but a few). Underpinned by Cat Stevens’s gentle but insistent soundtrack, part of its cult appeal undoubtedly comes from both the absurdity and the taboo-breaking nature of the relationship between Harold and Maude. But at the heart of the film is the curious ambience created by the contrast in performances of the principal actors. Cort’s Harold is ethereal and slightly otherworldly, his wide-eyed and permanently stunned expression marrying with his fresh, pre-pubescent look (the character is supposed to be in his early twenties) while rubbing up against his increasingly surreal mock suicides. But it is Gordon’s portrayal of the free-spirited Maude – the self-styled Dame Marjorie Chardin – that is the film’s real tour de force. For all its quirky, offbeat humour, at its core the film has a melancholic air, best summed up in Harold’s response to Maude’s insistence that he get the most out of his life while he can that ‘I haven’t lived … I’ve died a few times.’ It is perhaps this that lends the film its oddly off-key ambience and helps to make it such a cultish property, the clash between dry, off-the-wall humour and an overall motif of the ever-present nature of death. Despite being separated from Maude at the end (ironically she successfully commits suicide upon reaching her eightieth birthday), the film closes with Harold faking his own death and picking up a banjo while cheerily singing ‘If you want to sing, sing out’ as he gaily skips into the middle distance. Harold has evidently taken Maude’s insistent advice to make the most of his time on earth to heart. EM/RH

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DIRECTOR Hal Ashby PRODUCER Colin Higgins, Mildred Lewis, Charles Mulvehill WRITER Colin Higgins CINEMATOGRAPHY John Alonzo PRODUCTION DESIGN Michael Haller EDITING William A. Sawyer, Edward Warschilka PRINCIPAL CAST Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Cyril Cusack, Vivian Pickles

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Häxan (Witchcraft through the Ages) Sweden, 1922 – 76 mins, 104 mins Benjamin Christensen

Häxan is as much a cult film as it is a film about cultism. Officially a documentary on the rituals of witchcraft, black magic and superstition – and on the means used by church and state to suppress these – Häxan combines grotesque special effects with an anarchistic sense of humour and documentary-style realism in sketching that most notorious of cults, Satanism. Across its seven chapters, Häxan follows a chronological trajectory, from 1488 to 1921. Five of the chapters reenact case studies such as ‘deeds of the devil’, ‘trials of the inquisition’, an exuberant ‘witches’ sabbath’ and demonic possession in a nuns’ convent. The first and sixth chapters quote sources, display documents and examine aspects of witchcraft and superstition. Among the most fascinating are paintings by Goya and Bosch, and numerous close-ups of medieval torture instruments, which the camera lingers over almost sadistically. One of these, a set of thumbscrews, we actually witness being applied. The actress’s confident smile soon changes into a very real expression of pain. Before long she is begging to have the screws loosened. Much of Häxan’s appeal lies in the abundance of unsavoury details concerning sex, violence and ‘lower life’. Carcasses, skulls, skeletons, cut-off limbs, insects and reptiles abound. Dirt is everywhere, as is spilled and half-eaten food, ripped clothes, broken branches, grease dripping from a sacrificed baby. The culmination of this mood is the witches’ sabbath. It is loosely based on Margaret Murray’s (1921) then-novel work on witch cults, which became a precursor to Wicca beliefs. In Häxan, the account of the witches’ sabbath is extracted from a woman under torture, one that synthesises popular beliefs about the kinds of abandonment and sortilege a Satanic enchantment would cause in its victims. The orgiastic choreography sees cult followers dance themselves into ecstasy, have uninhibited sex and engage in bacchanals – complete with the sacrifice of an infant. The scene is a tour de force in terms of special effects, and it outranks many contemporary films in its excessiveness and sexual imagery. The most significant role in Häxan is that of Satan, played with visibly devilish pleasure by director Christensen himself (who also appears briefly as Jesus Christ). In Häxan, Satan is horny, seductive and alluring. He presides over the witches’ sabbath in an unabashedly sexual way. He twists and swirls his tongue, gropes women and makes obscene masturbatory gestures. Needless to say, Häxan provoked controversy. It was banned in several countries and its release experienced obstacles virtually everywhere. At the same time, its anticlericalism was celebrated by the surrealists, who declared it a masterpiece of subversion. In the late 1960s, it found a countercultural audience through a shortened version that carried a doomsday narration by William Burroughs. This version quickly joined the likes of Freaks*, Reefer Madness* and El Topo* on the midnight-movie and college-campus circuit. Häxan’s colourful depiction of what a cult experience, at its climax, could be was not lost to the viewers who saw it in the late 60s. The 90s saw the restoration of the original print, which gave the film a third life, now within the safe realms of cinephilia. EM 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Benjamin Christensen WRITER Benjamin Christensen CINEMATOGRAPHY Johan Ankerstjerne EDITING Edla Hansen PRINCIPAL CAST Benjamin Christensen, Maren Pedersen, Oscar Stribolt, John Andersen, Karen Winther, Astrid Holm, Kate Fabian

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Hellraiser UK, 1987 – 94 mins Clive Barker

In the film’s prologue, the sexually promiscuous explorer Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) purchases an ancient puzzle box from a mysterious seller during an overseas trip, which he tries to unlock when he returns to England. By finally managing to release the ornament, Cotton exposes himself to the hellish world of the cenobites, whose ringleader Pin Head (Doug Bradley) controls the underworld extremes of sexuality, sadism and the flesh with cruel and calculating intent. Once the box is open, Frank becomes the cenobites’ next victim and his body is ripped apart by hooks and barbed wire, which appear from the corners of the room to eviscerate him. Some time later, the cursed abode is occupied by Frank’s mundane brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his sexually frustrated second wife Julia (Claire Higgins). Exploring the chaos of the deserted home, Julia finds a series of erotic photographs of Frank with other female suitors, which prompts a lengthy flashback revealing her own sexually sadistic past with the protagonist. Recalling her sexual acts with Frank, Julia becomes aroused and, at the point of her climax, Larry cuts his hand in the hall below while moving furniture into the property. The blood from this wound seeps into the cellar below, partially reanimating Frank’s body (here played by Oliver Smith). When Julia later discovers the cadaverous remains of her former lover concealed in the house, she experiences not repulsion at his skinless facade, but continued erotic attraction. She agrees to help Frank regain his normal physical form by seducing men before killing them with a claw hammer so that Frank can feast on their flesh. After several ill-fated suitors have been dispatched in this way, Frank begins to assume a human form, and the couple resume the sexual games that dominated their past. However, Julia is spotted bringing one victim into the family home by Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), Larry’s daughter from his first wife. Already ambivalent about her stepmother’s motivations, Kirsty sneaks into the house to confront her, only to find Frank devouring the body of this latest victim. Although Frank attempts to mutilate the teenager, she escapes with the puzzle box that had initially entrapped him. While recovering from the incident in hospital, Kirsty unwisely unlocks the device and is also transported into the hinterland of these dark creatures. The heroine manages to bargain with Pin Head for her life, which is granted on condition that she return Frank’s rotting body to them. However, when she returns to the family home, she finds that her uncle and Julia have killed her father at the climax of their erotic quest. Frank has now assumed Larry’s form, and attempts both to seduce and then kill Kirsty, before dispatching Julia in error. In the climactic scene, the cenobites return at the point when the protagonist has finally regained human form, destroying his body with hooks and chains for a second time, while Kirsty manages to escape. One of the few successful novelist-into-celluloid auteurs, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser remains a significant homegrown horror entry from the 1980s. Released during the Thatcher era’s campaign to control both 110

DIRECTOR Clive Barker PRODUCER Mark Armstrong, Christopher Figg WRITER Clive Barker CINEMATOGRAPHY Robin Vidgeon EDITING Richard Marden ORIGINAL MUSIC Christopher Young PRINCIPAL CAST Sean Chapman, Doug Bradley, Andrew Robinson, Claire Higgins, Oliver Smith, Ashley Laurence

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monetary and morality drives, the film offers a dark, subversive vision of the untamed desires within the domestic space. As a result, Hellraiser offers a deliciously deviant alternative to an officialised notion of family values, splicing subcultural sexual practices with Freudian imagery related to themes of primal trauma. As with Freud’s classic case study of the ‘Wolf Man’, Barker uses the transgressive link between Frank and Julia to reveal the extent to which perverse desires are defined both by voyeurism (indicated by Julia’s obsession with looking at imagery of Frank’s sexual past), and a process of compulsive repetition (as indicated in the central flashback outlining the female 100 CULT FILMS

protagonist’s past cravings). As with Freudian case lore, a perverse and almost dreamlike imagery pervades Barker’s film, which completes its libidinal circuit when Frank assumes his brother’s appearance only to try to seduce Kirsty. While Hellraiser remains ripe with fleshy, psychosexual symbolism, it is the film’s construction of the cenobites that ensured the series cult longevity. In particular, the leather-clad and curiously androgynous Pin Head proved an endearing icon for subcultural audiences during the decade, as Bradley reprised this role in no less than six other related sequels and spin-offs. XM 111

The Holy Mountain France/Mexico/US, 1973 – 113 mins Alejandro Jodorowsky

There are few directors with the career path of Alejandro Jodorowsky, who has seen every single one of his films acquire a cult reputation that is linked to failure. Some films failed to express Jodorowsky’s vision because outside interventions compromised his work. Among the examples are Tusk (1980) and Dune, an abandoned project later resurrected by David Lynch (1984). But the films he managed to complete in freedom carry a tag of ‘failure’ too, especially El Topo* and The Holy Mountain. Addressing human failure to grasp the world, they struggled to reach viewers. This combination – not coincidental to some critics – both obstructed and strengthened the cultural status of the films. Holy Mountain is inspired by the novel Mount Analogue, by René Daumal, a French writer heavily influenced by esoteric philosophy. The story tells of the adventures of a group of travellers who set out to seek a ‘superior humanity’, a form of spiritual enlightenment they hope to find at the top of a magic mountain. The symbol of the mountain as representing knowledge is, of course, an image shared by many religions and philosophies (Daumal mentions Mount Meru of the Hindus, Mount Sinai of Yahweh and Mount Olympus of the Greeks). But in Daumal’s and Jodorowsky’s views it is also a physical place. First, the seekers have to locate the mountain. This they do through rigorous philosophical training, under the guidance of a teacher, the Alchemist (played by Jodorowsky). The Alchemist subjects the travellers to a range of occult, surreal and (frankly) wacky rituals that liberate them from previously held beliefs and convictions. Next, the seekers have to experience the process of actually climbing the mountain. Mount Analogue explains this process as a ‘chain’: each step forward can only come after full understanding of every previous step. ‘The last step depends on the first’, writes Daumal. Daumal’s novel remained unfinished but Jodorowsky improvised his own ending. The seekers are promised that once they have completed the chain (the climb) they will unseat the Immortal Gods and a new truth will be born. In a series of brutal scenes of bestial sexuality and cruelty, each of the climbers confronts their worst fears of dehumanisation as they ‘give themselves to the world’ (a bloody, vicious dog fight, a seeker’s face covered in cow semen, castration, a spider infestation …). Yet the reward remains absent. At the top, the Alchemist discloses there is no ‘deeper’ truth, no secret or immortality. ‘If we haven’t obtained immortality, at least we have obtained reality?’ he asks. ‘No, it is a film. Zoom back camera.’ The set of the film is revealed. With the myths and the attempts to represent them exposed, the group topples the symbol of the holy mountain. They conclude: ‘real life awaits us’, and walk away from the set. Holy Mountain’s graphic violence, explicit sexuality and bizarre images made it an instant scandal when it premiered at the Cannes film festival in 1973. The imagery and the unexpected, demystifying conclusion in which the film turns its back on much of the rhetoric of spiritual enlightenment did not sit well with audiences expecting mystical revelation. It also sat uncomfortably with financer Allen Klein, 1 0 0 C U LT F ILMS

DIRECTOR Alejandro Jodorowsky PRODUCER Robert Taicher WRITER Alejandro Jodorowsky (based on a novel by René Daumal) CINEMATOGRAPHY Rafael Corleidi SET AND COSTUME DESIGN Alejandro Jodorowsky EDITING Federico Landeros MUSIC Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ronald Frangipane, Don Cherry PRINCIPAL CAST Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas, Ramona Saunders, Juan Ferrara, Adriana Page, Burt Kleiner, Valerie Jodorowsky

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whose company ABKCO had put up the funding for the film at the behest of their client John Lennon. After a very short run, ABKCO almost completely withdrew Holy Mountain from circulation. Incidental screenings notwithstanding, it remained virtually unseen until a DVD box set was released in 2007. This release has finally

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allowed the debate about the film’s meaning to proceed. Much remains to be said about Holy Mountain, but one thing is sure: like Mount Analogue it is a deconstruction of the essence of the human experience and of the necessary failure of the recording of that experience. EM

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The House with the Laughing Windows (La casa dalle finestre che ridono) Italy, 1976 – 110 mins Pupi Avati

Although not a director solely associated with the horror genre, Pupi Avati turned in one of the most significant entries to the 1970s Italian giallo craze with The House with the Laughing Windows. As with many of the entries related to this cycle, Avati’s film uses its rural backdrop to evoke a set of regional and sexual fears that resonates with the wider Italian imagination. It is the prevalence of these unsettling themes that is demonstrated in the film’s startling sepia opening montage. This depicts a partly clad and bound male being brutalised in slow motion by two unidentified figures, his suffering being simultaneously reproduced as a macabre painting. The masochistic and deeply sexual underpinnings of this scene are confirmed by the accompanying anonymous narration. Here, an unidentified man discusses the punishment enacted upon the depicted male body in near pornographic terms, noting that the colours of his canvas are ‘hot like fresh blood … the liquid flows down my arms …’, this macabre version of ejaculation being reproduced as the camera pans down the bloodied torso of the victim. The voiceover narration is revealed to be that of Buono Legnani (Tonino Corazzari), the controversial and celebrated artist from a remote rural town, whose images of extreme agony sketched from models at the point of death earned him the title of the ‘Painter of Agonies’. As the film reveals, the now dead artist’s reputation still casts an air of obscene celebrity over the town, whose residents have decided to restore one of Legnani’s church frescoes (one depicting Saint Sebastian being attacked by two unidentified aggressors) in a bid to attract more Northern tourists. As a result, the post-credit sequence shows art historian Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) arriving in the region, instantly evoking the distinction between the idyllic rural landscape and its aberrant inhabitants that has long occupied the ‘cultured’, Northern Italian mindset. Here, a gradual close-up shot of the town’s pier reveals Stefano’s new benefactor to be Solmi (Bob Tonelli), the dwarf turned self-styled mayor who is attempting to reverse the town’s fortunes. Beyond the figure of Solmi, it is noticeable that The House with the Laughing Windows revels in a pantheon of physiological abnormality, which is displayed before Stefano in communal settings such as the town’s (singular) restaurant, as if he were a forensics rather than an art expert. Moreover, Stefano’s investigation into the macabre power of this deceased painter uncovers a culture of both gender and physiological abnormality within the town. For instance, although the artist Legnani is revealed to have perished in an act of horrific selfmutilation prior to the actualisation of the narrative, his personality (and body) is kept alive by both the delirium of his murder-themed audio recordings, as well as his self-portraits, which hang proudly in local dignitaries’ homes. When the restaurant owner shows one these paintings to Stefano, to explain the artist’s limited success with women, the transgendered nature of his body (replete with feminine characteristics, including well-developed breasts) becomes startlingly apparent. 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Pupi Avati PRODUCER Antonio Avati, Gianni Minervini WRITER Antonio Avati, Pupi Avati, Gianni Cavina, Maurizio Constanzo CINEMATOGRAPHY Pasquale Rachini EDITING Giuseppe Baghdighian ORIGINAL MUSIC Amedeo Tommasi PRINCIPAL CAST Lino Capolicchio, Tonino Corazzari, Francesca Marciano, Gianni Cavana, Guilio Pizzirani, Bob Tonelli

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It is these themes of sexual Otherness that also dominate the finale of Avati’s movie, when a traumatised Stefano uncovers the mummified corpse of the artist in the archaic country house he has been renting. Having been violently assaulted by Legnani’s geriatric sister (who is continuing his murderous reign), Stefano seeks shelter with the ‘male’ cleric who has been supervising his restoration of the artist’s fresco in the local chapel. The film’s shocking finale reveals the priest to be another of Legnani’s sisters, who has been living (and accepted) in the community under the transsexual guise of a male priest. This startling gender revelation is demonstrated when the cleric removes ‘his’ robe to reveal a firm pair of breasts, the freeze-frame ending on Stefano’s shocked reaction. His ultimate fate at the hands of the rural return of the repressed remains unresolved.

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With his powerful examination of the sexual peculiarities that rural Italian communities can harbour, Avati’s film remains a significant giallo production, whose impact is very much associated with its representations of the landscape. As the director himself has commented: My contexts were neither the metropolis nor the papier-mâché castle of traditional Italian horror. Instead, I brought my horror story into the sun-bathed and peaceful, reassuring world of rural Emilia-Romagna. Suddenly, I am not just framing that part of the hedge which is in sunshine, but also enabling the viewer to imagine that part which is in shadow.

XM

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I Walked with a Zombie US, 1943 – 69 mins Jacques Tourneur

The cult reputation of I Walked with a Zombie, a film that does not contain a marketable monster and that is almost void of explicit violence (though rife with sexual suggestion), relies solely upon appreciation for it as an aesthetic aberration. As part of a 1940s cycle of B-movies produced by Val Lewton for the RKO studio, Zombie’s brief was that of an exploitation picture. Yet, instead of building their story around a type of monster similar to those of the successful franchises of the 30s, director Tourneur, producer Lewton and editor Robson (who would direct some of the other RKO horror films), decided to forego the creation of a creature and instead focus on inference and atmosphere, inspiration for which they found in the novel Jane Eyre and the legend of St Sebastian. The story, told in retrospect via voiceover narration, recounts the adventures of Canadian nurse Betsy (Frances Dee) on the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian, named not only after the ship that brought slaves to the island but also after the Christian martyr and protector of possible plague victims who was able to ‘cure’ women (of muteness and blindness) and locate the final resting places of missing corpses – a clever metaphor for the film’s two main themes: male control over female ‘neuroses’ (under which is also understood infidelity), and the disenfranchised’s persistent practice of superstition and cult worship (or belief in the afterlife) as a coping mechanism for misery and adversity. Betsy becomes aware that the woman she is caring for has a mysterious illness that put her in a catatonic state (she is a zombie of course) and that her condition is somehow related to the fate of the island’s slaves and their voodoo rituals. In an effort to find help, Betsy guides her patient across the island to the place of black magic worship – a nerve-wracking, haunting trip (and a highlight of the film), during which they encounter a native zombie. Betsy narrowly manages to save her patient from being sacrificed, only to see her die after all, this time at the hand of a former lover trying to rouse her from her possessed state by stabbing her with an arrow from the effigy of St Sebastian. It is with a close-up of this effigy that the film ends. Avoiding motivation and rational explanation, ambiguity and sexual tension reign in Zombie, not in the least through the suggestion of a link between Western anxieties and folk superstition (a link also made by Häxan*). The ambiguity is well served by the absence of any explicit horror. Yet, while the real horror is generally beyond eyesight, it is often audibly referenced, through drums beating in the distance, or through insinuations in songs (such as the rendition of ‘Shame and Scandal’ performed by calypso singer Sir Lancelot Pinard). Zombie further showcases this remote horror via long, dreamlike and silent passages with lyrical background ambiance – most effectively used when the female protagonists wander through the cane-field wilderness. Only very rarely are there moments of shock: a skull, a cadaver hanging from a tree, a catatonic sleepwalker appearing out of nowhere and only two zombies. Released in the wake of the very successful Cat People (1942), Zombie performed well at the box office. It also drew positive reviews. Over time, it found a cult following with fans of atmospheric, implicit horror – a 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Jacques Tourneur PRODUCER Val Lewton WRITER Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray (story: Inez Wallace novel: Charlotte Brontë) ORIGINAL MUSIC Roy Webb EDITING Mark Robson PRINCIPAL CAST Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison, Edith Barrett

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following that became more entrenched as explicit and splatter horror became the dominant modes for the genre. Zombie is of a completely different calibre than the flood of zombie films released after George A. Romero’s paradigmatic Dead trilogy – much more exotic and invested in the folklore of the Caribbean and far less implicated in capitalist consumer criticism, a difference it shares with a short cycle of late-1980s zombie films that situated at least part of their backstory in 118

the Caribbean (or the Deep South of the US). The cycle included Angel Heart, The Serpent and the Rainbow and The Believers (all from 1987, the year this book references more than any other). Despite such occasional emulators, and regardless of accusations of misogyny (fuelled by the film’s final statement that ‘the woman was a wicked woman’ whose ‘steps led him down to evil’), Zombie remains pretty much unique in its exoticism and its ambiguity. EM BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1) Japan, 2001 – 129 mins Takashi Miike

With titles such as Dead or Alive (1999), Audition (2000), City of Lost Souls and Visitor Q (both 2001), the controversial Japanese cult director Takashi Miike crafted a series of blood-and-guts classics that have provoked outrage for their OTT scenes of SFX splatter and scenarios of prolonged sexual violence. To his detractors, Miike exposes the very worst excesses of the gun-crazed, unrelenting misogyny haunting Japanese culture, while his defenders see these works as uncompromising and experimental comments on the customs of an increasingly techno-alienated society. Upon first appearance, Miike’s rendition of the manga-inspired Ichi the Killer certainly seems to bear out the opinions of his most vehement critics. The opening sequence of the movie sets the tone for what is to come. Here, a woman is beaten and molested by her partner, the camera capturing her disfigured face in close, almost fetishistic detail. Meanwhile, outside their apartment a young boy masturbates to the images of degradation he is witnessing. As his semen spills on the open ground, the title ‘Ichi the Killer’ emerges through the droplets of discarded fluid. Rather than functioning as an isolated scene, this gruesome opener initialises a pattern of increasing violation that builds to an unsavoury climax in a later sequence showing one female victim having her nipples sliced off with a scalpel in a brutal act of intergang retribution. Despite its standout grotesque moments, the narrative of Ichi the Killer owes more to the excesses of comic-strip and gangland yakuza culture than to gross-out cinema traditions. In this respect, the extremes of punishment meted out to the film’s females are not only equalled, but exceeded by the representations of male-on-male violence that populate the narrative. The most spectacular example of this involves a rival gang member being stripped naked before being suspended mid-air by a series of hooks inserted in his flesh. This ghoulish ritual is only concluded when the victim is horrifically scalded across his face and body with burning fat from a frying pan. (Miike’s revolutionary use of CGI allows viewers the dubious pleasure of seeing the victim’s face melt before their eyes in close-up.) Ichi the Killer details the exploits of the sexually repressed teenage assassin Ichi (Nao Omori) who already traumatised by a prior childhood assault, is manipulated into destroying a local mafia gang with a lethal pair of razor-tipped boots by his dispossessed father, Jijii (played by cult director Shinya Tsukamoto). When high-ranking members of the local yakuza mob presume that rival gangs are responsible for the disappearance of their leader, it sets off an avalanche of criminal recrimination, orchestrated by the flamboyant henchman Kakihara (Tadanobu Asano), whose sadistic qualities are only matched by the curiously moral affiliation that he feels to this criminal family. Indeed, as with other significant entries in Miike’s filmography, it is the repressive and distorted influence of the family unit (both domestic and criminal) that remains one of the pivotal concerns in these unconventional productions. In this respect, the manipulation by Ichi by his father is itself reproduced in the outlandish Visitor Q, which begins with a sex scene between 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Takashi Miike PRODUCER Akiko Funatsu WRITER Hideo Yamamoto, Sakichi Satô CINEMATOGRAPHY Hideo Yamamoto EDITING Yashushi Shimamura ORIGINAL MUSIC Karera Musication, Seiichi Yamamoto PRINCIPAL CAST Nao Omori, Shinya Tsukamoto, Tadanobu Asano

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a dysfunctional father and his young daughter, before revealing a catalogue of domestic violence enacted against a subservient mother by the male members of the household. Even Miike’s breakout hit Audition relates how an apparently meek Japanese woman is transformed into a vengeful dominatrix after years of systematic family abuse. Discussing the familial basis to the regimes of punishment shown in his films, Miike has himself confirmed in interview that: My interest is definitely in the family. Violence may appear to be a particular problem, but my interest is more in human actions and human emotions within the family. But violence of course, as a filmmaker, is an easy tool for expressing or conveying certain problems or emotions that are at work within the family.

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Arguably, the complex web of human affiliations and tensions that these family structures evoke, betrays an emotional intensity in Miike’s work that defies the simplistic label of genre director. This complexity also extends to the narrative and stylistic constructions of the director’s work, which often privileges experimental constructions of time and space associated with European arthouse and avant-garde masters. As with directors such as Godard or Antonioni, the works of Takashi Miike require an active form of spectatorship, one that forces the viewer to work out how one vignette or examination of on-screen space relates to another. It is this unconventional mixture of experimental style with extended scenes of violence and suffering that makes Ichi the Killer both innovative and uncomfortable viewing, while confirming Takashi Miike as one of Japan’s most creative and confrontational cult icons of recent decades. XM

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In Bruges US, 2008 – 107 mins Martin McDonagh

A slow burner about burning in hell, In Bruges was initially neither an impressive release nor a catastrophic failure. Some commentators were quick to proclaim it a cult film (one of them was Chuck Palahniuk, writer of Fight Club*), but most of its reputation grew gradually. In the years since its premiere at the Sundance festival in January 2008, it has slowly, and mostly through word-of-mouth, slipped into cult status. It now has a firm following of devoted fans who cherish the highly quotably back-and-forth dialogue, the swirling comedy-of-errors plot and its many mazelike inferences, the dark, existential humour and the volatile mix of tragedy, sadness, principled moral stands and nihilism. The key to In Bruges is its nothingness. Nothing works; nothing is sacred; every action misses its goal; everyone is misunderstood; and no one escapes. The main story is that of two London-based Irish hitmen who hide out in the picturesque medieval town of Bruges because of some messed-up business back home. Ken (Brendan Gleeson) is the veteran of the two, and he enjoys the sense of eternity the city exudes. Ray (Colin Farrell) does not: acting like a pouting six-year-old, he whines wherever they go, ridiculing the religious relics they visit – he is particularly unimpressed with the Chapel of the Holy Blood. The only brief reliefs for his bad mood are beers (not ‘gay beers’ as he calls the Belgian ales, but ‘normal beers’, like lager) and impromptu encounters with a racist dwarf actor (Jordan Prentice) and the angelic film-set assistant Chloe (Clémence Poésy, Fleur from the Harry Potter films). The film reveals Ray’s moodiness to be the result of guilt – he accidentally shot a child once. For his involvement in that killing, Ray’s strangely principled boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) has ordered his elimination, by Ken. But like all other plans in the film, that arrangement fails and everything falls apart in Last Judgment-fashion amid the fairytale beauty and moral solemnity of the Christmastime city, which becomes their prison – a confirmation of Bruges’s function as heaven, purgatory and hell, and a wink to the city’s medieval heritage, portrayed so ominously in the film. In the last scene, a mortally injured Ray prays for redemption and slips into blissful nothingness. The grave symbolism of this sad story is redirected through some of the most remarkable dialogue of recent decades – smart and witty yet also blunt and offensive (and overloaded with ‘f-bombs’) – and through several clever allusions, to medieval allegory and to film history. The meeting with Chloe on a film set is one example. It is ‘a Dutch movie’, Chloe explains, ‘a dream sequence. It’s a pastiche of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Not a pastiche but a … “homage” is too strong … . A “nod of the head”.’ The film-in-the-film itself looks like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch (which Ray and Ken actually visit earlier in the film). Such elaborate allusions are plentiful in In Bruges and they produce an alternative, cultist way of seeing the film that fans worldwide latched onto. Director Martin McDonagh, known primarily for his savage, Tarantinoesque theatre plays of revenge and violence set in rural western Ireland, already had somewhat of an offbeat reputation when In Bruges 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Martin McDonagh PRODUCER Graham Broadbent, Peter Czernin WRITER Martin McDonagh CINEMATOGRAPHY Eigil Bryld EDITING Jon Gregory ORIGINAL MUSIC Carter Burwell PRINCIPAL CAST Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Eric Godon, Clémence Poésy, Jordan Prentice, Jérémie Renier

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was released – mostly thanks to his short Six Shooter (2004), a hyperbolic homage to Spaghetti Westerns that features the explosion of a cow and the execution of a rabbit. In our poll that searched for the ‘newest cult film’, In Bruges is the single most mentioned title. It is a fan favourite by a small margin. It far outruns any other films as a second and third choice, and it appears as a point of reference for cultism today in several comments to other films. It has its opponents, and its supporters are loud too – the number of exclamations and expletives suggests its fans share some of Ray’s vocabulary.

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Throughout, there is also a sense that, like it or not, the film has earned its place among canonical cults. Even Bruges’s own heritage now bears the marks of In Bruges’s cult status – the Belfry Tower in and around which much of the film is set is now tagged with graffiti quotations from the film. Among the most prominent are the phrases ‘Bruges is a shithole’ and the politically highly incorrect yet apt summary of the film: ‘They’re filming midgets!’ The writing is literally on the wall, then: In Bruges has enshrined itself into the history of churches and cults. EM

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers US, 1956 – 80 mins Don Siegel

Paranoia and pod-pulping horror collide in Don Siegel’s landmark sci-fi conspiracy classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The film, adapted from Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers, was not only well received in critical terms, but spawned a number of sequels, as well as a reputation for social commentary that continues to influence contemporary cinematic debate. In the film, Kevin McCarthy gives an appropriately melancholic performance as Dr Miles Bennell, the locum of a small American town gradually revealed to be the locus of an alien invasion. When a clutch of Bennell’s patients begin to exhibit paranoid tendencies, complaining that loved ones have become strange and unresponsive, the protagonist’s wider sense of social harmony is disturbed. This unsettling trend begins when Bennell is asked to treat the young Jimmy Grimaldi (Bobby Clark), who is convinced that his mother has been replaced by a replica. Soon, other instances of this communal malaise emerge to confirm Bennell’s unease. In a wry nod to the increasing influence of psychoanalysis on Hollywood fiction (and the film set), Bennell’s concerns are at first dismissed by the town’s psychotherapist, who defines the outbreak as an example of group hysteria. However, the protagonist, along with former love interest Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), discovers the extraterrestrial invasion is facilitated through a network of abject, oozing pods, whose occupants take human form while the host body sleeps. The scene where Bennell and Driscoll confront a collection of the fleshy, pulsating shells in the protagonist’s greenhouse underscores the visceral nature of Siegel’s invaders, and remains one of the more disquieting images in the film. Alongside these unsettling inserts, it is the paranoid fear of identity loss that pervades Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This threat is actualised in the film’s closing scenes, when Bennell discovers that his female companion has already been cloned and set the trap for his capture by the alien horde. The scene is lent an additional layer of angst by virtue of the fact that Bennell is engaged in a passionate embrace with Becky at the very moment that he realises her non-human status. The subsequent sequence, where the lone, deranged hero runs along the motorway, attempting to warn passing motorists of the alien presence in their midst, remains one of the most iconic and evocative images of the film, and indeed of wider 1950s American cinema. This startling sequence was originally intended as the nihilistic closing by Siegel, before studio bosses stepped in to impose a new prologue and epilogue, to soften the downbeat tone of this outro. In this resultant version, the film begins with the incarcerated hero recounting his story to a sceptical group of local cops, his narrative facilitated by a flashback structure. The story is then resolved when the flashback ends, and the officers reveal that a cluster of the pods has been discovered by law-enforcement agencies, and an investigation is now ongoing. Although viewed as a compromised version of Siegel’s original vision by some 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Don Siegel PRODUCER Walter Wanger WRITER Daniel Mainwaring, Jack Finney CINEMATOGRAPHY Ellsworth Fredericks EDITING Robert S. Eisen ORIGINAL MUSIC Carmen Dragon PRINCIPAL CAST Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Bobby Clark

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pulp purists, the tacked-on ending does not fully relieve the disquieting sense that Bennell is indeed the last local left uninfected. Equally, the studio-approved version (with its flashback and voiceover bridging mechanisms) actually enhances some of the darker noir-like stylistics that proliferate in the narrative, with Siegel’s distinctive offkilter framing and low-key lighting effectively symbolising his male lead’s gradual entrapment. While studio dabbling has led some to view the style of the movie as compromised, its themes of alien invaders slowly engulfing free speech and rational thought with a dogma of unerring conformity has pushed Invasion of the Body Snatchers into the realms of conspiracy narrative. For writers such as Robin Wood (1979), Siegel’s film uses the theme of the ‘Monster as Other’ to evoke wider 1950s fears about the dehumanising effects of Communism, which permeated the Cold War American mind-set. If these innovative readings remain apt, it is appropriate to read Invasion of the Body

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Snatchers as an index of contemporary fears, which include the sexual, as much as the socio-political. For instance, recent critics such as Solveig Burfeind (2011) have argued that the figure of Becky Driscoll (with her masculine qualities and divorcée status) highlights greater American fears around the required re-domestication of women in the post-war decade. What remains interesting is the extent to which the bodysnatcher narrative has continued as a signifier of shifting social and sexual fears, which have also infiltrated the franchise that developed from the release of the original. For instance, the 1978 Philip Kaufman remake is centred around post-sexual-liberation couples and the gay bathhouses of San Francisco, thus literalising fears about aberrant sexuality as a mode of physical invasion. More recently, the underrated Abel Ferrara rendition Body Snatchers (1993) relocates the alieninvasion motif to a US army base, thus reflecting the more militaristic fears manifest during the Reagan/Bush Sr era. XM

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Invocation of My Demon Brother US, 1969 – 11 mins Kenneth Anger

With Woodstock, the Vietnam War, the Manson Family murders and Altamont, 1969 represents a pivotal, mad moment in popular culture. Invocation is equally a part and a critique of that madness. Kenneth Anger himself called it ‘the last blast of Haight consciousness’. Invocation presents a series of snapshots and fragmented scenes that establish a mood of drugged hallucination. Against the hypnotic soundtrack of a Moog synthesiser (improvised by Mick Jagger), the film mixes ‘outcast’ imagery (an albino with muscular spasms, tattoos, nude men, hippies smoking pot from a skull), with superimposed and near-subliminal news footage, Rolling Stones concert footage, and scenes from a 1967 public ceremony of the Ritual of the Autumn Equinox, lorded over by Anger. The ceremony is the central performance in Invocation. As the editing becomes more frantic, and the ceremony itself seems to intensify, the character of Satan appears (portrayed by Anton LaVey, then leader of the Church of Satan). Waving a Nazi flag against a solar swastika image projection, Anger burns the Testament of Oz, a proto-hippy manifesto declaring the absolute freedom of artists written by Aleister Crowley, founder of the occultist philosophy of ‘Magick’, a form of Gnosticism of which Anger was an avid follower. Throughout Invocation, Lucifer watches on. Played by Bobby Beausoleil, Lucifer’s beautiful body is one of two recurrent motifs – the other is imagery of eyes – against what Anger called a ‘background of chaos and violence’. Anger had already developed a niche following with his scandalous book of Hollywood gossip, Hollywood Babylon, and with provocative avant-garde films such as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) and Scorpio Rising, which portrayed subcultural actions, a queer sensibility and a Dionysian cultism in which one loses oneself in a wasteful orgy of sex, violence and sheer energy. By the time of Invocation Anger was regarded as a semi-guru by rock celebrities, including Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger. Living at the San Francisco ‘Russian Embassy’, Anger was in direct proximity to religiously inspired sects (such as the Church of Satan), as well as friends of the Manson Family such as Beausoleil, a connection that added to the sense that his occultism was not a pose, but a practice. Invocation is certainly a film that celebrates the ways in which alternative religiosity and utopianism challenge mainstream world beliefs, and many of its fans take it very seriously. At the same time, Invocation constitutes a criticism of idolatry and fetishism, of the rituals that are the articulations of a countercultural attitude. Invocation premiered in October 1969 at the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. It then made its way onto the burgeoning midnight-movie circuit in New York, where it preceded that phenomenon’s breakthrough (which came in 1970 with El Topo*). For midnight-moviegoers Invocation was a testimony to a period of heightened interest in alternative religion, and the pinnacle of a brief moment when there appeared to be a genuine rapprochement between film cults and semi-cultist living practices. ‘We’ve got it 126

DIRECTOR Kenneth Anger WRITER Kenneth Anger CINEMATOGRAPHY Kenneth Anger EDITING Kenneth Anger ORIGINAL MUSIC Mick Jagger PRINCIPAL CAST Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, Bill Beutel, Mick Jagger, Anton LaVey, Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards

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right here’, Woodstock announcer John Morris famously commented on that moment. He also warned not to ‘blow the whole thing’. Invocation seems to address the full ambiguity of this moment. The

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nostalgia for that true cult moment, and the impression that by watching the film one exposes oneself to its millennial rapture, is a key reason why Invocation still remains as seductive as it was in 1969. EM

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It’s a Wonderful Life US, 1946 – 130 mins Frank Capra

The little things matter, that’s the message of It’s a Wonderful Life, a film whose persistent cult following, squarely within rather than at the margins of middlebrow culture, is all about little people watching a little film on the little screen for a little respite from the rat race. The little things of It’s a Wonderful Life constitute a cute but constant clutter, a wide range of emotions (with a constantly yelling and arm-waving James Stewart at its centre), and a strangely meandering style of storytelling. The life of George Bailey, a sympathetic fellow from Bedford Falls, flows from one small occurrence to the next. The little things that happen to him simultaneously agitate and amuse George, as they waylay his plans for a career, a dream, some form of happiness other than what he has. However, when a bureaucratic mishap means that his small loans and savings bank is facing bankruptcy, it heralds an escalation of bad luck and desperation. On Christmas Eve George tries to commit suicide. In an unexpected twist, he is saved by an angel-in-training from heaven, an angel who still needs his wings confirmed. The angel shows George how much good his little deeds have done by showing him what would have happened to his hometown had he not lived: instead of Bedford Falls there is a morally bankrupt cesspool called Pottersville, after the town’s other, bigger, evil banker. Upon exiting Pottersville George re-embraces life with a newfound thankfulness that is best epitomised by a kiss he gives to a little loose staircase banister in his house (the banister had earlier received several scowls). In a finale that is probably one of the most sentimental ever, there is even a financial solution to his bank’s problems as Christmas brings all the townsfolk to his house to pitch in and bail him out with little donations. As George cuddles his wife and children a tiny bell rings – the angel has received his wings in heaven. Unsuccessful upon its initial release, and criticised for its unabashed sentimentality, It’s a Wonderful Life became a marginalised film. It enjoyed several fractured reception trajectories, all outside the centre field of mainstream Hollywood. One such instance, documented by Eric Smoodin (2004), was its run as part of an educational programme at San Quentin jail – where the film managed to soften the hearts of inmates who confessed to submitting to the ‘river of tears’ the film provoked. After the copyright of It’s a Wonderful Life lapsed and it became public property, it began to acquire a loyal following on the small screen. In a remarkable parallel with the story, local television stations looking for no-cost Christmas shows to counter big networks’ muscle events, began to schedule it, and through the 1970s and 80s It’s a Wonderful Life became a ‘seasonal cult’, one that perfectly fitted middle America’s (the little people!) yuletide nostalgia for family and community values. In recent years, and in spite of a renewed protection on its copyright, the nostalgic appeal of It’s a Wonderful Life has spawned other appropriations. Various musical stage versions have appeared, some sponsored by religious communities. Its reinvigorated theatrical life, a revival of the repertory tradition of the early 1980s, led Danny Peary (1981) to describe it as so cultist that ‘only the 128

DIRECTOR Frank Capra PRODUCER Frank Capra WRITER Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra (story: Philip Van Doren Stern) CINEMATOGRAPHY Joseph Biroc, Joseph Walker EDITING William Hornbeck MUSIC Dimitri Tiomkin PRINCIPAL CAST James Stewart, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Beulah Bondi, Gloria Grahame

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youngest children in the audience hadn’t seen it several times’. It also makes the occasional appearance on the convention circuit, where appearances by the film’s child actors attract thousands of fans. Ultimately, It’s a Wonderful Life and its many little things offer,

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simultaneously, a mild criticism of capitalist modes of consumption, and a touchstone for thousands who seasonally seek to escape from such modes through the management and construction of nostalgia as yet another form of consumption. EM

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The Killer Hong Kong, 1989 – 111 mins John Woo

The start of the 1990s saw a wave of violent, spectacular and flamboyant gangster films from Hong Kong break onto Western shores. Among them was The Killer, a film that helped revitalise cult interest in East Asian action cinema, which had foundered after kung fu and Ninjas had lost some of their appeal. To the heritage of martial-arts films, films such as The Killer, A Better Tomorrow (1986) and Hard Boiled (1992) added highoctane, hyperbolic violence and dense webs of intertextual associations, against a background of urban anxiety and Triad intrigue. Because of the focus on values such as redemption, duty and honour, the wave became known as the ‘heroic bloodshed cycle’. What sets The Killer apart from the rest of the wave is its spirituality, or, rather, its obsession with the Catholic cult of the Holy Virgin Mary. The first line in the film asks: ‘Do you believe in God?’ ‘No’, answers protagonist Ah Jong (Chow Yun Fat, he’s called John or Jeff in some subtitled versions). But the film’s emphasis on metaphors of the sacred and the sacrificial suggests otherwise. Ah Jong is a gun-for-hire with a conscience. After accidentally wounding an innocent young woman during a bloody shootout (she is blinded by a blast from his gun), he decides to use his earnings from one more hit to pay for her eye operation. Initially, his plan is obstructed by rogue cop Li (Danny Lee), but after a while the two men find themselves fighting for a shared cause. A standoff ensues when Ah Jong and Li face the united forces of the local Triad gang, in a church adorned with hundreds of flickering candles and fluttering white doves, underneath an ornate Virgin Mary idol – which actually explodes onto the camera. Ah Jong dies a martyr’s death (his eyes are shot out), but Li avenges his ‘unusual’ friend. As David Bordwell (2000) notes, The Killer won local acclaim and boasted good box-office figures. But it was its overseas success in the 1990s, partly at festivals but mostly as a rental videotape, that really made its cult reputation. The main reason for that appeal lay with the film’s kinetic, elaborately choreographed ballets of bullets, and the virtuoso camerawork that freely mixes styles (from wide angle to telephoto, from extreme close-up to bird’s eye view to slow motion to cranked-up shots within seconds). Next to that appreciation for visual excess, however, international fans also seized upon The Killer’s subtexts of masculinity and faith, and turned those into rationales for what Jinsoo An (2001) calls a ‘pleasurable misreading’ of the film as ‘mass camp’. One element from the film that facilitates this interpretation is the melodramatic tone of the relationship between Ah Jong and Li, and the elaborate ways in which they constantly talk about their ‘friendship’: they shower each other with compliments and utterances of respect, when duelling they point their guns close to the other’s body (dangerously and suggestively close), and they also give each other insinuating nicknames (depending on the subtitling region, they go by Dumbo and Mickey Mouse, or, more tellingly, Butthead and Numbnutts).

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DIRECTOR John Woo PRODUCER Tsui Hark WRITER John Woo ART DIRECTION Man-Wah Luk EDITING Fan Kung Ming ORIGINAL MUSIC Lowell Lo PRINCIPAL CAST Chow Yun Fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Kong Chu, Kenneth Chang

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It did not take fans long to see the cop and the killer’s fondness for each other as a queer subtext – an impression that the drawn-out finale reinforces. ‘Designed to make men cry’, said one critic about the ending. In addition to the overt religious symbols,

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this covert homoeroticism equips the term ‘heroic bloodshed’ with a potential new meaning that allows for endless speculation – the kind upon which film cults thrive. EM

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Lady Terminator (Pembalasan ratu pantai selatan) Indonesia, 1988 – 82 mins H. Tjut Djalil (aka Jalil Jackson)

Despite its rich tradition of mythical adventure, zombie, kung fu, cannibal and women-in-prison cycles, discussions of Indonesian cult cinema have frequently been sidelined by the frenzied theoretical search for more ‘legitimate’ traditions of so-called Asia extreme. In particular, some critics have argued that the Indonesian exploitation melange of American, Hong Kong and Eurotrash influences represents a hybrid that defies any stable notion of national cinema. It took the publication of Pete Tombs’s influential volume Mondo Macabro in 1998, to ignite a more sustained interest in the colourful and often uncategorised genres that constitute the Indonesian cult experience. As Tombs (and more recent authors such as Ekky Imanjaya [2010]) have argued, Indonesian film is in essence a contradictory format, which fuses an appeal to international cinema trends with an examination of more localised myth and tradition. On first appearance, some of the most celebrated titles to appear from the peak period of Indonesian trash cinema that lasted from the 1970s to the early 90s do betray a clear debt to pre-existing international hits. For instance, Jopi Burnama’s 1986 Indonesian actioner The Intruder features the mullet-headed hardman Rambu (played by Aussie cult icon Peter O’Brian), which does little to disguise its illegitimate affiliation to the Sylvester Stallone movie in circulation at the same time. However, closer analysis of the film, which depicts the lone vigilante taking on the aptly named ‘Mr White’ (who is guilty of pimping out local maidens), indicates the fact that more localised themes of colonial abuse underpin the narrative. Appearing at the tail-end of the Indonesian cult boom, Lady Terminator is another film that negotiates its international emulation with a more regional twist. With its theme of a near-indestructible cyborg-like figure wreaking havoc across a neon-lit urban landscape, the film bears more than a passing resemblance to James Cameron’s 1984 sci-fi hit The Terminator. As with other Indonesian movies of this era, Djalil’s film even reproduces key scenes from the Cameron movie, including carnage in a downtown disco and a massacre in a police station when the indestructible aggressor takes on an army of law enforcers to reach the female prey. However, both the title of Djalil’s movie, as well as its narrative prologue, which outlines the Indonesian myth of the sexually voracious South Sea Queen, suggest that Lady Terminator is exploring a different set of gender and cultural dynamics from the American template. The film begins by demonstrating the castrative powers of the South Sea Queen, who is initially seen emasculating her male victims at the point of orgasm: ‘Is there any man who can satisfy me?’ she croons to the female attendants of her boudoir. At this point, a mysterious (and distinctly European-looking) suitor appears and tricks her into revealing the basis of her mystical power in a fit of sexual excitement. The dark Queen lays a curse on the female decedents of her male victor, which becomes actualised in the present-tense setting that makes up the bulk of the narrative. Here, the naive American researcher Tania Wilson (Barbara Anne Constable) 132

DIRECTOR H. Tjut Djalil PRODUCER Mac Muller, Raam Soraya WRITER Karr Kruinowz CINEMATOGRAPHY Chuchu Sueja EDITING Karr Kruinowz ORIGINAL MUSIC Toicky Brothers PRINCIPAL CAST Peter O’Brian, Barbara Ann Constable, Claudia Angelique Rademaker

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

becomes infected with the evil spirit of the Queen, having researched the ancient myth for her thesis. Decked out in ‘Arnie-style’ leathers, Constable’s character then goes on the trail of Erica (Claudia Angelique Rademaker), the last living female relative of the South Sea Queen’s assassin, who is easily identifiable courtesy of her status as a teen pop performer. In the course of her attempts to kill Erica, the Lady Terminator leaves a trail of castrated male corpses and bullet-riddled bodies that neither the Jakarta police force nor the local military have been able to prevent. It is only when Erica heeds the advice of a traditional Indonesian mystic and punctures Lady Terminator with a ceremonial dagger, that her putrid and possessed female body is dispatched.

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With its theme of an irresponsible Westerner who rejects Indonesian traditions only to provoke chaos, it is clear that Lady Terminator plays well with local commentaries about colonial invaders and outsiders disrespecting national values. As Constable’s character unwisely comments after locals warn her of the South Sea Queen’s power: ‘C’mon, I’m an anthropologist!’ As well as displaying a distinctly nationalistic tone amid its scenes of carnage, the nature of Wilson’s possession, whereby a serpent penetrates her vagina, rendering her both sexually charged and indestructible, also reproduces Indonesian beliefs surrounding the abject potential of the female body, which also run through a number of these narratives. XM

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The Lord of the Rings US, 2001–3 – 178 + 179 + 201 mins Peter Jackson

The Lord of the Rings trilogy has, together with Star Wars, made blockbusters acceptable as cult cinema. The Rings trilogy received some criticism for being aimed at an indiscriminate audience, a viewership for whom the utopian and ecotopian ideals that are at stake in the story might not immediately mean much. But, unlike Star Wars, it was never dismissed as infantile. Its commitment was never doubted, secured as it was by the built-in cult following of the literary original, weathered by decades of abuse from high-minded intellectuals and taste guardians. It is easy to see why Rings initially became a cult. The original books by J. R. R. Tolkien describe a mythical world before history, when nature and culture have the capacity to unite organically, and magic abounds. In that world, wandering humans, wizards, elves, Hobbits, and other creatures, resist ‘dark’ forces that have temporarily upset that ‘pure’ balance. A fellowship of chosen ones sets out on a quest to restore the rights and freedoms of ‘little people’ and oppose the restrictive powers of invisible rulers and their mighty machinery. Under the leadership of unlikely hero Frodo (Elijah Wood), the heroes destroy the ring of evil in order to save the world, but the cost of victory is so great that it leaves a sense of loss – of a pure past, in one word: nostalgia. The books had first become a cult phenomenon in the second half of the 1960s, especially through the counterculture of the time, as allegories for civil resistance against corporate bureaucracies. For the films, new comparisons emerged. Some significant dialogue was replaced by martialarts action, ‘Wizard-fu’, as one critic called it. Literary elaborations were replaced by spectacular travelogues (flights across mountain ranges, or descents into gorges filled with fire). The magisterial special effects became a pivotal point of reference. Still, fans kept some of the political subversion intact: the story’s attention to deformations of the ‘normal’ human body was seen by some as reflective of our world’s obsession with ‘whiteness’ and ‘foreignness’. And one online viral picture of US President George W. Bush carrying the ring of evil simply said: ‘Frodo has Failed.’ At least as interesting as the countercultural appeal of Rings is the following the trilogy received because it was such an oversized phenomenon. A long production period (complete with excesses such as the lengthening of airport runways for the private jets of studio executives) was followed by almost a year of heightened anticipation that saw widespread speculations about the kind of ‘monster’ the enterprise would spawn. There were rumours about the risks of a project of this scale, and questions about the robustness of a relatively inexperienced crew – most prominently about the New Zealand production infrastructure and the director, former splatter-king Peter Jackson (Hobbit-like in his posture and demeanour). It was described as a ‘gargantuan bash’ that would be ‘fitting for an obese junk food generation’. The Village Voice added: ‘Hype easily self-assassinates, but LOTR may be immune to excess […]. Because of its extra-cinematic life, it can’t escape being a monument to its own built-in cult, which is roughly the size of humanity’. On the eve of the 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Peter Jackson PRODUCER Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson, Barrie M. Osborne, Jamie Selkirk, Robert Shaye WRITER Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens (books: J. R. R. Tolkien) CINEMATOGRAPHY Andrew Lesnie EDITING Jamie Selkirk ORIGINAL MUSIC Howard Shore PRINCIPAL CAST Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, Sean Astin, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Ian Holm, Sean Bean, Cate Blanchett, John-Rhys Davies, Andy Serkis, Hugo Weaving

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premiere, the ‘sustained saturation’ of media attention that had been achieved was virtually unparalleled. Given this antagonism – not atypical for blockbusters – the decision of production company New Line Cinema to offer up distribution territory by territory, and to rely heavily on its decade-long expertise of marketing niche materials (Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984–2012 the films of John Waters, the 1960s re-release of Reefer Madness* and the 1970s distribution of Night of the Living Dead* and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre*) was a stroke of genius. It enabled myriads of ‘local’ stories to emerge that countered the impression of Rings as a prefabricated form of pleasure, and it kept alive the idea that this was a ‘pure’ and ‘true’ niche experience. Upon release, the Rings films became a massive success, one of the highest-grossing franchises of all time. For some this was proof that its niche was now no longer a marginal position ‘but a formative force in the cultural imagination of our times’. Geek-fantasy fandom, once a subculture, now applied to the masses. Does this mean that the Rings cult had graduated into culture? Its massive audience was still characterised by pockets of cultism. A worldwide study of the Rings audiences uncovered huge differences in how the films were experienced by veteran fans, ‘lonely epic males’ (who came to see it for the vertiginous experience of visual excess), senior and mature

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fans, collectives of repeat viewers (who wanted to experience the film with different groups of like-minded fellows), and, importantly crossgenerational family visits (veteran fans bonding with their children over a shared nostalgia). In the period since, the Rings cult has broadened. Fan fiction, burgeoning well before the films’ release, intensified. Fan gatherings, conventions and midnight reruns sprang up. A significant amount of homoerotic fan fiction appeared adding new subtext to the films. Soft-porn parodies crept in too, most notably Lord of the G-Strings: The Femaleship of the String (2002). Musical genres such as heavy metal and symphonic rock, which had once embraced Rings as part of a subculture, attracted renewed interest, as did role-playing game societies. The most deeply immersed cult of Rings, however, occurred in the home-viewing environment, where the combined length of the three films’ extended editions (well over twelve hours) proved to be a ‘test of endurance and loyalty’ against which hierarchies in fandom could be debated. The bonus materials and extras on the DVDs added numerous more hours as well as an ambiguity about the franchise’s ‘final moment’. Which was the definitive version? The trilogy itself does not seem to know. Perhaps this multiplicity and circular endlessness, more than anything else, explains best the cult of the Rings. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior Australia, 1981 – 95 mins George Miller

Until the 1970s, films about cars and roads tended to be naive celebrations of a utopian freedom produced by wheels and wide spaces. Then came road movies such as Two-Lane Blacktop* and Duel (1971). They preserved a cool mystique about the open road, but abandoned the innocence in favour of moral ambiguity. By the 80s, the car had become an evil murder weapon, no longer a passport to liberty but rather an instrument of the disintegration of culture, the nominated vehicle for a descent into hell. At the brink of that change stands The Road Warrior. As its full title indicates, Road Warrior is a sequel to Mad Max (1979). The difference between the two films is worth a pause: in Mad Max, as in most previous road movies, there was a concept of justice against which an outlaw in a car could rebel; a concept that would prevent excesses and avert escalations. That concept is absent in Road Warrior. There is no order, not even some vigilante justice from other outlaws in cars. The film opens with an apocalyptic account of the end of civilisation, brought about by a global war over oil that has pushed the world into what the voiceover calls ‘a maelstrom of decay’. It is followed by a short visual summary of the plight of Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson in an image-defining role). Max is a desperate man who ‘wanders out into the wasteland’. Most of the story is devoted to the transformation of the cynical, mercenary Max into a godlike figure, a change he achieves when he saves a tribe of settlers (and their precious fuel) from a militia of savage, rapist marauders. Ultimately, the shelled out, hurt Max himself is left abandoned, a drifter in the desert, never heard from again. Road Warrior became a phenomenal success. Audiences were impressed with the high-octane action scenes. The ultimate chase-cum-siege of an armoured tanker truck by a wild variety of rogue vehicles remains unparalleled. The look of the film also attracted admiration. Road Warrior is mostly set amid dust, sand and dirt roads in a barren landscape under a blazing sun. To this post-apocalyptic atmosphere is added a cast of muscle cars adorned with skulls and corpses and punk-cyborg characters outfitted in bondage leather, chains, bandanas and tribal wear. The most colourful are the mohawked and feathered villain Wez (Vernon Wells), who burns with rage after his male lover is killed, and the marauders’ leader, the Humungus (Kjell Nillson), a facially deformed body builder in tight, leather wrestling shorts and a hockey mask (a bit like Jason Voorhees in leather underpants). The Humungus is a true Satan – a metaphor reinforced by the scene in which we see him preside over a ritualised torture scene. According to Barry Keith Grant (1991), the look of Road Warrior and its numerous moments of abject and comic-book violence (one of which dutifully includes a rabbit), are signs of what he calls its stylistic transgression. It sets the film apart from all other road movies, and it invites speculation on its Otherness – an Otherness that leads fans to discuss at length the kinds of cars used in the film, the appeal of the characters for the ‘no wave’ punk subculture (inspiring bands such as Anti-Nowhere League and GBH). 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR George Miller PRODUCER Byron Kennedy WRITER Terry Hayes, George Miller, Brian Hannant CINEMATOGRAPHY Dean Semler COSTUME DESIGN Norma Moriceau STUNT COORDINATOR Max Aspin EDITING David Stiven, Tim Wellburn, Michael Chirgwin ORIGINAL MUSIC Brian May PRINCIPAL CAST Mel Gibson, Bruce Spence, Vernon Wells, Kjell Nillson, Emil Minty, Michael Preston, Max Phipps

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The cult of Road Warrior also got caught up in a wave of global fan enthusiasm for Ozploitation, Australian genre cult films of the 1970s and 80s. As Adrian Martin (2010) observes, there is general agreement that the ‘powerful aura of the cult film halo’ of

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Ozploitation shines positively on films such as Road Warrior. In fact, Road Warrior could well be seen as the culmination of this wave, the moment where it breaks out of its confines and becomes a phenomenon in ‘savage taste’. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Man Bites Dog (C’est arrivé près de chez vous) Belgium, 1992 – 94 mins Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde

A film about a jovial and opinionated bon-vivant serial killer that clashes with expectations and meshes notions of goodness and badness is a ticket to cult. To give such a story the format of a black-and-white, vérité mockumentary – in which a camera crew following this man becomes complicit in his crimes as it adopts his values, is certain to stir controversy. The film, and the camera crew, follow the daily life of Ben (Benoît Poelvoorde), a gun-for-hire who specialises in small assignments: his victims are the elderly, the poor, labourers and immigrants. At first, the film asks us to side with Ben. Occupation aside, he appears an ordinary, self-employed man with perhaps too many individual ideas about how the world should be run, and some awkward aspects to his populist opinions (about race, architecture, religion, age, art, gender), but by and large he seems likeable, funny even. He is generous to his family, his parents and to the camera crew. Within the limits of his profession he even seems somewhat of a working-class hero-cum-modern Robin Hood. Gradually, however, the documentary crew’s condoning of Ben’s actions morphs into dependency. As Ben becomes more audacious in his endeavours, the crew members willingly go along. They help dispose of bodies, and they accept financial support from Ben. One particularly nasty and graphic scene in which Ben and the crew, terribly drunk, invade a house, rape a woman and kill both her and her husband shockingly signals to viewers that Man Bites Dog is no longer a funny movie – it has become a full-fledged horror film. The violence no longer casual, everything spirals out of control. Man Bites Dog came out of nowhere and caused a storm at the Cannes film festival in 1992. Its collective of directors-writers-actors was only just out of film school when the film premiered. The day of the screening there was an unexpected buzz, partially thanks to a controversial poster (depicting Ben executing a baby). Little scuffles broke out among viewers eager to see what was suddenly rumoured to be a blast of provocation. Quentin Tarantino, in Cannes to sell Reservoir Dogs, was among the troublemakers. He also became a staunch defender of the film, which attracted highly diverse reactions. ‘Some called it gore cult, others a reflection on cinema’, reflected co-director André Bonzel, on Man Bites Dog’s critics. ‘I think that’s good!’ By the time Man Bites Dog was released in the UK and the US in 1994, it had become associated with ‘la nouvelle violence’, a term that grouped together films such as True Romance (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), Killing Zoe (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), which approached cinematic violence as an aesthetic in its own right, void of morals, served with a dose of irony. Like these ‘cool’ films, Man Bites Dog is savvy, filled with allusions to popular culture – for example, a running gag that sees the sound recorder of the crew die, and his replacements perish as well, is a knowing nod to the ‘exploding drummer’ gag in This Is Spın¨al Tap*. It did not take long for Man Bites Dog to develop a strong fan following, one articulation of which was the release of elaborate DVD editions on the Tartan and Criterion labels. The film’s exceptional 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde PRODUCER Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde WRITER Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde EDITING Eric Dardill, Rémy Belvaux PRINCIPAL CAST Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, Benoît Poelvoorde

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aesthetics, a combination of dynamic editing and stark realism, supported by handheld camerawork and direct sound, helped sustain a quasi-marginal, edgy reputation. Unlike some other films of the niche it was brought under, it never looked glossy. That too helped to position it as more ‘critical’ in its commentary on contemporary society. The fact that, with the exception of

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Poelvoorde, the film’s makers remained relatively anonymous and did not move on to bigger projects further ensured its cult status. In that respect, fans often point out that Belvaux, who later committed suicide, recorded one other remarkable feat in his short career: in 1998, as part of a soft-anarchist collective, he threw a pie in the face of Bill Gates. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Manos, the Hands of Fate US, 1966 – 74 mins Harold P. Warren According to J. Hoberman (1980), films can be bad because they depict immoral actions, because they are poorly made or because they constitute a bad experience for the audience. Originally, the cult of a bad film referred mostly to moral badness – the challenge of social norms and values. But at the beginning of the 1980s, bad movies became a cult topic because the bad viewing experience was turned into a form of ironic entertainment. This turn was celebrated in books such as The Golden Turkey Awards. The effect was that these films became ‘so bad they’re good’. Within a few years, a canon of ‘badfilms’, as they were called, developed. Plan 9 from Outer Space* and Manos top that canon. Contrary to many badfilms, Manos actually deals with cultism. The story revolves around a family (husband, wife, young daughter) on a holiday trip. They are stranded and have to spend the night at a mysterious house. A crippled satyr, Torgo (John Reynolds), welcomes them. The property belongs to a group of worshippers led by a ‘Master’ (Tom Neyman) and his many ‘wives’. Members idolise ‘Manos’, a god to whom they sacrifice humans by manually tearing them to pieces. But as the group prepares to prey on the family, the Master’s female followers bicker over whether they should sacrifice the child too, a dispute they settle through a lengthy wrestle in the sand. In the end, the family succumbs to the Master’s powers. As a new group of stranded holidaymakers visit the house, the now converted husband welcomes them. The set-up puts Manos in a tradition of horror tales that stretched through most of the 1960s and 70s: that of the modern family lost in rural hell – in a way that makes Manos a successor to Blood Feast (1963) and a predecessor of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre*. The film certainly exudes the same sense of freedom in film-making, freshly discovered in 60s independent and exploitation film. Unfortunately, however, Manos is so poorly made that it disqualifies itself from any favourable comparisons. It has the aesthetics of an 8mm home movie: there are plenty of ‘dead’ moments in which the actors just appear to be waiting for direction, in randomly framed shots that are stitched together through jarring, illogical editing. In the absence of direct sound, the film offers some of the most horribly dubbed ambience, stock music fragments, and poorly delivered lines of dialogue ever (many of which are repeated because there just seems to be nothing else to say). After an embarrassing local release, Manos disappeared into obscurity. As part of the cult interest in badfilm it resurfaced on video in the 80s. Its full recovery occurred in the early 90s, through the American television show Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988–99) (MST3K). The film’s broadcast was accompanied by riffing, a process whereby the silhouettes of a man and two robots are superimposed at the bottom of the screen and provide running commentary on the action – essentially a gimmick indicative of ironic audience celebration. Manos proved such a hit that Torgo became a recurring character in the show. The film has since been subjected to several other ironic homages. It is in these reworkings that the real value of Manos lies. Because of its failures, the film makes no demands of its audiences. Quite the opposite: it empowers and liberates viewers. Manos lets its fans make the film what they want it to be. EM 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Harold P. Warren PRODUCER Harold P. Warren WRITER Harold P. Warren ORIGINAL MUSIC Russ Huddleston, Robert Smith, Jr PRINCIPAL CAST Tom Neyman, John Reynolds, Diane Mahree, Hal Warren, Stephanie Nielson, Sherry Proctor, Robin Redd, Jackie Neyman

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The Masque of the Red Death US, 1964 – 89 mins Roger Corman

Without doubt, the output of Roger Corman constitutes a central core to this volume of 100 Cult Films. In an unparalleled career as both a director, producer and talent scout, Corman pioneered a plethora of postwar American B-movie genres that frequently fused the pulp with the political, as well as demonstrating a distinctly Experimental style in the frenzied productions that he oversaw. Some of Corman’s most celebrated titles from the 1950s and 60s included A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), The Wild Angels (1966), The Trip (1967) and Bloody Mama (1970). With these films he cultivated a catalogue of cult genres ignored by mainstream Hollywood, but craved by drivein, youth markets and subcultural audiences. And by producing pulp productions destined for nonmainstream markets, Corman’s films frequently demonstrated a distinctly un-Hollywood progressiveness to issues of gender, sexuality and race. Thus, although he was often dubbed the ‘King of the Bs’, this title does not do justice to the social awareness, creative flair and technical skill common to Corman’s films. For instance, his 1961 race drama, The Intruder, dealt with the politically explosive issue of Southern racial integration. Although The Intruder was initially shunned at the time of its release, critical acclaim for Corman arrived in the Gothic guise of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations that he directed for American International Pictures. These included The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964), all of which created a classic pairing between Corman and legendary horror lead Vincent Price. In many respects, The Masque of the Red Death represents the pinnacle of this Corman/Price pairing, with the actor delivering a numbingly nihilistic portrayal of Prince Prospero, the sadistic black-arts follower who presides over a castle defined by wanton female sexuality and cruel erotica (perfectly presented by Hazel Court’s performance as Juliana) and implied paedophilia (as represented by Patrick Magee’s portrayal of Alfredo). When Prospero discovers a deadly red-death infestation has erupted in one of his governed villages, he saves the young naive Francesca (Jane Asher) from the plague as a future conquest, while also subjecting her lover Gino (David Weston) to both the tortures and indignities of his public court. Only when the plague erupts into Prospero’s climactic masked ball are Francesca and Gino able to escape, while the infected bodies of the perverse court rise up to reclaim the body of their dark prince. As a film-maker who has in interviews openly defined himself as a ‘neo-Freudian director’, it comes as little surprise to find that Corman’s rendition of The Masque of the Red Death is dominated by a transgressive air of unbridled libido, with perversion straining at the seams of every laced corset. Thus, when Prospero begs his decadent guests to ‘act according to your natures’, the assembled party instantly reverts to animalistic swine and insect gestures, befitting the regime of regression over which Price’s character presides. As Corman 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Roger Corman PRODUCER Roger Corman WRITER Charles Beaumont, R. Wright Campbell, Edgar Allan Poe CINEMATOGRAPHY Nicolas Roeg EDITING Ann Chegwidden ORIGINAL MUSIC David Lee PRINCIPAL CAST Vincent Price, Hazel Court, Patrick Magee, Jane Asher, David Weston

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has said of the source material he adapted for this narrative: ‘I believe that Edgar Allan Poe was working slightly ahead of Freud with the unconscious mind, and I took great pleasure in working with his stories … and interpreting them from a Freudian standpoint.’ Beyond its startling psychosexual themes, this Poe adaptation was also marked by a striking visual look (realised by future arthouse great Nicolas Roeg), which paints Prospero’s palace in a range of vivid colours befitting the differing dark emotions inspired by the locale. These stylistic flourishes are particularly marked in a psychedelic dream sequence in which Hazel Court’s character imagines her body being inducted into Satan’s harem, which Roeg conveys via a series of tinted and distorted film frames. While releases such as The Masque of the Red Death underscore Corman’s desire to reinvent the American exploitation movie as a legitimate cinematic art form, his 1970s work as producer

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and movie mogul confirmed him as a pioneer of major new film genres and talent. As head of New World Pictures, he created many of the genres and cycles popular with American youth audiences at the time. By virtue of these genres, Corman also cultivated a wealth of acting and directing talent, all of whom went onto stellar stardom in more mainstream productions. The awe-inspiring A-list of Hollywood acting talent who got their career breaks on Corman cult fare included: Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern. Roger Corman also offered early directorial roles to leading Hollywood legends, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron and Jonathan Kaplan. Even today, at the tender age of eighty-five, Roger Corman remains active, recently producing the click-to-kill TV series Splatter (2009) for former protégé Joe Dante. XM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Monty Python and the Holy Grail UK, 1975 – 91 mins Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

The early 1970s saw a cycle of spoofs, or intertextual, ironic and self-reflexive satires and parodies, garner cult receptions. Specifically, these spoofs targeted film genres that had already attracted cult followings. In that sense they were among the first meta-cult films. Examples include Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974), Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) and Play It Again Sam (1972), and of course The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Amid these films one British effort stands out: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the first full film of the comedy troupe Monty Python, which had already established a cult reputation through a television show (Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1969–74) and a feature-length anthology of routines (And Now for Something Completely Different, 1971). Holy Grail is a parody of the sword-epic and the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and their quest for the Holy Grail. In the loose, sketch-like treatment of the Pythons, Arthur and his knights are a motley lot, less interested in heroic bravery than in self-mythologising their petty deeds into myth – Lancelot (John Cleese) calls it being ‘right to their idiom’. Yet they cower when confronted with the slightest adversity, even if it comes in the form of a cute, little rabbit with ‘a vicious streak a mile wide’. Rabbits are a recurrent image in the film – in that sense Holy Grail follows a trope that runs through the history of cult film. With its focus on idolatry, Holy Grail interrogates motifs dear to cultists, such as mythology, and the rewriting of history via popular media. In passing, the film also takes aim at fairytales, syndico-anarchism, the religious film, nunsploitation films and the documentary genre. Throughout, there are moments of surrealist humour and instances of abject messiness and violence, such as blood squirting from severed limbs, or decaying bodies piled in mud (the ‘Bring out your dead’ segment is particularly Boschian). Above all, Holy Grail is wickedly funny; neither vulgar nor sophisticated, but hilarious in its endless trivial arguments. An instant cult success upon its release, Holy Grail gradually fine-tuned its status through television broadcasts and occasional theatrical reruns. If we separate the cult following for Terry Gilliam from its current reputation, it appeals mostly to a youthful audience, and that is where its main value lies. For many of its young viewers, it represents a first taste of the joys of ritualised repeat-viewing and audience participation, mostly through aping lines. Numerous lines from the film have entered popular consciousness, be they lengthy speculations over a swallow’s airspeed velocity (‘African or European?’), or mentions of ‘nostrils raped’ and French farts to the short bursts of the knights who say ‘ni!’. To some, Holy Grail is stupid and silly, to others hilarious, to others yet it is ultra-clever, and to its cult fans it is all of that – cult because of how it unhinges the very concept of humour. Today, Holy Grail still attracts crowds at midnight screenings, especially in North America and Asia, less so in Europe. Perhaps that is because satire, as well as downright silliness, is best perceived as cult when it comes from the other side of the ocean. Ask Jerry Lewis. EM 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam PRODUCER Michael White, Mark Forstater, John Goldstone WRITER Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, CINEMATOGRAPHY Terry Bedford EDITING John Mister PRINCIPAL CASt Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Connie Booth

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Near Dark US, 1987 – 94 mins Kathryn Bigelow

Shatteringly romantic and tough as nails, Near Dark is the cult film that embodies brilliantly the ambivalence and hybridity that was a trademark of the 1980s. Near Dark is so rife with internal contradictions, it doesn’t even seem to agree with the distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that its own narrative draws. The story is straightforward enough. Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) and his family encounter a rogue band of vampires. Caleb is bitten and initiated into vampirism by the band, whose members protect him but still see him as an outsider – especially when he refuses to hunt with them. However, when they threaten to also initiate his sister Sarah (Marcie Leeds), Caleb and Mae (Jenny Wright), the vampire girl who loves him, rebel. In the end, Caleb and Mae are ‘cured’ of their vampirism through a blood transfusion. Aesthetically, Near Dark is nowhere near straightforward. It is a mix of two solidly formulaic genres, the Western and the vampire film. But though it has the characters of a vampire film, and the hats and horses and desolate deserts of the Western, its overall atmosphere of desperate, lower-class America (pitched perfectly via slurred lines such as ‘you look like forty miles of rough road’) is pulled equally from post-road-movie films such as Paris, Texas (1984) and The Hitcher (1986), the latter a film by the same writer, Eric Red. The music veers from punky rock (the Cramps) to synth-pop (Tangerine Dream). On top of that, Near Dark switches between existentialist punk nihilism (exemplified by clothing and accessories, which reference, for instance, William Burroughs) and intimate and passionate moments of deep caring – caring against all odds as it were. Thematically too, Near Dark is a mess. There are too many subtexts, and the film seems unable to choose between them. The vampires are obnoxious one moment and cool the next. In a sense they are portrayed like Native Americans in revisionist Westerns, or like gay men in more contemporary films: a loyal and admirable community that is all the same abject and objectionable. Near Dark is also a politically volatile film. Is it a reflection of Reaganite rhetoric, or a critique of conservative ‘family-first’ propaganda? The hardly disguised AIDS reference, which the blood-transfusion cure and numerous metaphors of ‘bloodsucking’ push to the foreground, also remains politically murky. The unevenness and roughness of Near Dark roused critical debate, and its disrespect for genre conventions gave it a vocal fanbase. Because a substantial chunk of the love for the film is dispersed across the globe some of the cult status of Near Dark benefits from so-called ‘webbed appreciation’. The long-term reception of the film has certainly been helped by the fact that Bigelow’s debut, biker film The Loveless (1982), and the three films she made after Near Dark, feminist cop thriller Blue Steel (1990), Zen-macho surf-gangster extravaganza Point Break (1991), and virtual-reality sci-fi noir Strange Days (1995), all have committed followings that continuously draw comparisons with Near Dark. Bigelow’s cult reputation has further been informed by persistent references to her background as a painter, a scholar and a feminist. A lot of the fandom inspired by Bigelow is also tied up in the following for her former partner James Cameron (his film 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Kathryn Bigelow PRODUCER Stephen-Charles Jaffe, Eric Red, Edward S. Feldman, Charles R. Meeker WRITER Kathryn Bigelow, Eric Red CINEMATOGRAPHY Adam Greenberg EDITING Howard Smith ORIGINAL MUSIC Tangerine Dream PRINCIPAL CAST Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein, Tim Thomerson, Joshua John Miller

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Aliens, 1986 is displayed on a marquee board in the film). In short, the ambivalence of the Near Dark cult is not limited to the film itself – it is equally affected by its reputation in a consistently cultified oeuvre. Yet even without the myriad connections to the rest of Bigelow’s oeuvre, Near Dark remains a firm cult favourite. More than

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twenty years after its original release the film still tours regularly in cinemas and on the convention circuit – with cast reunions (especially of the vampires: Paxton, Henriksen, Goldstein), cosplay parties and make-up contests of the vampire families attracting hundreds of enthusiastic fans. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Nekromantik West Germany, 1987 – 75 mins Jörg Buttgereit

Rob Schmadtke (Bernd Daktari Lorenz), a masochistic loner, divides his time between his profession as a refuse collector for ‘Joe’s Street Cleaning Agency’, and the domestic life he shares with his devoted partner Betty (Beatrice Manowski). The only thing disrupting this otherwise blissful image of monogamous normality is the fact that Rob’s refuse role centres on him handling the human entrails and severed body parts from car wrecks and urban suicides, which he steals to present as gifts to Betty as part of their twisted sexual games. When one poor unfortunate is found floating in the river after having been accidentally killed while picking fruit, Rob takes the rotting corpse home as an erotic playmate for Betty. This initiates a perverse ménage à trois, which provides the film with some of its most iconic and outrageous scenes. Here, in a parody of the safe-sex campaigns common during the era, Buttgereit shows the decadent couple wrapping a condom over a wooden stake they have attached to the genital area of the corpse, so that Betty can mount the cadaver at the point of orgasm without fear of STD infection. While the introduction of this object of decomposing desire takes Betty to new heights of sexual pleasure, it ultimately alienates her from Rob, and she later absconds (with her new dead lover in tow), after the protagonist is fired from his cleaning job. Rob’s loss of both work and emotional anchors precipitates his further decline. This results in him hanging out at sleazy sex-and-slash cinemas, as well as consorting with prostitutes, one of whom he strangles to death for insulting his flagging potency. In the ultimate act of autoerotic annihilation, Rob masturbates while stabbing himself to death, expiring in a flood of blood and sexual fluids. The final image of the movie is a slow tracking shot onto his unkempt grave. This cemetery scene is suddenly disrupted by a slim, stocking-clad leg and a shovel that starts to disinter the buried protagonist’s body. This freeze-frame finale indicates that Betty has returned and that her insatiable sex quest will continue … Necrophilia meets New German Cinema, in Jörg Buttgereit’s controversial sex-after-death epic. As with the early cinema of John Waters, Nekromantik (as well as the director’s more polished 1992 sequel Nekromantik II) derive their cult status from the audacious nature of their images, which in Buttgereit’s universe centre on an unpalatable conflation between blood, semen and decomposing body parts as indexes of unwholesome desire. The film gained further controversial currency for its realistic flashback footage of a rabbit being slaughtered (an incident indicated to be at the root of Rob’s macabre fetish, shown at key points of the narrative). Such is the excess of physical torment and fleshy appendages in the director’s cinema that film theorist Linnie Blake (2004) has defined them as ‘necro-porn-horrors’. However, in her article ‘Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantiks: Things to Do in Germany with the Dead’, Blake argues that the director’s visceral works have merit beyond their shock quality, particularly in their ability to capture the sterility of post-war life. In this respect, she convincingly connects Buttgereit’s output to the New 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Jörg Buttgereit PRODUCER Manfred Jelinski WRITER Jörg Buttgereit, Franz Rodenkirchen CINEMATOGRAPHY Uwe Bohrer EDITING Jörg Buttgereit, Manfred Jelinski ORIGINAL MUSIC Herman Kopp, Bernd Daktari Lorenz, John Boy Walton PRINCIPAL CAST Bernd Daktari Lorenz, Beatrice Manowski

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German Cinema movement of the 1960s and 70s. As embodied by directors such as Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this movement sought to engage documentary and experimental film techniques to examine the alienated and desolate protagonists inhabiting the divided German landscape. This stylistic drive is reproduced not only in the distinctive pattern of Buttgereit’s visual track, which shoots its extreme murders in neo-realist style, without direct sound, but also in the experimental score that accompanies the film, which foregrounds an industrial synth sound that perfectly evokes the urban alienation of Buttgereit’s protagonists. As Blake has commented: Buttgereit’s films dwell on the existential isolation of the desiring German subject and the libidinally ambiguous re-animation of the deeply repressed historical past. As such, they present highly self-

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reflexive plays on cinema’s capacity for the dissemination and reproduction of regressive ideologies of race and gender.

Specifically, Blake sees the extreme and surreal imagery of Buttgereit’s work as evoking repressed memories that relate to Germany’s traumatic Nazi past. In this respect, it is interesting to note how a concentrationcamp iconography pervades the perverse couple’s activities. From specimen bottles and lab equipment that connote the eugenic experiments associated with National Socialism, to the preponderance of chicken wire in the couple’s domestic space that recalls policies of containment within the camps, Buttgereit’s films can be seen as working at both a visceral and political level, with his protagonists digging up both corpses and memories of the traumatic past. XM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Night of the Living Dead US, 1968 – 96 mins George A. Romero

Decried at the time of its release for its apparently unparalleled scenes of flesh eating, George A. Romero’s monochrome masterpiece is now justifiably seen as a landmark horror movie, which both launched the modern zombie genre, as well as effectively capturing the nihilistic Zeitgeist of late 1960s America. Made as an independent feature by Romero and ad-agency colleagues John A. Russo and Russell Streiner, the film concerns the fate of seven relative strangers trapped in a country farmhouse by bloodthirsty marauders, who are revealed to be a cannibalistic collective of the undead. The film’s now infamous opening initiates the themes of familial rivalry that run through the narrative, by featuring two squabbling siblings on a family visit to their father’s gravestone. This early scene immediately eschews horror conventions of the time by showing the ease with which apparently random acts of violence can break out at formative moments of narrative development. Here, the sadistic Johnny (Streiner) taunts his long-suffering sister Barbra (Judith O’Dea) over her fear of graveyards, before he is suddenly dispatched by a slow-moving male figure previously seen ambling innocently along the rear of the film frame. Before falling into a near-catatonic state, Barbra manages to scramble to a local deserted farmhouse, where she discovers both more grisly remains, as well as Ben, the film’s main lead (played with magisterial presence by the African American actor Duane Jones). The rest of the movie deals with Ben’s attempts to shore up their building against the encroaching army of the undead and to quell the conflict arising between himself and Harry Cooper (played by the film’s producer Karl Hardman), who has taken refuge in the basement of the building with his wife and injured daughter. Although memorable for the unflinchingly graphic flesh-eating scenes that occur when the infected marauders periodically reach their intended prey, these visceral inserts are relatively rare, with the majority of the running time being taken up by the tense standoff between Ben and Cooper. These frictions only abate at moments in the narrative when the besieged community breaks off from internal warring to huddle around the TV set for snippets of media misinformation on the outbreak, slyly inserted into the narrative by Romero. The documentary-style footage of rural death squads executing these undead communes that the director slices into the fiction here, effectively conveys the pervasive impact of vérité violence for an American generation watching Vietnam and race-riot footage unwind on a nightly basis at the time of the film’s release. These inserts also prefigure the film’s feelbad finale. Here, Ben, having escaped infection, the last survivor in the group, is shot in the head by the redneck cleanup squad attempting to restore order as dawn breaks. The image of Ben’s lifeless body being scooped up with meathooks and burned with the rest of the ‘contaminated’ in the film’s macabre montage outro remains one of the most evocative and unsettling sequences in horror history, as well as feeding into wider currencies of race conflict that have been read against the movie. 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR George A. Romero PRODUCER Karl Hardman, Russell Streiner WRITER John A. Russo, George A. Romero CINEMATOGRAPHY George A. Romero EDITING Brian Huckeba ORIGINAL MUSIC WRS Studio Library PRINCIPAL CAST Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea, Karl Hardman, Russell Streiner

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Although Romero has often played down some of the racial and Freudian interpretations of the movie (the latter of which were actualised with Harry Cooper’s infected daughter expelling both her parents in a highly stylised scene), he has confirmed that he intended Night of the Living Dead to be part of a trilogy commenting on contemporary American life. These aspirations were later actualised with releases such as the globally successful Dawn of the Dead* and the more muted Day of the Dead (1985), which managed to capture the anomie of emergent mall culture and the aggressive militarist tone of Reaganite America respectively. The success of Night of the Living Dead did little to quell tensions between Romero and key co-creators of the original, all of whom have been quick to claim credit for the movie’s winning formula. In particular, writer John A. Russo has attempted to spawn his own zombie career, with a series of spin-offs and tie-in movies,

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though his 1982 backwoods possession movie Midnight, did an effective job of evoking some of the race-based themes from his original Romero collaboration. Beyond these creative tensions, the success of both Night and Dawn have often dwarfed some of the other low-budget shockers created by Romero in the 1970s. These included The Crazies (1973), whose theme of a town turned into homicidal maniacs following accidental exposure to chemical agents destined for Vietnam fitted well with 70s eco fears. The later Martin (1977) is an understated vampire classic in which an alienated teen goes around slashing the wrists of Pittsburgh inhabitants while attempting to decide if he is dead or just deranged! The film’s visceral marketing kit (featuring a blood-drenched razor blade embossed with the words ‘Made in America’) seems an appropriate tagline for a director with such a canny ability to document his nation’s social ills. XM

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Pink Flamingos US, 1972 – 93 mins John Waters

Having recently secured the dubious title of the ‘Filthiest Person Alive’, perverse mother Divine (aka Babs Johnson) relocates to a new trailer-park home with her unconventional family, comprising of her oversized, pen-bound, boiled-egg obsessed mother Edie (Edith Massey), her sister Cotton (Mary Vivian Pearce) and a retarded son, aptly named Crackers (Danny Mills). Because of the notoriety that her newfound tag entails, Divine and her brood fall foul of Connie and Raymond Marble (Mink Stole/David Locharchy), a pair of pseudo-sophisticates, who wish to claim this unsavoury mantle for themselves. With their illegal activities ranging from running an adoption ring to kidnap flower-power lovelies and then forcibly impregnate them for lesbian couples, to funding both porn houses and a heroin-for-schools programme, the Marbles prove to be a comparable model of transgression for Divine and co. In order to plot the family’s downfall, the pair employ the sexual talent of Cookie (Cookie Mueller), who seduces Crackers in the family poultry shack, where the couple have sex with, and then kill, a chicken in one of the film’s most notorious scenes. Using the information Cookie has gained from this coital encounter, the Marbles attempt to disrupt the Rabelaisian feast that constitutes Divine’s birthday celebrations. This sequence conjures up all aspects of the carnivalesque as defined by writers such as Bakhtin. Here, Edie’s mock marriage to a delivery clerk (who literally feeds her boiled-egg obsession), is rewarded with an unruly feast which leaves her face and body splattered with yolky remains, while Divine herself fetishises the decaying pig’s head she has been given as a present, in a further act of excess orality. Elsewhere, Bakhtin’s concept of the world turned upside down is evoked by the dominance of desiring women, whose erotic displays are performed for the ramshackle but appreciative audience at the scene. This sexualised dynamic also informs the eruption of the lower bodily stratum, here evidenced in the anal/aural ‘performance’ of one young man able to rhythmically manipulate his anus in time to music. This pantheon of transgression is completed when the police squad that the Marbles have ordered arrives only to be hacked to pieces and then devoured by Divine and her guests in a near-erotic display of cannibalism. When the Marbles burn down Divine’s trailer-trash home in a further act of provocation, the heroine and Crackers retaliate by invading their (decidedly upmarket) home, freeing the young girls assembled there for future impregnation. Befitting the pervasive air of transgression that underpins this movie, Divine’s perverse campaign is completed when she performs oral sex on her own son in the Marbles’ family lounge. The narrative concludes with Divine organising an illegitimate trial for her former oppressors, before killing them in the presence of assembled press representatives. As the protagonist comments during the trial, ‘Filth are my politics, filth is my life!’ This mantra is confirmed by the film’s standout closing scene. Here, Divine scoops up and consumes handfuls of real dog excrement in an apparently unscripted scene, while John Waters’s direct narration confirms her status as both the filthiest person and filthiest actress in the world. 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR John Waters PRODUCER John Waters WRITER John Waters CINEMATOGRAPHY John Waters EDITING John Waters ORIGINAL MUSIC John Waters PRINCIPAL CAST Divine (Babs Johnson), Edith Massey, Mary Vivian Pearce, Danny Mills, David Locharchy, Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller

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Using the subtitle ‘An Exercise in Poor Taste’, this cult classic crystallises many of the essential features of the cult-film phenomenon. At the level of film style, the movie mixes multiple modes of movie mayhem, fusing fiction, neo-documentary and direct address to camera, while also using a distinctive 60s Americana soundtrack to noted effect. At the level of content, Pink Flamingos confirms Barry Keith Grant’s (1991) conclusion that the transgression of social and moral conventions remains at the heart of the cult movie’s appeal. If Grant is correct, then it explains the taboo-busting emphasis on transsexual desire, incest, cannibalism, obscene orality and waste matter that characterises the film. As so many obscene acts entail a regressive element linking orality and anality to familial transgression, the film retains a strong psychosexual dynamic. Equally, the fact that all of these acts oscillate around the oversized transsexual performer Divine lends an extra dimension to the essential cult cachet

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of the production: namely, a perverse persona whose features parody the qualities associated with mainstream star image. Finally, as with The Rocky Horror Picture Show*, John Waters’s film garnered a reputation from the subcultural audiences it attracted on the North American midnight-movie circuit of the 1970s. Although Pink Flamingos remains the standout cult production of Waters’s career, it can also be fruitfully linked to underground productions that the director completed with his stock company of Dreamlander performers during this era. Other related productions here included Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970) and Female Trouble (1974), which shared the same transgressive edge as Flamingos. In more recent years, Waters has moved from the margins to the mainstream, though managed to infuse his kitsch and offcentre sensibilities to Hollywood fare such as Polyester (1981) and Hairspray (1988). XM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Piranha US, 1978 – 94 mins Joe Dante

As with many cult auteurs of his generation, Joe Dante began his career in film criticism, before graduating to film production in 1974 as an editing intern at Roger Corman’s New World studios. Here, he was responsible for the creation of a series of exploitation trailers for New World products, as well as taking a codirectorial role on the influential B-movie parody Hollywood Boulevard (1976). In 1978, Dante directed his first solo film for Corman: the ferociously fast-paced and full-on feature that was Piranha. Featuring a script co-written by indie icon John Sayles as well as cameos from Corman stable-mates such as Dick Miller, Piranha became one of New World’s biggest hits to date. In the movie, Heather Menzies is cast as Maggie McKeown, the rookie insurance investigator hired to find the pair of missing teens who had been horribly mutilated in an isolated rural pool in the film’s opening scene. Her investigation brings her into contact with the wonderfully understated Bradford Dillman, who is cast as the local drunk-cum-cynical guide Paul Grogan. When the pair discover the abandoned military site where the teenagers disappeared, McKeown unwisely drains the pool, hoping to find evidence of wrongdoing at the plant. It takes the sudden intervention of genre stalwart Kevin McCarthy to reveal that the abandoned plant had in fact hosted a former military experiment to engineer an indestructible breed of underwater fish to help the fight against Communist forces in Vietnam. With the deadly strain of fish released onto an unsuspecting American populace at a summer camp, Dillman and Menzies face a desperate race against time to warn the residents of the danger. Although dismissed by some critics for its similarity to Jaws (1975), Dante’s film actually generated a whole series of fishy rip-offs, including the unofficial sequel Piranha II: The Spawning (James Cameron, 1981) and Antonio Margheriti’s Killer Fish (1979). As well as constituting an influential cult template, Piranha also evidenced features that would dominate other Dante classics: namely a self-reflexive savagery linking physical alteration to previous cult and B-movie traditions, as well as a distinctly left-leaning message critiquing both the American military and commercial power elites. The latter stance can be identified by the fact that, when a military and scientific team turn up, their priority is to cover up the piranha outbreak rather than warn the locals who make up the bait in the film’s final waterside massacre. While Piranha demonstrated Dante’s fusion of political commentary with horror-comedy motifs, the film also showcased impressive SFX, which the director would also develop in his later career. For instance, Dante’s pioneering attention to the specifics of monstrous transition led to new heights of corporeal excess in 1981, with his influential lycanthrope blockbuster The Howling. The film (which featured state-of-the-art SFX by Rick Baker), is now cited as one of the most successful werewolf films ever made, and its combination of gross-out moments and in-movie humour propelled Dante to mainstream attention. Having worked on Steven Spielberg’s Twilight Zone in 1984, he redefined the parameters of the American home-invasion movie 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Joe Dante PRODUCER Roger Corman WRITER Richard Robinson, John Sayles CINEMATOGRAPHY Jamie Anderson EDITING Joe Dante, Mark Goldblatt ORIGINAL MUSIC Pino Donaggio PRINCIPAL CAST Heather Menzies, Bradford Dillman, Kevin McCarthy, Barbara Steele

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with Gremlins (1984), whose doubly coded appeal to the kidult and critically attuned led to the film grossing $200 million worldwide. The success of the film (and its 1990 sequel Gremlins: The Next Batch), confirmed Dante as a Hollywood player able to combine blockbuster appeal with satirical and subversive content. Indeed, while many countercultural cult icons have been marginalised and maligned by the increasingly corporate structures of the Hollywood machine, Dante’s mainstream movies have retained a decidedly anarchic and unorthodox edge, with productions such as Matinee (1990) enlisting the trope of exploitation aesthetics to explore the

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paranoid politics of the Cold War era, while the later Small Soldiers (1998) used animatronics and action-figure aesthetics to poke fun at the military obsessions that continue to beset the North American mind-frame. Dante’s continued commitment to fusing corporeal excess with pulp political commentary was most forcefully evidenced in his iconic entry to The Masters of Horror TV (2005–) series. Entitled The Homecoming, Dante’s episode featured the American military undead from the Iraq campaign returning to devour the Republican elite that had sent them into unjustified combat. XM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Plan 9 from Outer Space US, 1959 – 79 mins Ed Wood, Jr

Edward D. Wood, Jr directed films typified by low budgets and general ‘badness’. Steffen Hantke (2004) summarises Wood’s oeuvre as follows: ‘threadbare, illogical plots … abysmal acting, ludicrous painted flats, mismatched shots, wholesale use of stock footage, complete lack of technique, and hysterically inept special effects’. Plan 9 is often cited as Wood’s ‘masterpiece’. As the worst of the worst, it has received more attention than his other films, attention that was boosted by it being crowned the ‘Worst Film of All Time’ at The Golden Turkey Awards. The importance it thus acquired actually transformed Plan 9 into a real cinematic gem, and it even led to documentaries on Wood’s work and to a prestigious biography: Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), in which the part of Wood was played by Johnny Depp. Plan 9’s story concerns aliens seeking to control the world through the exhumation and control of zombies (the raising of the undead is the so-called Plan 9). Originally titled Grave Robbers from Outer Space, it was changed at the behest of one of the film’s major funding bodies, the Southern Baptist Church; Wood had convinced a minister that the film would make a profit, which could then help fund religious films. The film contains numerous scenes demonstrating incompetence, from the plastic-toy models of UFOs (with attached string clearly evident), extremely basic sets, ridiculous dialogue and extensive use of stock footage clumsily edited together with newly shot images. A spoken introduction even warns viewers that what they are about to witness is based on ‘future events’, an intervention that yanks the plot out of any logic of time and space before it has even started. In addition to this, the film marks the final screen appearance of horror icon Bela Lugosi (Dracula): by the time he appeared in Plan 9, Lugosi’s career had declined significantly, and the actor was heavily dependent on substances. Lugosi died during the production of Plan 9. He was replaced by Wood’s chiropractor, who shielded his face with a cloak in order to mask the fact that he looked nothing like Lugosi. Plan 9 is the model ‘so-bad-that-it’s-good’ film. In fact, it plays that role so well that the film regains an uncomfortable quality. Usually, the appeal of such films relies on the way that they inadvertently entertain and provoke laughter: rather than just being ‘bad’, they fall so far beneath the standards to which we are accustomed that viewers find them funny. In that respect, Plan 9 is an example of what Jeffrey Sconce has called ‘paracinematic taste’ – ironic countertaste. Such attitudes towards bad films grew fast during the 1980s, when Wood’s films gained their core cult status – often they were programmed during ‘bad taste’ weekends. As the 80s progressed, sci-fi and horror festivals around the world included Plan 9 in their latenight and midnight retrospectives – where it became a riot. Paracinematic taste became a common practice during the 1990s, and Plan 9 and Wood became romanticised, a process reinforced by Burton and Depp’s imagining of Wood as a maverick film-maker. In Ed Wood they even concocted a scene in which Wood has an impromptu meeting with Orson Welles – the maker of the worst film ever meeting the maker of the best 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Edward Wood, Jr PRODUCER Edward Wood, Jr WRITER Edward Wood, Jr CINEMATOGRAPHY William C. Thompson EDITING Edward D. Wood, Jr PRINCIPAL CAST Bela Lugosi, Vampira, Tor Johnson, Lyle Talbot, Gregory Walcott, Tom Keene

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film ever. One unintended consequence of this ‘misplaced nostalgia’ for the rebel director is that, if one watches Plan 9 today, the ironic fun is tempered by a slightly uncomfortable feeling of knowing that one is mocking the achievements of a poor, naive and sincere soul who tried but failed – as if a snarky teen is making fun of a child’s drawing, an embarrassing situation for all involved. It is this oscillation between 160

emotions that keeps the debate about Plan 9 going, fuelling its cult reputation. All of this had made Plan 9 somewhat of a totemic icon with aspiring film-makers, and at film schools and on college campuses the film is still a big hit. Numerous television series, The XFiles (1993–2002) most notably among them, paid homage to the film, further solidifying its status as the undisputed worst. EM BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Re-Animator US, 1985 – 86 mins Stuart Gordon

Borrowing liberally from the fiction of H. P Lovecraft, as well as the emergent SFX market of contemporary splatter, director Stuart Gordon and collaborator Brian Yuzna’s Re-Animator created a slick, gore-laden cult classic that shook up the moribund American horror scene of the mid-1980s. Not only did the pair update the Gothic theme of the mad scientist in the figure of the iconic antihero Dr Herbert West, but they also initiated a successful fright franchise that saw the character himself re-animated for further misadventures with the undead. In Re-Animator, Jeffrey Combs stars as the mischievous medical intern whose formative training in Switzerland leads to his discovery of a serum that allows the recently deceased to be re-animated, usually to disastrous effect. After having been caught experimenting on the just-expired body of his university mentor in the film’s pre-credit scene, West relocates to America, where his moral meanderings disrupt the career and romance of fellow medical students Daniel Cane (Bruce Abbott) and Cane’s lover Megan (Barbara Crampton). Having already tested the re-animation process on the couple’s cat in an early scene, West convinces a sceptical Cane to reproduce the experiment on the cadavers housed in the medical school’s morgue. The subsequent scene of the rampaging re-animated morgue dwellers grotesquely contorting before they are finally laid to rest with a variety of surgical power tools represents the successful fusion of splatter imagery and black humour for which the cycle became synonymous. A later scene, where West’s revived nemesis and intellectual arch rival Dr Hill (David Gale) dispatches an obscene army of naked corpses to assault the protagonist and his two aides also evidences the currency of sexual perversion underpinning Re-Animator. Characteristic of the connections that the series shares with the Gothic tradition, these sexual semantics are closely linked with the libidinal, which privilege distinctly Freudian themes of morbid loving, traumatic repetition and unrestrained incestuous drives. In the case of ReAnimator, these perverse desires are most explicitly referenced in the controversial (and oft censored scene) of Hill’s disembodied head attempting to perform oral sex on the naked and bound Megan, whose body has been prepared for seduction by her own zombiefied father. The scene, both comical and disturbing in tone, confirms Brian Yuzna’s own definition of perverse sexuality in the film: ‘It’s what we call “psycho-fiction”, traumas can be a lot of fun!’ Later productions such as Yuzna’s Society (1989), extended the ‘psycho-fiction’ emphasis of ReAnimator, by presenting a terrifying vision of American life viewed from the perspective of an incestuous and sexually obsessed cannibalistic secret society. Yuzna later resurrected Herbert West for two further outings: the neo-Gothic sequel Bride of Re-Animator (1990), and the more recent and underrated Beyond ReAnimator (2003), which again returned to the theme of the character’s ability to exploit the near-repressed libidinal desires of the medical fraternity that surrounds him. 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Stuart Gordon PRODUCER Michael Avery, Bruce William Curtis, Brian Yuzna WRITER H. P. Lovecraft, Dennis Paoli, William Norris, Stuart Gordon CINEMATOGRAPHY Mac Ahlberg EDITING Lee Percy ORIGINAL MUSIC Richard Band PRINCIPAL CAST Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton

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While Stuart Gordon has moved onto a more eclectic range of works since Re-Animator, his subsequent films still retain the gross-out physiological aspect that made his directorial debut such a hit. For instance, the recent Stuck (2007) adapts the real-life tale of a disenfranchised business executive left impaled on the windscreen of the care-home worker too afraid to report the 162

incident for fear of losing an impending promotion. This title indicates that both Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna continue to create distinctive works that mix explicit social criticism with even more explicit themes of sexual perversion, as well as milking scenes of extreme physical transformation for dual humorous and horrific effect. XM BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children) US, 1936 – 68 mins Louis J. Gasnier

Using a mixture of jagged film style and multi-episodic narration, Reefer Madness tells the story of three unfortunate high-school innocents, whose downfall is precipitated by the demon drug of the film’s title. The trio fall foul of manipulative couple Mae Coleman (Thelma White) and Jack Perry (Carleton Young), who use their wild jazz parties to hook youngsters on dope at the behest of their crime boss. They are aided in these dark activities by fellow pushers Ralph (played with twitchy, wide-eyed brilliance by Dave O’Brien) and Blanche (Lillian Miles), a femme fatale whose sensuality helps to lure the college kids in. The film details how these drug fiends destroy the lives of Jimmy (Warren McCollum), his high-school friend Bill (Kenneth Craig) and Mary (Dorothy Short), the latter’s ill-fated girlfriend. An early party scene at the drug hideout is indicative of the coming chaos, when Jack persuades a naive Jimmy to drive him to his boss’s headquarters to pick up further supplies of marijuana. Having already plied the youngster with reefer cigarettes during the journey, Jimmy loses control of the car, seriously injuring a pedestrian before speeding away. Later in the film, Mary attends one of the reefer parties in search of Jimmy and Bill, and is there sexually assaulted by Ralph (who boasts all of the best cackling, direct-to-camera moments in the movie). Bill returns from an illicit sexual encounter with Blanche in the room next door to find Mary being raped and a violent struggle ensues. In the fracas, Mary is shot by Jack, who tries to frame the semi-conscious Bill for the murder. It is only when Ralph’s drug-induced behaviour becomes more unstable and he kills Jack during Bill’s trial, that the truth about the drug den is revealed. With the remaining gang members in custody, a repentant Blanche tells investigators that Bill is innocent and, in one of the many incongruous scenes of the movie, suddenly jumps to her death rather than face the judicial process. With natural justice restored, the judge releases Bill, while sentencing the hysterical Ralph to a mental asylum. It is the image of the latter’s wild rolling eyes and incoherent gestures that appropriately closes the film’s focus on the ravages of substance abuse. Despite the apparently inconsistent pairing of legalistic moralising with scenes of salacious illegality, Reefer Madness embodies the key contradictory elements of early exploitation cinema. Although the film was initially funded by church groups (under the title Tell Your Children), its educational message became mangled once it was purchased by prolific B-movie director/producer Dwain Esper (who also helmed other pivotal potboilers such as Narcotic, 1933 and Maniac, 1934). Esper then re-edited and renamed the movie Reefer Madness, to maximise its grindhouse potential. This tactic of recutting or producing multiple edits of the movie was common in exploitation circles of the time, and resulted in a specific stylistic coda associated with these early flicks: namely, a curiously 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Louis J. Gasnier PRODUCER Sam Diege, George A. Hirliman, Dwain Esper (uncredited) WRITER Lawrence Meade, Arthur Hoert CINEMATOGRAPHY Jack Greenhalgh EDITING Carl Pierson ORIGINAL MUSIC Abe Mayer PRINCIPAL CAST Thelma White, Carleton Young, Dave O’Brien, Lillian Miles, Warren McCollum, Kenneth Craig, Dorothy Short, Joseph Forte

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incompatible fusion of hyper-fictional excess and documentary realism, with fluid boundary markers between the two narrative modes. In the case of Reefer Madness, the film’s moralistic message about the evils of marijuana is established via an opening ‘truth’ discourse, which signals an educational element to proceedings. This is achieved through a long, scrolling, on-screen message that claims to be exposing ‘the frightful toll of the new drug menace’ happening in reality. Although these pretensions to realism are diminished by the ensuing fictional narrative mode, the post-credit sequence (in which college principal Dr Alfred Carroll [Joseph Forte] expounds upon the dangers of teen drug use to a theatre of concerned parents), recaptures the film’s documentary flavour. Not only does Carroll address the camera directly at key points of this lecture, but his talk integrates various realist cues into the following fiction, such as the discovery and destruction of urban marijuana workshops by real narcotics officers. Indeed, the college principal maintains an ambivalent status in the narrative, functioning as both narrator, fictional designate and directto-camera-addressee at key points of the text. According to Eric Schaefer’s (1999) influential account, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959, Reefer Madness can be aligned with a wider series of drug-peril exploitation titles produced during the 1930s, all of which featured similar stylistic disparities in their attempts to peddle illicit thrills

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alongside an edifying message. For Schaefer, this produces some interesting cult incongruities that also reveal deviations from emergent continuity-editing systems. In the case of Reefer Madness, the film’s most explicit scenes of outward-looking exhibitionism occur appropriately during the drug-induced party scenes, which are replete with distorted facial gestures and frequent direct-camera addresses by the afflicted. At key moments, the film’s supposed social message is replaced by a far more delirious and subversive subtext, which often revels in the very transgression that the movie purports to condemn. In this respect, it is interesting to note that Reefer Madness continually equates drug abuse with frenzied jazz music (most comically marked when the manic Ralph gets Blanche to play the piano at breakneck speed during one of his murderous highs). Equally, the film also provides an index to wider social taboos surrounding female transgression and its consequences. For instance, it seems appropriate that Mae is introduced into the narrative in a state of semi-nakedness, with her transgressive status as drug honey overladen with connotations of wanton sexuality. This seems confirmed by her later flirtatious displays during the film’s party scenes, and is replicated in the sequence where a drugged out Blanche initiates intercourse with Bill. Blanche’s sudden and unmotivated suicide jump at the film’s close seems more indicative of the exploitation cycle’s need to shortcircuit issues of aberrant female sexuality, than of any specific narrative requirement. XM

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Repo Man US, 1984 – 82 mins Alex Cox

Even before directors such as Quentin Tarantino had cemented the cult connections between the fan/collector and the cineaste in mainstream mind-set, Alex Cox was already breaking down the barriers between the critical appreciation and production of the alternative image, with a series of fresh and challenging titles such as Repo Man. Best known (from a UK context) for the BBC’s Moviedrome (1988–2000) series, which profiled cult and exploitation classics for an eager terrestrial audience, Cox’s debut movie also exhibits the eclectic conflation of pulp genres on which the later TV show traded. In Repo Man, the disaffected but wellintentioned punk Otto (Emilio Estevez) slides dramatically out of the realms of consumerist respectability, losing his job to anomie, losing his girlfriend to a fellow punk-group member, and losing his inheritance to a fire-and-brimstone TV evangelist. As a result of these occupational, romantic and economic traumas, Otto winds up assisting the Repo Men: an odd coterie of vehicle-reclamation misfits, headed by the motormouthed Budd (Harry Dean Stanton), who tries to induct the youngster into the logic of coke-snorting late capitalism. Other curious mentors encountered by Otto include Lite (Sy Richardson), a gun-toting street diamond with a penchant for late-1970s funk and Miller (Tracey Walter), a philosophical but greasy mechanic with a belief in aliens and the paranormal. Cox situates these wonderfully off-centre characters within a multinarrative framework connecting the Repo Men to a series of drugstore raids perpetrated by Otto’s former squeeze, a longstanding feud with a local squad of Latino gangbangers, an FBI conspiracy to track down a nuclear-laden Chevrolet Malibu and even an alien encounter overseen by the psychotic former scientist J. Frank Parnell (Fox Harris). Despite the essentially chaotic construction of its characters, Repo Man remains a strongly driven character piece that highlights Cox’s masterful sense of storytelling. Although the narrative culminates in an absurd crescendo, with all these different threads converging at breakneck speed, this reflects the director’s sense of the anarchic, which is clearly bound up with the punk aesthetic underpinning the movie. According to the classic subcultural accounts of this phenomenon, punk remained a movement whose political and stylistic concerns were wedded both to a sense of the eclectic and parodic use of established sign systems. As Cox (1993) has himself commented in interview: ‘this was a movement that encouraged the political. It encouraged anarchic tendencies because it had revolutionary expectations. Although punk’s revolutionary tendencies may have been disappointed, its features fed through into a number of interesting films at the time.’ The punk aesthetic in Repo Man has an existence beyond the nonconformist characters: it includes a visual collage of differing cinema styles (from road movie to classic sci-fi, conspiracy film, youth flick and beyond), as well as an abrasive aural element that frequently switches between US indie punk, to 166

DIRECTOR Alex Cox PRODUCER Peter McCarthy, Michael Nesmith, Gerald T. Olson, Jonathan Wacks WRITER Alex Cox CINEMATOGRAPHY Robby Müller EDITING Dennis Dolan ORIGINAL MUSIC Steven Hufsteter, Tito Larriver PRINCIPAL CAST Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Sy Richardson, Tracey Walter, Fox Harris

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

70s funk and even 40s big-band tunes. The role of music in Repo Man remains very much integral to the movie’s wider message, as the director has himself noted: At the time that it was happening, there was still a thing called vinyl and people were making their own records and the record industry was being cut out of the distribution of music. So what did the record industry come up with, how did they regain control of the punk movement? By introducing two new bits of technology: the CD,

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which was well out of the recording ability of most punk bands and the rock video!

Although the director has publicly lamented the marginalisation of this rebellious aspect of cinema (and musical) culture, a punk aesthetic is further evidenced in Cox’s later burn-out rock biopic Sid and Nancy (1986), while both Straight to Hell (1987) and Highway Patrolman (1991) continued to explore his love of Eurotrash Westerns and modes of genre mixing. XM

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Ringu Japan, 1998 – 96 mins Hideo Nakata

With its emphasis on the terrifying link between tradition and the televisual, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu begins with two schoolgirls discussing an urban legend about the curse contained in a video clip that they viewed during a recent trip. According to local myth, any viewer who watches the extract is destined to die seven days after witnessing the tape’s jarring images. Despite their attempts to diffuse the mounting tension with humour, the horrific potential is suddenly brought home when one of the girls, Tomoko (Yuko Takeuchi) is suddenly killed by an unseen force, with her final moments of agony captured in a disturbing monochrome framed shot. The teenager’s death arouses the interest of her aunt Reiko (Nanako Matsushima), who is disturbed to discover that all of Tomoko’s friends who have watched the tape have also died violent and mysterious deaths. In order to interrogate this enigma further, she travels to the country retreat where all four teenagers stayed, and discovers the tape that is bound up with the group’s demise. Having watched the jagged and disturbing images contained in the extract, Reiko receives a phone call which confirms that she is destined for a similar fate. In a mood of desperation, the heroine enlists the help of her ex-husband Ryuji (Hironyuki Sanada), who also watches a copy of the tape that Reiko has prepared for him. The couple’s investigative quest is lent further urgency when Reiko discovers that their young son Yoichi (Rikiya Ôtaka) has also independently viewed the extract, meaning that the three only have a week to resolve the mystery before their impending doom. Reiko and Ryuji’s analysis of the tape connect its partial snatches of dialogue to a specific form of dialect linked to the remote island of Oshima. There, they discover the tragic tale of female psychic Shizuko Yamamura, who predicted the catastrophic earthquake on the island, only to then commit suicide after being shunned by the local community. Digging further, the pair discover a distinct theme of sexual and gender exploitation to the narrative, which links the the psychic’s fate to a manipulative professor, who exposed the heroine to a series of medical experiments and media interrogations. Ryuji experiences a psychic flashback that reveals a journalist suddenly died during one of Shizuko’s media demonstrations, for which she is wrongly labelled a witch. However, the real source of supernatural transgression is found to be Shizuko’s passive and devoted daughter Sadako (Rie Ino’o), who was later killed by her own father because of her heightened sensory powers. This assumption is later confirmed when Reiko and Ryuji discover her decaying body in a well, with the subsequent scene of Reiko cradling the abject cadaver becoming one of the more unsettling images of Nakata’s film. Although the pair believe the discovery of Sadako’s body may have lifted the curse, the climactic scene of the movie depicts her spirit crawling out of Ryuji’s TV screen to reclaim his soul as the next victim. It is the final attempts of Reiko to copy the cursed image to pass onto others in a desperate attempt to defer her own fate and that of her son that closes Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. 168

DIRECTOR Hideo Nakata PRODUCER Masato Hara, Takashige Ichise WRITER Hiroshi Takahashi, Koji Suzuku CINEMATOGRAPHY Jun’ichirô Hayashi EDITING Nobuyuki Takahashi ORIGINAL MUSIC Kenji Kawai PRINCIPAL CAST Yuko Takeuchi, Nanako Matsushima, Hironyuki Sanada, Rikiya Ôtaka

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

While the 2002 Hollywood remake brought the Ringu mythology to wider public attention, its residual themes are irreducibly connected with the Japanese mind-set. Both versions are derived from Koji Suzuku’s source material and explore wider cultural conflicts between a modern, autocratic and technologically attuned Japan, and its darker, primitive past. However,

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rather than just explore generational and regional points of discontent, it is the notion of the return of a repressed female that constitutes the unsettling core to Nakata’s film. Indeed, the standout scary moment remains the climactic scene of the subservient Sadako emerging (with head still bowed) out of Ryuji’s TV, to claim her male victim, which remains a startling renunciation of Japanese gender norms. XM

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The Rocky Horror Picture Show US, 1975 – 100 mins Jim Sharman

In one of the first ever overviews of cult films, in 1981, Danny Peary claims that ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show has become the very definition of the term “cult picture”: It is the one film that cannot even be discussed without mentioning its fans.’ Rocky Horror is more notable for the fan participation it solicited than for the actual film itself. It became, soon after its release, a phenomenon that would continue to grow and that is still going today: people dress up in transgender costumes similar to those worn by the cast, take props to throw during the screening, talk back to the screen and dance to the ‘Time Warp’, a song that perfectly evokes cult films’ uneasy relationship with the linear, and rationalised, passage of time. The first image of Rocky Horror, to the tunes of ‘science-fiction double-feature’, is that of a giant set of red-lipsticked lips, and the first line of the audience participation upon seeing it is ‘Let there be lips!’ A series of stereotypical horror and sci-fi situations ensue, many of them prefaced by a sardonic narrator, and all of them drenched in sexuality and irony. During a stormy night, Janet (Susan Sarandon, ‘Slut!’ shout the fans each time her name is uttered) and Brad (Barry Bostwick, ‘Asshole!’) get stranded in a creepy castle in which Dr Frank ‘n’ Furter (Tim Curry) chairs a convention of transsexual Transylvanians. They become the subject of serial seduction and witness the creation of the creature Rocky Horror. Eventually, Brad and Janet are released from the castle, after Frank’s servants have staged a coup and fly the entire castle – which is really a spaceship – back to their home planet, Transsexual. The parodic tone of Rocky Horror extends beyond genre film. It mocks everything, from Hollywood, to former President Nixon (whose resignation speech we hear on the radio as Brad and Janet’s car breaks down and their troubles begin) and to subcultural and countercultural emblems, referenced in Frank’s tattoos. The rock-opera, glam-rock music adds to this a hyperbolic, larger-than-life and tongue-in-cheek attitude that helps to reinforce the film’s celebration of androgynous sexuality and drug-induced abandonment. Originally, Rocky Horror had been a British theatre show designed by Richard O’Brien, and its UK success had prompted a film musical. But on the heels of a poor Broadway run of the play, the film version became a flop, in spite of featuring on a double bill around college campuses with Phantom of Paradise (1975). That changed when the Waverly Theatre in New York started running midnight sessions in 1976. It was gradually noted that repeat-audiences started talking back to the screen, shouting witticisms in reaction to certain lines. Eventually, these types of responses became more common and, in addition, people were starting to dress like the characters, and bring props such as rice, bells, newspapers and water pistols, which would be strategically used in relation to events on screen. By mid-1978 Rocky Horror was playing at midnight weekends at around fifty theatres in the US, and many people were participating in the ‘ritual’. The events surrounding Rocky Horror became widely reported in the media. Sal Piro, the best-known fan of the film, started up a fan club and published a newsletter, The Transylvanian. Other fan clubs, publications and 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Jim Sharman PRODUCER Michael White WRITER Richard O’Brien, Jim Sharman CINEMATOGRAPHY Peter Suschitzky EDITING Graeme Clifford ORIGINAL MUSIC Richard O’Brien PRINCIPAL CAST Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, Richard O’Brien, Patricia Quinn, Nell Campbell, Meat Loaf

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conventions soon followed. The musical Fame, from 1980, included a few scenes from the boisterous audience participation of Rocky Horror (with Piro doing the introductions), which pitches its wild cult rituals against more ‘normalised’ forms of enjoyment of popular culture. It also offers a glimpse into the hierarchies of Rocky Horror fandom. Bruce Austin, in one of the earliest academic articles on the phenomenon (also in 1981), segmented audiences into ‘virgins’, ‘veterans’ and ‘regulars.’ While these hierarchies were not rigidly codified, they often followed certain established norms. Over time, this has provoked a backlash, with critics accusing Rocky Horror fandom of preventing rather than facilitating audience liberation, reinforcing rather than subverting cultural consumption practices. Still, as a high-profile phenomenon in which performative audiences created a new kind of text out of the theatrical viewing experience, Rocky Horror remains an exemplary example of a cult film. The Rocky Horror cult also occurred at the cusp of an era, at a moment

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when the arthouse and exploitation circuits had found in the midnight-movie show temporary cohabitation, and right before video and cable TV discombobulated theatrical experiences altogether. Within the home-viewing era the Rocky Horror cult still thrives and the film still plays to audiences globally. The theatrical experience itself is even incorporated into Special Edition DVDs, which feature singalong options, participation prompters and a ‘theatrical experience’ option with an introduction by, again, Piro, and cutaways to audience reactions. Perhaps this has taken away some of the subversion of the original fandom. It is also an oft-quoted explanation for the public retirement, in 2010, of the veterans of the original cult. But as a metacult, a cult of cults, Rocky Horror is as visible as ever. And do not the film itself, a musical send-up and campy embrace of stereotypes, and the patchwork figure of Frank, remind us there is no such thing as pure authenticity, only replication? After all, the song does go ‘Let’s do the time warp again.’ EM

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Rome Armed to the Teeth (Roma a mano armata) Italy, 1976 – 95 mins Umberto Lenzi

Although most frequently associated with the Italian giallo and cannibal cycles that have become prominent objects of study in recent paracinematic accounts, director Umberto Lenzi’s most prolific work occurred in the poliziotteschi or rogue-cop movies, which proliferated between the years of 1966 and 1980. The poliziotteschi employed the two repeated tropes of the renegade detective forced to step outside the law to ‘correct’ criminal activity, or the private citizen who has to adopt the mantle of vigilante as a consequence of police incompetence or inactivity. While the term poliziotteschi might imply a straight police-procedural narrative, the cycle emphasised its exploitation credentials via explicit scenes of torture and sexual violence, extended chase scenes (featuring an ever-expanding repertoire of commuter carnage), as well as histrionic modes of acting performed by some of the cycle’s most iconic male leads (such as Maurizio Merli, Tomas Milian and Franco Nero). Alongside these visceral concerns, the poliziotteschi remain significant for reflecting wider domestic fears around terrorism, urban violence and political corruption circulating in the so-called anni di piombo (years of lead). Although the poliziotteschi rarely referenced terrorism (of either right or left persuasion) directly, Lenzi’s movies frequently employed a visual grammar associated with these traumas, through repeated images of kidnappings, the sexual brutalisation of women and children, as well as scenes of toxic industrial unrest and politically motivated assassinations. Rome Armed to the Teeth expands upon this established vocabulary in a narrative that deals with Commissioner Tanzi’s (Maurizio Merli) attempts to stem the violent flood of crime overtaking the city. By adopting an episodic construction to depict Tanzi’s criminal encounters (which include interactions with sadistic drug pushers, upper-class rape gangs and misguided young ram-raiders), Lenzi emulates the proliferation of media reports documenting similar, real-life crimes occurring at the time of the film’s release. Equally, Tanzi’s no-nonsense approach to policing also leads to fractious conflicts with the more liberal legal voices represented in the film. As represented by the late Merli, Tanzi’s character allows full rein to the portrayals of virile and unswerving masculinity for which the performer was noted. Even off screen, Merli’s unstoppable phallic gusto attained cult credibility: not only did the performer frequently do all his own stunts, but he was also known to deck stuntmen for real during set-ups for action sequences. However, this phallic ego-ideal is spectacularly overshadowed in the film by Cuban actor Tomas Milian, who is cast as ‘Il Gobbo’ (the Hunchback), a deformed, psychotic gangland boss, whose criminal empire underpins the individual acts of transgression that Tanzi is investigating. Although Milian studied at the Lee Strasberg Actors Studio in New York during the 1950s, his reputation flourished through a series of Italian genre productions that traded on his unnatural ability to contort his body in grotesque and unnatural ways. 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Umberto Lenzi PRODUCER Mino Loy, Luciano Martino WRITER Umberto Lenzi, Dardano Sacchetti CINEMATOGRAPHY Federico Zanni EDITING Daniele Alabiso ORIGINAL MUSIC Franco Micalizzi PRINCIPAL CAST Maurizio Merli, Tomas Milian, Maria Rosaria Ommagio

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Milian’s stunning repertoire of physical distortion comes fully to the fore in Rome Armed to the Teeth, with many of the film’s pivotal scenes being added and adlibbed at the actor’s request. Standout Milian moments in the movie include one tense standoff with Merli’s character, after Il Gobbo attempts to crush Tanzi’s wife (Maria Rosaria Ommagio) in an industrial press as a warning against the impending police investigation. As a reprisal for this act of aggression, Tanzi forces Milian’s character to eat one of the bullets with which the commissioner will later kill the deviant. Here, Milian readily accepts this feminised status with a typically characteristic sense of physiological excess: gagging on the bullet and shuddering uncontrollably before swallowing, he then apologises to Tanzi after ingestion of the metal object brings on an uncontrolled belching attack.

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Although the flamboyantly decorated Il Gobbo meets his demise in a heap of crushed velvet clothing at the end of the film, the character was resurrected in Lenzi’s later Brothers till We Die (La banda del gobbo), where Milian plays two criminal brothers at the same time (Lenzi’s innovative use of matting techniques allowing these different representations to cohere on the screen at the same time). Milian’s unique, histrionic acting range was further developed through a cycle of rogue-cop adventures he completed during the late 1970s, in which he played the neardestitute detective Nico Giraldi. These films, which once again often traded on the actor’s ability to take on dual and distorted roles, further evidence his phenomenal penchant for multiple performativity. XM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

The Room US, 2003 – 99 mins Tommy Wiseau

Timing is everything. The Room became a cult sensation at the exact moment that critics worldwide announced ‘the death of the theatrical cult film’ in favour of the home-viewed variety. But as long as The Room is around, theatrical cults are not quite dead yet. Above all, The Room is an obsessively personal film. The opening credits reveal ‘a Wiseau film’, with Wiseau as director, producer, screenwriter and star. The $7 million budget (about which Wiseau remains secretive) was raised independently. During production, some of the crew quit out of frustration with Wiseau’s methods (or lack thereof – reportedly Wiseau insisted on shooting scenes simultaneously in two different formats). Ostensibly, The Room is a melodrama, the story of the downfall of Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) a well-meaning, successful man, betrayed by his fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle), who has an affair with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). Upon discovering the affair, Johnny suffers a dramatic breakdown. ‘You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!’ he screams in agony, in one of the film’s many lines eagerly quoted by its fans. In an effort to ‘show ’em all’, wronged Johnny kills himself. Lisa and Greg wail and weep over his body; Johnny sure showed them all. But personal obsession aside, The Room is also ridiculously bad, and its naivety and self-aggrandising invite mockery. Whatever sincerity the melodramatic outline may have had is destroyed by The Room’s inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies. The cinematography is stubbornly repetitive. Not only is the film almost entirely set in (guess what) a room, with red walls and odd pictures of spoons, each scene also begins with a nearly identical shot of a door through which new characters, some of whom are never properly introduced, enter and announce themselves (‘Oh, hi Lisa. Oh, hi Johnny’). Dialogue is, as one critic called it, ‘interplanetarily bizarre’. The film is replete with nonsensical lines such as ‘as far as I’m concerned you can drop off the earth. That’s a promise.’ Exchanges that start angrily (‘I did not hit her!’) are followed brusquely by pleasant chitchat (‘Oh, hi Mark.’). The acting, especially that of Wiseau, oscillates between hyperbolic and mechanic – as if Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator and Dennis Hopper’s character from Blue Velvet (1986) meet in one body. Elaborate sex scenes appear out of nowhere. Against expectation, they focus not on Lisa’s body but on the ornate, muscular back and bottom of Johnny as he humps her amid clichéd set-ups of candles, rose petals, silk curtains and slow-motion tracking shots. The Room is also incapable of separating important dramatic moments from superfluous details – breast cancer, adultery, jealousy, alcoholism, drugs, crime, are all mixed into casual conversation as if they’re of equal irrelevance. Many moments do not make sense at all – Johnny and his friends playing football in an alley, dressed in tuxedos; Johnny buying flowers; emotional outpourings on a rooftop; a jog in a park – most of these are meant to show Johnny as a caring man, bonding with his buddies and protégé, but they elicit speculation well beyond that. When The Room was first released, it was presented as a serious drama. It had a brief, unsuccessful 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Tommy Wiseau PRODUCER Tommy Wiseau, Drew Caffey, Chloe Lietzke, Greg Sestero WRITER Tommy Wiseau CINEMATOGRAPHY Todd Barron ORIGINAL MUSIC Mladen Milicevic PRINCIPAL CAST Tommy Wiseau, Juliette Danielle, Greg Sestero, Philip Haldiman, Carolyn Minnott

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run in Los Angeles. In spite of a disproportionate publicity campaign, screenings proved disastrous and embarrassing. After a while, however, The Room found an unexpected audience across the West Coast of North America at midnight screenings in arthouse theatres and on college campuses, where viewers began celebrating it as an ironic masterpiece – an antithesis of talent, professionalism and craftsmanship. Before long, rituals developed: viewers started quoting dialogue, interacting with the film’s scenery (yelling ‘Alcatraz!’ at stock shots of San Francisco), and reenacting scenes (throwing spoons and rose petals, playing football and sharing Scotchkas – a mix of Scotch and vodka used to get Johnny drunk in the film). Wiseau embraced the newfound following and has since claimed The Room was always intended to be a pitch-black comedy.

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Since 2006, the reputation of The Room has spread gradually, mostly via word of mouth. Ultimate recognition of its cult status came in 2010, when the otherwise highbrow and serious Harper’s Magazine devoted a lengthy article to the film, labeling it a ‘post-camp’ cult phenomenon because of the way the film speaks sincerely to all of us – and we laugh in self-defence because we are relieved not to be in Wiseau’s shoes, having our own personal expression mocked (the article called Wiseau ‘an unfortunate cultic animal we had all come together to stab at the stroke of midnight’). The Room shows that not all films have become slickly self-aware, and that unintentional camp, as Susan Sontag called it, offers an experience that is simultaneously ironic and touching. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Italy, 1975 – 116 mins Pier Paolo Pasolini

Against the banality of evil stands the ritual of evil, and there is no better example of this than Salò, reputedly the sickest film ever. Thinking about the organisation of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt (1968) famously observed that one of the more uncanny aspects of evil is that it occurs so casually. It can be planned and executed according to a bureaucratic logic that cancels out human emotion – and that is its seductive power. Salò does something similar: it suggests that, when evil is shrouded in ritual planning and execution, it allows perpetrators (and victims!) to hide under a cloak of ceremony and procedure. For cultural theorists like René Girard (1972) ritual veils the violent origin of culture. But it also amplifies it. Salò confirms and challenges that idea. Salò derives its title and subject from the town that formed the centre of the late-World War II Mussolini state (a puppet state of Nazi Germany) and of the Marquis de Sade’s novel by the same name, from which it deviates significantly. The story is that of a quartet of wealthy bourgeois men (an aristocrat, a bishop, a judge and a politician) who, during the dying days of a fascist regime, hide with their militia in a large country estate. Here they plan to spend their last days humiliating, torturing, abusing and murdering a carefully selected group of eighteen young men and women – basically indulging in nihilism and evil in an effort to de-culture themselves. The increasingly intensifying sexual and corporeal acts of depravity are structured around four levels (loosely based on Dante’s Inferno): the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit and the Circle of Blood. In the end, a giant orgy of sadistic, sexualised violence sees each of the four men voyeuristically witness the annihilation of most of the victims. The last scene shows the sad effects of this violence on the guards: they dance a simple waltz that is both an act of ultimate desensitisation and intimate commemoration. Pasolini had already acquired a cult reputation before he made Salò. Several of his writings had attracted obscenity charges; some of the religious, erotic and burlesque material in his films had attracted censorship and stormy debate; and his philosophical activism as an openly gay, Christian, Communist campaigner for the proletariat had made him a controversial public figure. But that was peanuts compared to the scandal that Salò caused. Shortly before the premiere of the film, Pasolini was murdered, reportedly by a gay lover (though there are conspiracy theories that speak of a political assassination). Upon release, numerous regions banned Salò, refusing it certificates or classification. In many countries it is still banned. As a result, semi-clandestine and severely cut versions of the film circulated among curious cinephiles. Before long, Salò joined bills with films such as Eraserhead* and El Topo* touring college campuses, and gradually a solid cult following established itself. Much of that following centred around the meaning of the serial mutilation, sex, sadism, rape and murder. It is clear that Salò is a profound critique, but the film seems unsure about what exactly it is critiquing: fascism, sure, and complacency and state bureaucracy and massconsumption and … the debate goes on. Every scene elicits new metaphors, from actions such as the 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Pier Paolo Pasolini PRODUCER Alberto De Stefanis, Antonio Girasante, Alberto Grimaldi WRITER Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Citti, Pupi Avati CINEMATOGRAPHY Tonino Delli Colli PRODUCTION DESIGN Dante Ferretti EDITING Nino Baragli ORIGINAL MUSIC Ennio Morricone PRINCIPAL CAST Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti, Caterina Boratto, Elsa De Giorgi, Hélène Surgère, Franco Merli, Ines Pellegrini

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execution of a black servant (Pasolini regular Ines Pellegrini) to the brutal extraction of the tongue of a young male (another regular, Franco Merli, one of Pasolini’s ‘street boys’ whom he recruited into acting). Metaphor upon metaphor, Salò offers an avalanche of allegories and in the end it is the ritual progression that persists – rituals against all other meaning.

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Salò’s extreme imagery and design (by Dante Ferretti) never lets the audience off the hook, making it a very uncomfortable viewing experience. This has led the film to top lists of the ‘sickest films ever’. As David Church has noted, this tendency to achieve the top spot has further consolidated its position as a cult film. Sickest film or not, Salò certainly spills its guts. EM

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She Killed in Ecstasy West Germany, 1971 – 73 mins Jesús Franco (as Frank Hollmann)

Even the relative luxury of a volume dedicated to 100 Cult Films could not possibly begin to do justice to the exhaustive back catalogue of the indefatigable Spanish cult icon Jesús (or Jess) Franco. At the time of writing, Franco has made over 190 films, though this number of entries can easily be multiplied, as the director often creates multiple or mutually exclusive versions of any one title: often with hardcore sex, softcore sex … or just unappealing sex variants targeted at the differing grindhouse audiences that constitute his loyal cult clientele. At the level of chronology, this vast back catalogue represents a patchwork of intriguing and interconnected European co-productions, often helmed under a bewildering range of pseudonyms, including Clifford Brown, A. M. Frank, Frank Hollman, J. P. Johnson, Franco Manera, Tower Nero and even Pablo Villa. Although he has worked in a variety of genres, the favoured Franco domain operates at the axis of horror and eroticism, with a repeated focus on deadly and dominant women whose sexual prowess subverts dominant male ideologies. This annexing of extreme sexual and violent imagery with atypical gender depictions resulted in many of his early works courting controversy, particularly in the era of the Spanish dictatorship that lasted until 1976. Seeking a more liberated cinematic environment abroad, Franco’s output was frequently chaotic, and often only defined by the French, German and Swiss producers with whom he worked. Arguably, the years between 1966 and 1970 could be deemed Jesús Franco’s most prolific period, defined by his work with German exploitation financiers such as Adrian Hoven and Artur Brauner. In particular, Franco’s work with Brauner proved significant, as it established his iconic pairing with the fatal starlet Soledad Miranda. Made as a companion piece to Miranda’s lesbian-chic epic Vampiros Lesbos (1970), She Killed in Ecstasy remains a macabre cult oddity for the way in which the film’s narrative finale mirrored the real-life fate that befell the actress. Here, Miranda (billed as Susan Korda) is cast as the vengeful wife of a pioneering surgeon who commits suicide after a medical board wrongly suspends him for medical malpractice. Her character seeks retribution against the (largely male-dominated) ‘ethical’ panel by first seducing, then torturing and castrating its key personnel. In a pointed moment of self-reflexivity, she saves and savours the most lavish of punishments for Dr Donan (played by Franco in one of the many oddball cameos that populate his films), both arousing and wounding his flesh prior to the ultimate act of emasculation. The only act of female mutilation occurs when the dark heroine seduces and then suffocates Dr Crawford (Ewa Strömberg) with an inflatable, zebra-print, plastic cushion. This surreal scene is even more incisive for the ways in which Franco uses an interruptive porno gaze to obscure the erotic coupling with a variety of objects such as halffilled wine goblets. The visual compositions of the film (which trades on the director’s infamous overuse of the zoom shot) are complemented by the psychedelic jazz score, which continues to give She Killed in Ecstasy currency with contemporary audiences. 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Jesús Franco PRODUCER Artur Brauner WRITER Jesús Franco CINEMATOGRAPHY Manuel Marino EDITING Clarissa Ambach ORIGINAL MUSIC Manfred Hübler, Sigi Swab PRINCIPAL CAST Soledad Miranda, Jesús Franco, Ewa Strömberg

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These stylistic flourishes aside, the most remarkable element of the movie remains Miranda’s cold-as-ice performance, which sees her totally transformed from the squeaky clean (and blonde) pop-princess persona that defined her early Spanish career. As Franco himself has commented ‘when we worked together she would go into a kind of a trance, a fever and draw out these incredible dark performances. She had a deep, deep appreciation of what we were doing together on those films’. If the pairing of Franco and Miranda points to a near supernatural quality to the actress’s roles, her demise is even more uncanny, as she perished in a near identical car crash to that in the final scene of She Killed in Ecstasy soon after the production was completed.

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Arguably, Franco never recovered from the loss of this cinematic soulmate, commenting that Our relationship was magical because she would always understand what we were trying to create. She was an animal of cinema, she put all of her emotions in to our films and she will always have a presence for me.

Miranda’s memory is preserved not only by her collaborations with Franco, but also by contemporary fan websites such as soledadmiranda. com, which celebrates the star’s ethereal qualities. XM

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Showgirls US, 1995 – 128 mins Paul Verhoeven

As a sexploitation picture with a shallow narrative, a mannerist style and poor acting, Showgirls embodies bad cinema. It was honoured as such at the Raspberry mock awards for worst films in 1996. Yet it is also extremely smart cinema: a passionate critique of the performance and exploitation of labour in the entertainment industry, where hyperbolic rhetoric and postures about ‘chasing one’s dreams’ disguise a deadly competition only won at the expense of one’s bodily integrity. A critique so smart that when director Paul Verhoeven showed up at the Raspberries to pick up his award in person and deliver an acceptance speech, one had to wonder who was mocking who. Set in Las Vegas, a city the film introduces as female in gender, Showgirls tells a cautionary tale. Smalltown girl Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley) hopes to become a celebrated dancer in one of Vegas’s top topless shows. As she claws her way to the top via a sexual relationship with a hotel entertainment director Zack (Kyle MacLachlan) and the shrewd elimination of her rival, celebrity dancer and former girlfriend of Zack, Cristal (Gina Gershon), she betrays her friend, seamstress Molly (Gina Ravera) and alienates her fellow dancers. Her luck turns when her seedy past is revealed and her friend Molly is raped by a celebrity rockstar. Nomi avenges Molly, and soon after she hitches a ride out of Vegas. If this story had been more sparing in its use of hyperbole, Showgirls would have remained a mediocre exploitation film cursed with high production values. Instead, every scene, stride and gesture is blown out of proportion. People do not walk in Showgirls; they storm, chase, strut or swirl. Nor do they have normal conversations – they shout, snarl, brag or sneer. The humour is vulgar. A chubby female standup comedian (a nod to John Waters’s fetish actor Divine) asks a rowdy audience in a nightclub: ‘You know what they call that useless piece of skin around a twat? A woman.’ All of the sex in Showgirls is sleazy, rough and highly performative. In the film’s most notorious scene, Zack invites Nomi to his villa. As they laugh and flirt and spill expensive champagne (Cristal, of course), Zack shows off his patio, with a swimming pool, fountains and fake, neon palm trees. The kitschy artifice of the setting is carried over into the wild sex they have – with Nomi ‘performing’ beyond any probability. This is no isolated scene. The entire acting arc of Berkley is ambiguous in its hyperbolic badness. It is impossible to tell if this is a deliberate strategy by her, by Verhoeven or if it is the result of a lack of skill. It also makes it impossible to pinpoint Nomi’s motivations: is she ruthless or desperate, is her impulsiveness a quality or a flaw? And why does she only eat junk food? ‘Sell your bodies’, yells the casting director during Nomi’s audition. Nomi and her colleagues are constantly reminded (in the most vernacular wordings), that the female body is a site of constant, and ritual, reconstruction: they are told to get their noses fixed, wear wigs, shave their legs, curl their eyelashes, get pointy breasts and nipples and avoid tan lines. Add the constant references to stage costumes, wonderbras, g-strings and dresses (including the infamous mispronunciation of ‘Versayce’ through which Nomi betrays 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Paul Verhoeven PRODUCERS Charles Evans, Alan Marshall, Mario Kassar WRITER Joe Eszterhas CINEMATOGRAPHY Jost Vacano COSTUME DESIGN Ellen Mirojnick EDITING Mark Goldblatt, Mark Helfrich ORIGINAL MUSIC David A. Stewart PRINCIPAL CAST Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi, Alan Rachins, Gina Ravera, Lin Tucci

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her low-class background), and an image emerges of woman as a commodified cyborg, a body technologically altered for trade. At the same time, Showgirls represents a critique of the exploitation of showbiz’s proletariat, its below-the-line labourers and the ways in which they too appear to reproduce the rhetoric of hyperbole and selfreflexivity, of postured professionalism, that is so typical for those at the top of the entertainment industry. There is not a moment in Showgirls when its characters are not trying to seize opportunities or fend off competition. ‘There’s always someone younger and hungrier than you coming down the stairs behind you’, says Cristal. Showgirls argues that the rhetoric of this system of exploitation is unattainable. Yet the film gleefully joins in the celebration of the glitter it produces. Does this make Showgirls an allegory for the film industry? After all, once Nomi has settled the score on behalf of Molly, she drives off into the sunset – a sign tells us she is headed in the direction of Los Angeles. Showgirls had a very rocky reception. It was assigned the relatively new NC-17 rating, installed to replace the X-rating. It was

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cut and censored in various countries. The critical reception was very hostile. This was not new for Verhoeven, who had had previous films such as RoboCop (1987) meet with adverse reviews. One recurring criticism was that Showgirls was a symptom of the revival of macho ‘lad’ culture. For a brief period a wave of sleaze and softcore thrillers found a sizeable niche appeal, one that Verhoeven’s previous film, Basic Instinct (1992), had actually helped to propel. Among its most notable figures were Shannon Tweed, Shannon Whirrey and Pamela Anderson – symbols of the athletic ‘babes’ of which Nomi represents the hyperbolic epitome. As it turned out, Showgirls can be viewed as both a symptom and a criticism of this sensibility. After the Raspberry award ceremonies, and as queer cultist screenings of the film emerged across the US and Europe, critics changed their opinions. Academics in particular began to praise Showgirls for its strategy of ironic camp, as a film that exposes not only female nudity, but also our culture’s obsession with such expositions. EM

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Soul Vengeance (aka Welcome Home Brother Charles) US, 1975 – 91 mins Jamaa Fanaka

Better known for low-budget, male-prison melodramas like Penitentiary (1979), African American auteur Jamaa Fanaka’s work retains a cult interest for its willingness to fuse ribald genre imagery with forthright racial commentary. Although Fanaka’s early films were seen as minor entries to the 1970s American blaxploitation craze, they have recently been subject to some revision, with authors such as Steven Jay Schneider (2004) viewing their gender and stylistic qualities as a ‘corrective’ to problematic issues of sexual and community politics that often dogged more mainstream visions of black action cinema. Adding weight to Schneider’s interpretation, Fanaka’s debut feature Soul Vengeance (completed while he was still a UCLA film undergraduate) can be considered as one of the more experimental and edgy blaxploitation entries, its fictional narrative of ethnic protagonists resisting white authority enveloped within a non-traditional structure that recalls wider attempts to pioneer a black-film aesthetic during this period. Told in flashback, from the point of the central character’s demise, the film details the inevitable downfall of Charles Murray (Marlo Monte), who is violently assaulted by racist cops eager for a ghetto-based drugs bust in the opening segment. In a scene evocative of the race and sexual politics underpinning the movie, one officer takes a cut-throat razor to Charles’s genitalia, the cop then successfully claiming the act as self-defence when the case reaches court. (The fact that this legal process is presided over by the sleazy judge seen cruising for black skin in the film’s opening scene indicates the theme of white complicity that runs through the narrative.) The subsequent scenes of Murray’s incarceration establish a genre marker of how Fanaka would later develop the use of prison locales in the Penitentiary series, with the character’s isolation effectively evoked through a series of vérité-style shots and experimental inserts. The frenzied musical score accompanying this montage scene also works to establish an off-kilter aesthetic to Soul Vengeance that continues after Murray is released from his three-year stretch. Upon his return to the tough streets of Compton (competently realised through documentary scenes featuring real-life urban dwellers), Murray finds his hopes of enacting positive change within the black community soon thwarted by both his former criminal associates and the wider racial prejudices that prevent him finding employment. Although the protagonist finds emotional security with a former prostitute, his ultimate aim is to enact revenge against the symbols of white authority that have tarnished his manhood. It is the activation of this vendetta motif that shifts Soul Vengeance from the socially attuned to the cinematically surreal, as the key scene of the movie reveals that, rather than suffering castration, Charles Murray’s damaged genitalia have now become a weapon of racial resistance, able to seduce and hypnotise female members of the white elite, before serving as a deadly weapon with which to expel his former male oppressors. Indeed, the scene of the protagonist’s monstrously engorged penis wrapped around the neck of one expiring white opponent represents one of the most iconic (if unpalatable images) ever committed to 184

DIRECTOR Jamaa Fanaka PRODUCER Jamaa Fanaka WRITER Jamaa Fanaka CINEMATOGRAPHY James Babidge EDITING Jamaa Fanaka ORIGINAL MUSIC William Anderson PRINCIPAL CAST Marlo Monte, Reatha Grey, Stan Kamber, Tiffany Peters, Ben Bigelow, Ed Sanders

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cult celluloid. According to Fanaka, Soul Vengeance was an attempt to update plantation myths surrounding black male potency for the militant African American generation of the 70s. While it would be easy to critique the director’s handling of these stereotypical myths, the style with which he shoots the key ‘erotic’ scenes (rendering male and female anatomies as a discordant collection of body parts) elevates Soul Vengeance into the realm of genuine cult oddity. Fanaka’s next movie Emma Mae (aka Black Sister’s Revenge, 1976) continued the director’s dual exploration of racial and sexual politics, detailing how a naive rural heroine gets unwittingly involved

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in crime and the militant movement in order to free a jailed suitor. Although this film (along with Fanaka’s debut) suffered from poor distribution, the success of his independently financed Penitentiary series exposed his work to a whole new generation of urban iconoclasts (including rappers such as Snoop Dog and Dr Dre). Retaining his political edge Fanaka recently initiated an ill-fated attempt to bring a lawsuit against the Directors Guild of America for failing to employ adequate female and minority personnel in American productions. This defiant move has further enhanced Jamaa Fanaka’s reputation as one of cult film’s truly independent fighting spirits. XM

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The Sound of Music US, 1965 – 174 mins Robert Wise

‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ The enduring love for The Sound of Music poses a problem for cult cinema. Can a film be deemed cult if it sits squarely in the middle of the mainstream, enjoyed great success at the box office, collected numerous awards and remains immensely popular? The size and devotion of its ardent following is one part of the answer, of course, but other reasons factor in too, not the least of which is the fact that Music manages to cosily nestle itself in what is largely a tough, macho environment. Based on a real-life story, and a Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway musical, Music already had some appeal before becoming a Hollywood film. The story of the Austrian Von Trapp family, and their daring challenge to (and escape from) the Nazis with the help from their nanny, the tomboyish former nun Maria (Julie Andrews), has, in fact, become part of the cultural fabric, its content passed on from generation to generation. For the most part, the story is a mix between an epic outdoor adventure in which the impressive Alps and the picturesque city of Salzburg are as much a star as Maria and the Von Trapps, and a revue musical in which the family has to sing to save their lives. There are funny and sweet moments, and even some awkward subject matter, directed by Wise with the aplomb of a B-movie. Mostly, it is the songs that propel the film. Many of them, and ‘Do Re Mi’ in particular, have become household tunes. When Music was released it drew some ire from critics, who felt it was ‘an exceedingly sugary experience’. But that did nothing to hinder the immense success of the film. It broke records everywhere. It also won five Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’. Music quickly became a holiday stalwart on television, where it found itself in the company of It’s a Wonderful Life* (for North America) and the Sissi films (1955–7) (for Europe and Asia). Over the years, some of the fandom changed. Indeed, Music has the remarkable capacity to renew itself and to endear itself to even the newest generations of filmgoers. For many fans, trips to Salzburg became a sort of pilgrimage. In the 1980s and 90s it became a queer-camp favourite – as a character, and a ‘problem’, Maria appeals to gay and lesbian viewers. A karaoke-type screening at the 1999 London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival made the film a pioneer of participatory singalongs. It also became the inspiration for a reality-TV contest, the trailers of which were an internet-craze, and even for horror-musicals such as The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001). Most recently, Music has headed a feminine cutification of cult film, part of a flock of family-friendly, rollickingly romantic feelgood musicals, to which Dirty Dancing*, Grease (1978) and Mamma Mia! (2008) also belong. For some, this cutification borders on sacrilege; others see it as a logical consequence of the cult reception process. Put otherwise, Music challenges the masculinity of cult. Experts project that Music will soon overtake Gone with the Wind (1939) as the most watched film ever. Perhaps when that happens it will be the right moment to also pay some attention to yet uncharted components of Music’s cult potential. Perhaps director Robert Wise, whose affinity with cults includes West 186

DIRECTOR Robert Wise PRODUCER Robert Wise, Richard D. Zanuck WRITER Ernest Lehman, Howard Lindsay, Russell Crouse (book: Maria Von Trapp) CINEMATOGRAPHY Ted McCord EDITING William Reynolds ORIGINAL MUSIC Irwin Kostal (Broadway music: Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein) PRINCIPAL CAST Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor Parker, Richard Haydn, Charmian Carr, Heather Menzies

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Side Story (1961), Star Trek and The Haunting (1963) (as well as some underappreciated work for Orson Welles), can be given his due praise. Or fans can poke underneath the sentimental surface of Music to

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unearth more bleak and dark material – war atrocities or religious and political fanaticism, for instance, or the nostalgic fabrication of history. Perhaps then traditionalist cult fans too will finally embrace Music. EM

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Star Wars US, 1977–2005 – 121 + 124 + 134 + 136 + 142 + 140 mins George Lucas

Should Star Wars not be called culture instead of cult? After all, the sci-fi fantasy franchise of the Jedi warriors’ fight against a vast, evil empire, somewhere in a ‘galaxy far, far away’, is an omnipresent force in the mainstream of contemporary entertainment and society. In a British population census so many people entered ‘Jedi’ as their spiritual denomination that it qualified to be recognised as an official religion. Star Wars has also played a significant role in the identity formation of North American, Generation-X males, marking not just a subculture but an entire generation. That influence is probably best expressed through the casualness with which Star Wars quotes appear in other media – the fascination with Star Wars in Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) is but one visible example. Star Wars is also an economic powerhouse. The franchise of six feature films and numerous ancillary products make up one of the most profitable and most fiercely protected intellectual properties. Back in the 1970s and early 80s, the first three films in the series (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) were instrumental to the proliferation of fantasy blockbusters in Hollywood. They showed that fantasy films could be high-end products and big business. They also demonstrated that what had until then been seen as a tiny, niche subculture of geeks was, actually, a highly dedicated and well-organised cohort of fans eager to submerge themselves wholesale into active and participatory consumption. Like the fanzines through which they voiced their admiration (Cinéfantastique and Starlog prominent among them), these fans were both loyal and critical. And they were numerous. In fact, Star Wars showcased the film industry’s renewed obsession with ‘size’ as a dominant measure for success and appreciation. In first instance, size or, better, super-size, marks the scale of the operation: a vast array of innovative imagery, merchandise and rights brought together under one name: the Expanded Universe (also the name of the franchise’s storyworld, that ‘galaxy far, far away’). Super-size also characterises the zeal with which both fans and creator George Lucas keep expanding on those materials (and that storyworld). Endless snippets and fragments of the Expanded Universe are explored – from the Lucas-endorsed cartoon of the family of one of the supporting characters (Chewbacca the Wookie [Peter Mayhew]), to fan-boy fantasies of the chaste Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) in a skimpy outfit (chained to the oversized Jabba the Hutt), to hobby-movies on the daily life of a Stormtrooper (not endorsed, in fact opposed by Lucas). Within Star Wars itself, super-size is both a threat and a source of admiration. When, in the first film, the X-wing rebel squadron approaches the feared Death Star, one of the pilots exclaims in awe: ‘Look at the size of that thing!’ Super-size aside, Star Wars has attracted accusations of infantilism and escapism. These are mostly directed against Star Wars fan dedication, and against the simplistic sense of community and belonging of that fandom (brilliantly analysed, and refuted, by Will Brooker in his 1991 book Using the Force). In spite of these accusations, however, it is difficult to deny the awe experienced during moments such as the starship 188

DIRECTOR George Lucas, Irvin Kershner, Richard Marquand PRODUCER George Lucas, Gary Kurtz, Howard Kazanjian, Rick McCallum WRITER George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan, Leigh Brackett, Jonathan Hales CINEMATOGRAPHY Gilbert Taylor, Peter Suschitzky, David Tattersall EDITING Paul Hirsch, Maria Lucas, Richard Chew ORIGINAL MUSIC John Williams PRINCIPAL CAST Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Ewan McGregor, Liam Neeson, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Samuel L. Jackson

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Millennium Falcon’s jump into hyperdrive, where we see the depth of the universe literally expand. Add to that themes of rebellion and mythology, and some notoriously bad direction and campy acting and the cultist nucleus of Star Wars’ entrenched fandom is clearly visible. For some, the omnipresence of Star Wars disqualifies it as cult cinema. Too quickly, Star Wars moved from a sci-fi sect into a full-

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fledged church, a religion as it were. Yet the way in which obsessions with Star Wars are carried beyond boundaries of moderation and modesty give the whole enterprise, and fans’ immersion into that enterprise, the genuine look and feel of a cult – placed in the middle of culture perhaps, but somewhat monstrous and anomalous nonetheless. EM

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Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story US, 1988 – 43 mins Todd Haynes

To make a critical no-budget film about the tragic death, from anorexia, of the young, talented singer (Karen Carpenter) of one of America’s most beloved pop families (the Carpenters) is a contentious idea in itself. To reenact this story through America’s favourite doll, Barbie, in order to confront pop culture’s preoccupation with thinness, mixing in images of the Holocaust to press that point, is simply asking for trouble. Todd Haynes and Cynthia Schneider, who share key creative credits, were both students in New York when the idea materialised. They combined live action and stop-motion to construct a low-tech but highly melodramatic story that narrates the success and demise of poor Karen, and that discusses her disease openly. They further layered the soundtrack with saccharine Carpenter songs (and other top hits from the 70s), and added comments that alerted viewers to the pressures of the ‘internal experience of contemporary femininity’. The result is both a heart-wrenching drama and a scathing critique. ‘Wholesome is out’, says Karen at one point. She is referring to the sound of the Carpenters’ music but it rapidly becomes clear that her figure is part of that realisation too. Legal troubles began when Superstar was still in post-production. Karen’s brother Richard, cocomposer of the heavily featured song ‘Top of the World’, refused to grant any permission and successfully sued. Mattel, owners of the Barbie brand, also refused to cooperate. Yet Haynes and Schneider managed to book Superstar in several New York theatres, received positive press and even screened it at festivals (Utah, before it became Sundance, and Toronto). When the lawsuits came into effect, however, the film disappeared from public view, and retreated into the underground. But, perhaps as a sign of its significance, Superstar refused to go away altogether. In fact, its cult reception has continued to build, and it now lives on across several niche followings. For an outlawed, fugitive film, it is remarkably well circulated, mostly on a peer-to-peer basis of exchanges of bootlegged VHS and DVD copies, but occasionally also through private screenings for devotees. This slumbering presence coalesces wonderfully well with its low-fi technical qualities, highlighting its status as an object in the shadows. If one adds to this peer-to-peer sharing status themes of identity politics, bodily suffering and repressed sexuality, it does not take much to see just how Superstar found a queer following. As Glyn Davis (2008), one of the foremost chroniclers of the film, has noted, Superstar was perhaps not intended as a queer film but it was certainly made from a queer perspective. Haynes’s subsequent career as an exponent of New Queer Cinema reinforced that impression. A symbol of copy-culture, Superstar has also become totemic for advocates of free distribution and opponents of stringent copyright control, giving it somewhat of a romantic status. Finally, in recent years the film has emerged as part of so-called ‘thinspiration’ (or ‘thinspo’), a subculture of viewers celebrating rather than denouncing anorexia. A repressed film deeply loved by viewers who see that it reflects their own repression, Superstar remains, as one online fan called it, a ‘heartbreaking kick in the guts’. EM 190

DIRECTOR Todd Haynes PRODUCER Todd Haynes, Cynthia Schneider WRITER Todd Haynes, Cynthia Schneider ORIGINAL MUSIC The Carpenters, Elton John, Dionne Warwick PRINCIPAL CAST (ORIGINAL VOICES) Merrill Graves, Michael Edwards, Melissa Brown, Rob LaBelle, Todd Haynes, Cynthia Schneider, Gwen Kraus

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Suspiria Italy, 1977 – 97 mins Dario Argento

Even before his groundbreaking work on Suspiria, Dario Argento had established a cult following in his native Italy, having directed a series of influential thrillers that had revitalised the Italian giallo or murder-mystery format. With titles such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red*, Argento had created a series of films that featured complex and convoluted plotting, excessive visual styles and unconventional gender twists that repeatedly upset established definitions of cinematic taste. However, any artistic labels applied to these images were complicated by Argento’s insistence on using them as backdrops to scenes of sexual violence. The global success of Suspiria confirmed Argento’s status as a unique cult-cinema stylist, with the experimental look of the film appealing to cineastes on an international level. However, the film’s excessive scenes of female suffering led to the film being praised and condemned in equal measure. In contravention of the cosmopolitan settings that dominated contemporary European horror, Argento located Suspiria in a baroque ballet academy, where the students are dispatched by a coven of monstrous witches headed by ‘Black Queen’ Helena Marcos. The infamous opening of the film juxtaposes the arrival of heroine Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) with the gruesome and elongated murder of female student Pat Hingle (Eva Axén), who has discovered the dance school’s grim secret. Although the film’s supernatural setting marked a radical departure from his earlier giallo productions, Argento retained his favoured theme of ineffectual men dominated by aggressive women from those earlier works. This is seen in the film’s pattern of depicting male characters who are dependent on the evil school principal Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett) and her female assistant Miss Tanner (played with authoritarian zeal by Alida Valli). Argento presents these characters as responsible for some of the most shocking murders ever depicted in the history of horror cinema. For instance, in the opening showcase murder scene, the expelled student is stabbed to death and her mutilated body forced through a plate-glass window (killing her companion in the process). Other unfortunate victims of the witches’ murderous quest include the academy’s blind pianist (Flavio Bucci), who is stalked and then savaged by his own guide dog, while Suzy’s only friend in the school (played by Stefania Casini) becomes painfully entrapped in a room full of coiled wire before having her throat cut. It is only after Bannion has stumbled into the art-deco, lead lair of the Black Queen that the rotting horror of Helena Marcos’s existence is finally revealed and she is dispatched by the heroine as the dance academy erupts into flame. While the uncompromisingly grisly nature of the film’s murders ensured its shock value and instant cult status, Suspiria is also famous for the excessive visual style that Argento created as a backdrop. In particular, the film highlighted the director’s trademark features of disorientating camerawork, vivid use of 1 0 0 C U LT F ILMS

DIRECTOR Dario Argento PRODUCER Claudio Argento, Salvatore Argento WRITER Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi CINEMATOGRAPHY Luciano Tovoli EDITING Franco Fraticelli ORIGINAL MUSIC Dario Argento and Goblin PRINCIPAL CAST Jessica Harper, Eva Axén, Joan Bennett, Alida Valli, Flavio Bucci, Stefania Casini

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lighting and elaborate musical score (composed by his own house prog-rock group Goblin). In creating the look for the movie, Argento (and co-writer Daria Nicolodi) drew on a number of literary and cinematic influences, from the delirium-derived dialogues of Thomas De Quincey to the arthouse camera movements of Antonioni by way of the garish colour configurations of classic Disney cartoons such as Snow White (1937). The end result is a movie that is more arthouse than atrocity. As with all art cinema, Suspiria is a film that requires contemplation. Its surreal compositions emulate the feel of an artist’s canvas, with individual scenes being more aesthetically pleasing than the film as a whole. In characteristic Argento style, the most cinematically charged sequence is the opening murder scene, which is saturated with primary colours and a near-hysterical soundtrack. Both of these

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features are so overpowering as to distract the viewer from the gory activities unfolding in the scene. The unnerving force of the scene is once again testament to the director’s ability to manipulate every aspect of cinematic technology in his quest to expand the boundaries of horror cinema. In Suspiria, the distinctive visual style was achieved through the use of outdated Technicolor film stock, which. in flooding the image track with an unnatural, unrealistic sheen, achieved Argento’s aim of imbuing the film with a fairytale-like quality. Commenting on the cult status of Suspiria, Argento is often quoted as saying that he wanted to extend fear from a 375 degree Centigrade experience to 400 degrees. While the film perfectly captures the director’s desire to take the genre to new heights of sensory experience, his subsequent work has never equalled the dazzling heights of Suspiria. XM

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Tank Girl US, 1995 – 104 mins Rachel Talalay Does cult film’s preoccupation with the enjoyment of certain kinds of toughness, violence and sexualised portrayals of women mark it as masculine territory? For critic Joanne Hollows (2003) the answer is yes: cult film and fandom are drenched with machismo. As a consequence, female fandom is often not regarded as fully cultist, and feminist films do not inspire cult followings. To a large extent Hollows is right. Luckily, there are films such as Tank Girl to complicate the picture she paints. Based on a British cult comic-strip by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett (later part of the animated rock band Gorillaz), Tank Girl began as a female collaboration, between director Talalay and star Lori Petty (it also featured women in other key positions). Talalay had made a name as a producer for John Waters and as one of the forces behind the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Petty had developed a small but staunch following for portraying fighters and misfits – especially with Point Break. The story is set in a future wasteland, where water is a scarce commodity controlled by mega-corporation ‘Water and Power’. W&T is opposed by the foulmouthed, bitchy anti-heroine Tank Girl and her companion, Jet Girl (Naomi Watts), and by the Rippers, a mythical band of mutant kangaroo soldiers. Tank Girl’s reasons for opposing W&T are deeply personal; those of the Rippers appear revolutionary – though they often just seem to love violence. Tank Girl saves the planet’s water and, in a most provocative finale but perfectly in sync with her kick-ass attitude, plunges into a waterfall while flirting with her Ripper boyfriend as Joan Jett sings Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)’. Coincidentally or not, Tank Girl encountered a great deal of adversity. Production was complicated by a screenplay loaded with intertextual overkill. Shooting went over budget, and a few scenes had to be animated to tie loose ends together. Financier MGM-UA also decided to recut the film, virtually exterminating its tone and coherence. The film’s website (the most expensive at the time) tried hard to make Tank Girl teenand gadget-friendly, but failed. Upon release, the film was vilified by critics, who objected to its ‘relentless manic energy’, and condemned what they saw as gratuitous violence and sexuality. Feminist critics accused Tank Girl of making a joke out of women’s empowerment and of lacking a political cause; its rock feminism was seen as window dressing. One columnist compared it to pornography. Under such an onslaught, Tank Girl performed poorly at the box office, and Talalay’s and Petty’s careers suffered. Over time however, a reevaluation of Tank Girl took place. It was embraced by the very ‘Riot Grrrl’ subculture said to be exploited by the film’s appeal – but which was never given a voice in the original debate. As critics Imelda Whelehan and Esther Sonnet (1997) noted, for these fans Tank Girl’s flaws and contradictions are radical because they are both playful and political, not less empowering but more so because of the heterogeneity of positions they allow, especially with regard to sexuality. What is at stake, then, is less the ‘truth’ about Tank Girl’s feminism – or even the feminism of the viewers – and more the heightened awareness of ‘feminism’ as a tool for cult fandom. Isn’t that the meaning of the film’s tagline: ‘justice rides a tank and wears lip-gloss?’. EM 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Rachel Talalay WRITER Tedi Sarafian (story: Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett) CINEMATOGRAPHY Gale Tattersall PRODUCTION DESIGN Catherine Hardwicke EDITING James R. Symmons ORIGINAL MUSIC Graeme Revell (performers include Bjork, Hole, L-7, Joan Jett and Paul Westerberg) PRINCIPAL CAST Lori Petty, Naomi Watts, Malcolm McDowell, Ice-T, Iggy Pop

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Tetsuo Japan, 1989 – 67 mins Shinya Tsukamoto

Every so often, sci-fi fans will entertain the idea of the merger between the human body and mechanical machinery as a form of liberation. The idea lies at the heart of the cyberpunk movement of the early 1980s. Films such as Blade Runner*, Videodrome*, Akira* and Ghost in the Shell owe a fair share of their cult status to the ways in which they address this fusion. But few films problematise it as viscerally as Tetsuo, a film that eschews glossy, shiny equipment, whirring computers or neon lights, but instead presents the fusion between body and metal as both a dystopian promise and a nightmare of eternal pain. The story is that of a young man known as the ‘metal fetishist’, whose body has been infected by metal. In pain, the man is hit by a car and left for dead. But he survives and though he seems to be in constant terrible agony his metal-body has gained some mind-control capacities and he begins to torture the Salaryman and his girlfriend (the people whose car he was hit by). Soon, Salaryman too begins to transform and his body is invaded by metal parts. It starts with a razor blade on his cheek and it gradually gets worse – at one point his penis turns into a pneumatic drill (this is after he has been raped in a dream). The girlfriend gets impaled by the drill and dies. The fetishist shows Salaryman, who has now turned into Iron Man (a blubbering heap of scrap metal) a future vision of a world in which tentacle wires and molten metal distort and destroy humans – at least that is the impression one gets of a highly surrealist and occasionally nearly abstract scene. Though in extreme torment, the fetishist and Iron Man reluctantly join forces: they morph into a giant, grotesque metal-body, an assembly of crushed scrapyard pieces that also functions as a tank, and they decide to turn the world into metal and let it rust. In the final scene, their lethal scrap-metal machine races thunderously down the streets – to nowhere. Filmed in black-and-white 16mm, with a feverishly moving camera that favours a wide-angle lens (thereby enhancing the impression of aimless speed) and nervous editing, Tetsuo depicts the fusion of man and machine as a freak-out torture trip. It hurts like hell, and it looks disgusting – the closest cinema has come to the concept of the leaky, abject cyborg that Donna Haraway had proposed earlier in the 1980s. Thanks to its heavy use of stop-motion and its setting in an urban-tech environment Tetsuo sometimes has the look of an anime film, but with the grind and attitude of a horror movie and the dystopic message of a post-punk sci-fi film. One of the posters for the film compared the style to that of ‘the two Davids’: Lynch and Cronenberg. But aggressive industrial metal music (imagine Ministry or Nine Inch Nails), featured prominently in the film, is an equally good point of reference – Tetsuo proved trendsetting in that respect. Within its native Japan, Tetsuo became a small cult among mecha-otaku, hardcore fans of sci-fi anime who saw it as prophetic in its depiction of obsessions with technology. According to Annalee Newitz (1995), the metal fetishist is in fact himself a mecha-otaku, and she argues that his ordeal can be seen as a quest for 196

DIRECTOR Shinya Tsukamoto PRODUCER Shinya Tsukamoto WRITER Shinya Tsukamoto CINEMATOGRAPHY Kei Fujiwara, Shinya Tsukamoto EDITING Shinya Tsukamoto PRINCIPAL CAST Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Nobu Kanaoka, Shinya Tsukamoto

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one’s self in a world in which assembled and constructed identities prevail. It took Tetsuo several years before it became known outside Japan. Early 1992, the film toured the fan-friendly Méliès network of European fantasy and horror festivals, where its radical look astounded audiences. That success led to Parisian and New York

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releases. By the mid-1990s, and after a sequel added to the film’s visibility, Tetsuo had found a committed following. Still, because of its extreme imagery, and because of the challenging ramifications of its ideas, Tetsuo’s reach remains limited – a film about extreme obsessions, for the truly obsessed. EM

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre US, 1974 – 83 mins Tobe Hooper

Although relatively bloodless, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre provoked outrage and condemnation upon its in initial release in 1974. The film depicts a group of youngsters who stumble upon a cannibal family during a road trip to rural Texas. As a result, these innocent characters are dispatched in various gruesome ways. The film’s finale finds the heroine Sally Hardesty (played by Marilyn Burns) as the only remaining survivor of the group. Having witnessed the slaughter of her wheelchair-bound brother Franklin (Paul A. Partain) and been forced to endure both torture and humiliation at the cannibal clan’s home, she finally escapes (in a clearly deranged state) along the Texas highway. Here, the film suddenly ends with the film’s iconic killer Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) swinging his chainsaw against the sunrise as the narrative abruptly cuts out to a black masked frame. To the film’s many detractors, both the structure and content of the film exemplified a new low in talentless film-making. Several of its opponents derided the narrative’s illogical construction and abrupt ending, while condemning its visceral exploitation of unmotivated acts of rural barbarism. However, for its defenders, Tobe Hooper’s film represented an experimental and nihilistic genre breakthrough that could be considered from a number of different perspectives. Robin Wood (1979) famously argued that the film depicted the ‘Return of the Repressed’, by detailing the monstrous uprising of an abandoned rural underclass that takes unsuspecting middle-class college kids as its victims. For Wood, rather than relying on excessive gore or SFX to shock, it is an inability to distinguish ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ that remains at the disturbing core of Tobe Hooper’s film. In this respect, the film repeatedly used the cannibals’ practices, squabbles and preoccupations as a way of destabilising so-called ‘normal’, everyday practices. By directing its sources of terror towards the familiar, the film remains chillingly effective in drawing the close parallels between the so-called monster family and wider society. For instance, an unsettling link between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ is created through a series of connections between the cannibals and their intended prey. Central to this uncanny effect is the terrifically twitchy figure of Franklin. While established as a future victim of the cannibals, he also seems to share many of the traits of his aggressors. This connection is first established in an early scene where Sally and the group pick up a crazed hitchhiker (Ed Neil) at the side of the road. Although clearly coded as deranged, he instantly bonds with Franklin and the pair then discuss the most efficient methods of cattle slaughter (much to the disgust of the other passengers in the van). This scene establishes a series of uneasy parallels between the so-called monstrous and normal family structures, underscored by the way in which Hooper uses his mobile camera to separate the two characters visually from the other occupants of the van. Alongside the unnerving connections, Hooper’s film also employs experimental film techniques to further disorient and terrify its intended audience, from jump cuts and disorienting camerawork to the 198

DIRECTOR Tobe Hooper PRODUCER Tobe Hooper WRITER Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper CINEMATOGRAPHY Daniel Pearl EDITING Larry Carroll and Sallye Richardson ORIGINAL MUSIC Wayne Bell PRINCIPAL CAST Marilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen, Paul A. Partain, Ed Neil

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near-industrial collage effect created by Wayne Bell’s score (which emphasises violent elements clashing together, thus perfectly mirroring the central theme of the movie). With its shocking style and even more unsettling intentions, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

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remains an intense exercise in total horror whose impact has yet to be equalled by the slew of sequels and remakes that bear the same name. XM

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This Is Spın¨al Tap US, 1984 – 82 mins Rob Reiner

This Is Spın¨al Tap, a fake documentary about a heavy-metal band’s comeback tour of the US in 1982, introduced the term ‘rockumentary’ and demystified some of the heavy-handed veneration of rock-music culture. Tap was not the first film to ridicule rock. The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978), which featured the Beatles parody band the Rutles predates it, as does the Sex Pistols’ The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (1980). But Tap exceeds satire. Its love and respect for rock fans makes it a unique look into a vivid subculture that by the beginning of the 1980s had enveloped itself with an air of high seriousness and semi-religious adoration and that synthesised extravagant loudness, fashion, cosmetics and coiffure into ‘style’. The story follows documentary film-maker Marty DiBergi (director Rob Reiner) as he records the gigs and travails across the US of Spın¨al Tap (note the heavy-metal umlaut). He also interviews the band’s core duo, Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and David St Hubbins (Michael McKean), and their sardonic bass player Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), as well as their entourage. On the road, the band encounters every possible rock ’n’ roll cliché, including exploding drummers, anal-obsessed lyrics, bad reviews, dressing-room antics, sudden schedule changes (the cancellation of the Boston gig is greeted with ‘it’s not a big college town’) and malfunctioning stage designs – in a truly hilarious scene band members order a replica of Stonehenge to illustrate a ‘Druid’ song, but because they give the wrong measurements, only a tiny model is constructed, which belittles rather than aggrandises their performance. The tour spirals into chaos and Nigel and manager Ian (Tony Hendra) leave the band because they are unhappy with the ‘creative input’ of David’s girlfriend. But just as the Tap hit rockbottom, as the lower end of a double bill featuring a theme-park puppet show, the members reunite to embark on a new tour, of Japan. After a shaky theatrical release, Tap found a remarkably loyal fanbase on video. One of the most important elements of its appeal was that Tapheads, as they became known, balanced the film’s irony against its love for rock. Much of that comes from the film’s moderate approach. Given the real-life excess of rockmusic culture, Tap has to exercise restraint in its exposure of rock ’n’ roll clichés, and that gives the film a genuine, caring feel. Tap does not cannibalise or carnivalise its subject, but asks us to sympathise with this band of eccentric narcissists. When Nigel rejoins David on stage near the end, it is a truly moving scene. Next to that, Tap chooses accuracy over exaggeration. The attention to detail, and the competent performances and songs (especially the retro-songs ‘Give Me Some Money’ and ‘[Listen to the] Flower People’) demonstrate Tap’s fondness for rock-music conventions. In a marvellous book on Tap, Ethan De Seife (2007) points out that the film’s ‘two-pronged parodic attack’ relies on, and can sustain, fans’ deep knowledge of rock culture. It certainly helps to have micro-trivial familiarity with air-guitar role-playing, Gibson Flying V guitars and with the lesser bands in the new wave of British heavy metal or American ‘hair metal’ (Saxon, Ratt) to appreciate Tap. But Tap also offers viewers an option to repackage their fandom as ‘history’ long after the initial crush 200

DIRECTOR Rob Reiner PRODUCER Karen Murphy WRITERS Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer EDITING Kent Beyda, Kim Secrist ORIGINAL MUSIC Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer PRINCIPAL CAST Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Tony Hendra, Fran Drescher, Dana Carvey, Billy Crystal

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has ebbed away. As a result, fans see Tap equally as a joke, a testimony to a period of accelerated evolution in rock music and a nostalgic look into their own pre-ironic past. Tap’s operations have helped it to become a particular cult item among a number of rock-music bands, who often regard its viewing

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as a rite-of-passage experience. It has also spawned its own fan art, and the fictional band Spın¨al Tap has in turn given rise to tribute bands, such as Vinyl Tap, resulting in continued fact and fiction entanglement. EM

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Thriller: A Cruel Picture (Thriller – en grym film) Sweden, 1974 – 80 mins Bo Arne Vibenius

While some movies gain cult cachet for their flamboyant directorial flourishes, or their frenzied scenes of excess, others garner a reputation based on the iconic performances of their central leads. In recent years, cult cineastes have made a number of important advances in considering the role of the Eurotrash performer within previously marginal Italian paracinematic texts. Some examples of this tradition have explored the menacing persona of Eurocult icons such as Barbara Steele, as well as the representations of race and ethnicity evoked by performers such as Laura Gemser. Recent revisions to these performative accounts of the paracinematic have considered key icons from other European nations such as France, Spain and Sweden to significant effect. Arguably, the most influential and infamous performer to emerge from Sweden remains the erotic actress Christina Lindberg, whose roles in cult classics such as Thriller made her an icon for contemporary cult auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino. The actress was born in 1950 in Gothenburg before becoming incorporated into the ‘sexual revolution’ of the late 1960s, which saw her elevated from photographic ‘glamour’ model to become Sweden’s leading erotic soft-core performer of the 1970s. Between 1970 and 1974, Lindberg made eighteen films that confirmed her as a smouldering Eurocult icon, in a range of productions often fusing sex with social commentary on the changing Swedish society of the period. Building on her international status as a leading erotic pin-up, it is noticeable that many of these films were German productions, most noticeably her work for Walter Boos on the infamous Schulmädchen-Report (from 1970 on) series. Not only did Lindberg feature significantly in a range of such Eurocult productions during this era, but she also travelled to Japan to work with ‘Pink’ directors such as Norifumi Suzuki and Sadao Nakajima. Here, she completed two significant feature films in 1973: Sex and Fury (Furyô anego den: Inoshika Ochô) and The Pornstar Travels around Japan (Poruno no joô: Nippon sex ryokô), whose extreme images of sexy, swordwielding female avengers are often cited as influences on contemporary directors such as Quentin Tarantino. Arguably, it was Lindberg’s willingness to push the parameters of what was expected from the porno performance that led to her accepting the role as the lethal female vigilante Madeline in Bo Arne Vibenius’s Thriller (aka They Call Her One Eye, 1974). The film, instantly banned in Sweden due to its excessive depictions of sexual violence, casts Lindberg as a mute girl who is ensnared into a brutal world of enforced prostitution, drug addiction and violence at the hands of the suave but psychotic pimp Tony (played with chilling effect by Heinz Hopf). When Madeline attacks one of her clients in an early act of defiance, Tony brutally blinds the heroine by stabbing a scalpel into her eye. This scene (which reportedly featured a closeup of a human eye secured from a local morgue) gave Thriller its instant notoriety. Equally, subsequent images of Lindberg toting a shotgun while wearing a single black eyepatch also gave Thriller an enduring cult iconography and in part explain the genesis of the similarly disabled but potent female character of Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003). Even more than thirty-five years after 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Bo Arne Vibenius PRODUCER Bo Arne Vibenius WRITER Bo Arne Vibenius CINEMATOGRAPHY Andreas Bellis EDITING Brian Wikström ORIGINAL MUSIC Ralph Lundsten PRINCIPAL CAST Christina Lindberg, Heinz Hopf

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its controversial release, Thriller remains unconventional and uncomfortable viewing, not least because of Vibenius’s insistence on splicing hard-core footage (derived from a Swedish sex club) into the frequent scenes of Madeline’s abuse. As startling as these jarring shock inserts, is Lindberg’s towering performance in the film. Denied access to any dialogue in the fiction, she evokes the heroine’s predicament and eventual empowerment through a wide range of carefully orchestrated body gestures that lend genuine conviction to an otherwise difficult role. Paradoxically, the potential merits of this cult performance went unnoticed in Lindberg’s home country, where the politically attuned chattering classes saw the actress as a cause célèbre. As Lindberg commented recently in interview: ‘the Swedish feminists of the 1970s did have a picture of me, which they would throw darts at! I guess to them, I symbolised all that was bad with Swedish sexploitation cinema of the period.’ If Lindberg’s appearance in the movie generated a great deal of national debate, this performance was in part assisted by the

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unconventional film style with which Vibenius shot his heroine in Thriller. While the final scenes of Madeline taking revenge on her (male and female) oppressors are shot in extended slow-motion scenes, which betray a clear debt to Peckinpah and genre cinema, the colour codings, camera movement and use of naturalistic sound reveal a more distinct, more legitimate basis in European art cinema (doubtlessly inspired by the director’s training with Ingmar Bergman). The end result is a movie that is both shocking and thought-provoking and ultimately reveals an image of potent female vengeance rarely equalled in mainstream film. It is also a movie for which Lindberg remains characteristically unrepentant: Thriller did make an impact, and in a very good way. I feel that and I hope that I have given people something positive to consider in my films. Certainly, I never sought to portray women as victims or weak in any of my films. Instead they are a warning to men who do not realise the potential power women have.

XM

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Thundercrack! US, 1975 – 116 mins Curt McDowell

Thundercrack! has been described in the wildest terms, as ‘the hardest of hard-core pictures’, ‘the American dream recast in pansexual terms’ and ‘a demented parody of an era’s carnal abundance’. It is the best-known film of anarchic Bay Area artist Curt McDowell, who made it in partnership with his longtime collaborator and lover, New York trash-avant-gardist and gay activist, George Kuchar. The personalities of McDowell and Kuchar turned a story that would otherwise have been unadulterated garbage into a satirical deconstruction of conventions, an exercise in intentional tastelessness. Essentially, Thundercrack! is a genre riff, a pastiche of the rural Gothic thriller, the melodrama and the pornographic film. On a stormy night, a party of strangers seeks shelter in the old, isolated mansion of Mrs Gert Hammond (Marion Eaton, playing the part as an insane, alcoholic Joan Crawford). The strangers, four men and three women (and later also a gorilla) pass the time by sharing tragic stories. Among them are the tale of the death of a business owner’s wife (burnt by the girdles his company makes) and the forced love relationship between circus owner Bing (Kuchar) and female gorilla Medusa. Hardcore sex acts accompany the stories. At the end of the night the guests discover a locked door. Behind it they find Mrs Hammond’s deformed son (McDowell), of whom she had previously said he ‘no longer existed’. This complex and bizarre plot, and its murky black-and-white, dilapidated visual style made Thundercrack! near impossible to place. The film occasionally appeared on the midnight-movie circuit during the 1970s and 80s, where its tone of despair and queer metaphors (most obviously present in McDowell’s closeted part) found some admirers, but by and large it remained invisible. McDowell died of AIDS in 1987, at the age of forty-two. He did not live to see Thundercrack! reach some limited visibility through a mid-1990s video release on a variety of labels exploiting ‘extreme entertainment’ tastes. On such labels, the film often appeared in the company of Tokyo Decadence (1992) or Café Flesh*. Seen from today’s perspective, Thundercrack! is a salute to two forms of adventurous film-making that were both experiencing a downfall at the time. The first niche is that of the underground cinema. Films such as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures* and Mike and George Kuchar’s Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965) were clear inspirations to Thundercrack!. These films, at once ultra-serious and unbelievably campy, had been using explicit sexuality, excessive imagery and themes of freakery and abjection to challenge normality and convention, and Thundercrack! is an extreme extension of these obsessions. By the mid-70s, the fortunes of the radical underground film had turned and the circuit was shrinking dramatically. Thundercrack! was also an epilogue to the porn-chic wave that had made explicit hardcore sex films such as Behind the Green Door* and Deep Throat huge successes. The inspiration Thundercrack! drew from this wave was a negative one: its baroque excess supports not a celebration of sex but a descent into delirium; its sex is not athletic but pathetic, not arousing but nightmarish. In short, Thundercrack! was porn shock, and as such it presented a fitting end to porn chic. 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Curt McDowell PRODUCER Charles Thomas, John Thomas WRITER Mark Ellinger, George Kuchar, Curt McDowell CINEMATOGRAPHY Curt McDowell EDITING Curt McDowell ORIGINAL MUSIC Mark Ellinger PRINCIPAL CAST Marion Eaton, Melinda McDowell, George Kuchar, Mookie Blodgett, Ken Scudder, Bernie Boyle, Mark Ellinger, Laurie Hendricks

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In recent years, there has been a slight revival of interest in the films of McDowell. Screenings of Thundercrack! have been increasing steadily and there are rumours about DVD releases. McDowell’s other films – mostly provocative 16mm shorts such as Siamese Twin

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Pinheads (1972), Stinkybutt (1974) and Boggy Depot (1973), the latter a demented rural opera-musical have even attracted some attention. It may not be long now before the ultra-cult reputation of McDowell will be fully exposed. EM

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El Topo Mexico, 1970 – 125 min Alejandro Jodorowsky

From his early days as a cult fan, Quentin Tarantino fondly remembers El Topo: ‘One of us would get a copy, a horrible, screwed up one – the more screwed up it was the cooler it was – we’d sit around and watch this ripped, crappy old copy of El Topo. Oh boy!’ For the longest time, El Topo was a rarity, a myth. ‘There was no way you could see it’, recalls Tarantino, and that was precisely ‘the cult of it’. There is another reason for its status too. As a mind-altering trip through an alternative universe, El Topo perfectly embodies the spirit of the end of the 1960s, a period to which it is also a eulogy. The combination of its scarcity and its reputation as a cultural marker have made it one of the most legendary cult films ever. The genesis of El Topo lies in the transgressive art of director, theatre-maker, comic-book writer and puppeteer Jodorowsky. Much of Jodorowsky’s work is influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Antonin Artaud’s ideas about the liberating powers of violence. With Fernando Arrabal and Roland Torpor, Jodorowsky formed a group called the ‘Panic Movement’ in 1963, which embraced irrationality, mysticism and absurdity, and staged controversial plays and happenings. For Jodorowsky, art should assault the spectator with chaotic acts and symbols that bypass rational levels of meaning and connect with the viewer in a more visceral, mystical manner. This philosophy fed into his first feature film, Fando y Lis (1968), which was promptly banned. Jodorowsky took his next film El Topo to the US to help it avoid the same fate. At its most basic, El Topo is a hybrid between a Spaghetti Western-on-acid, a surrealist nightmare and a religious prophecy. Jodorowsky himself plays El Topo (the mole), a black-clad gunslinger who, after declaring himself God and killing a gang of bandits, abandons his son for a woman named Mara. El Topo is structured into four chapters which reference the Bible, Sufism, Taoism and Zen. In the first two chapters, El Topo rushes from challenge to challenge. But after he is faced with a victim who kills himself to reveal the worthlessness of life, El Topo suffers a spiritual awakening. He is shot by a woman who has recently joined him and Mara. In the latter two stages El Topo is resurrected by a band of deformed outcasts imprisoned in a cave. When he liberates the underground community and leads them into the town they had been banished from, they are massacred. Enraged, El Topo avenges them, after which he sets himself on fire in an act of self-immolation. The only survivors – El Topo’s son, the female dwarf and her newly born son (El Topo’s too?) – bury him and ride out of town. Throughout, El Topo abounds with heavy surrealist and esoteric symbolism, including shoe fetishes, graves made of bees and white rabbits. It also features frequent sexual imagery, sudden blasts of violence and plenty of references to 1960s politics. Deformed outsiders of all stripes and flavours call analogies with the oppressed into mind. El Topo’s circular narrative is indebted to Nietzsche, referring to his idea of ‘eternal recurrence’, in which history is not a linear progression, but a cyclical series of shifting repetitions. Jodorowsky was, in particular, inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1892). El Topo emerges from the underground cave, recalling how Zarathustra himself emerges from mountain solitude to 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Alejandro Jodorowsky PRODUCER Mick Gochanour, Juan Lopez Moctezuma, Moshe Rosemberg, Saul Rosemberg, Robert Viskin WRITER Alejandro Jodorowsky EDITING Federico Landeros ORIGINAL MUSIC Alejandro Jodorowsky, Nacho Mendez PRINCIPAL CAST Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Alfonso Arau, Mara Lorenzio, David Silva, Paula Romo, Robert John

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preach to the people. And, like Zarathustra, El Topo manages to overcome his ego in order to attain the state of a ‘superman’ – someone who can die only by his own hand. Initially El Topo failed to find a distributor. Jodorowsky peddled it everywhere in New York before it was programmed at the Elgin Theatre, at midnight. As the former owners of the Elgin, Chuck Zlatin and Steve Gould, recall, the original screening was designed to be an underground, invitation-only event: ‘And it really worked, the whole way of showing it. The time was right.’ Solely through word of mouth it began to build up a committed following of repeat viewers, among them John Lennon. El Topo played for six months at the Elgin before it was purchased by Allen Klein, Lennon’s manager, who began to book it into more mainstream outlets. This move into the mainstream opened the film, and its fans, to hostility, especially from critics. Because this critical venom, however, only spilled from the newspaper pages after the film had already developed a cult following, this alienation of taste guardians only bolstered its reputation. Furthermore, El Topo was not meant to meet the conventions by which audiences consume films. As Parker Tyler (1970) noted, the El Topo experience became the quintessential ‘cult

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for pot-smoking and otherwise stoned hippies’. The midnight-movie slot at the Elgin was a perfect permissive, communal setting (with many people consuming hashish or LSD) for the film to become something to be experienced. Because of its stubborn followers El Topo quickly secured its place within the cult-cinema canon as the film that kickstarted the heydays of the midnight-movie phenomenon. After a few years, Klein began to limit circulation of the film, and soon El Topo became, as Tarantino found out, ‘the sort of film that you couldn’t see’. That scarcity lasted for a long time, and in that period El Topo grew to become the very embodiment of the legend of the midnight cult film: elusive, dangerous, speaking a truth that was suppressed by the establishment. Finally, in 2007, a DVD box set was released that opened the cult of El Topo to wider audiences. However, this renewed visibility has not led to a change in reputation. El Topo’s significance now lies in how it captured an oppositional zeitgeist, how its metaphors brought the upheaval of the late 60s from the streets into the theatres at a time when actual political action retreated into sectarianism – a cyclical process that is neatly mirrored in El Topo’s own quest. EM

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The Toxic Avenger US, 1984 – 87 mins Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman

With their uneasy blend of sick humour, bodily fluids and diverse displays of gross-out, the films of New York cult icon Lloyd Kaufman have frequently outraged critics and in a manner similar to the offensive early efforts of John Waters. Working through his independent production house ‘Troma Pictures’, Kaufman and longterm associate Michael Herz have developed a novel approach to a vertically integrated cult empire, not only creating cult movies, but also handling their distribution, as well as exhibition through industry side-swiping events such as the ‘Troma-dance’ film festival. Despite an often chaotic back catalogue, Kaufman’s productions repeatedly trade on grotesque and humorous depictions of the body (often subverting masculine and ‘body beautiful’ ideals), while also using pointed political commentary and established cinema motifs for parodic purposes. Kaufman’s 1984 codirectorial debut The Toxic Avenger trades on multiple images of unruly feasts, riotous gatherings and body secretions (notably blood, semen, excrement and toxic urine), as well as depictions of the grotesque body in a variety of incarnations. These unsavoury images are stitched together in a format that fuses parodic film references (e.g., to old Chaplin movies and 1930s ‘cliffhanger’ serials) with nods to experimental underground techniques (including a ‘toxic transformation’ with colour codings straight out of Stan Brakhage). The film focuses on the trials and transformations of Melvin (Mark Torgl), the effeminate and terrorised toilet attendant at the Tromaville Health Club. When Melvin is dropped into a vat of nuclear waste by the body-building tyrant Bozo (Gary Schneider), he becomes an atomically (and anatomically) deformed superhero whose quest to defend the citizens of Tromaville from political corruption and violent crime clearly parodies the norms, ideals and values associated with the American dream. For instance, despite setting the film in a health spa, The Toxic Avenger continually degrades and displaces the notions of bodily integrity that such locales promote. As the viewer discovers, it is implied that Tromaville’s corporeal and corrupt Mayor Belgoody (Pat Ryan) has been allowing the illegal dumping of toxic waste in suburban areas, thus ensuring human decay and infection. In this environment, it is the grotesque, comic frame that comes to replace the body beautiful. Indeed, Kaufman and Herz populate their narrative with a catalogue of cult grotesquery comparable to those created by John Waters. From the gargantuan, slob-like and food-obsessed figures such as Belgoody (whose excessive orality is signified by his insistence on eating fast food while receiving an erotic massage), to emaciated males such as Melvin, whose meagre frame and jerky, uncoordinated gestures contradict the healthy images of masculinity that the film seems keen to critique. Importantly, even after Melvin’s transformation into a pumped-up, but decaying superhuman defender, these contradictions surrounding the masculine ideal seem to be undercut by the element of 210

DIRECTOR Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman PRODUCER Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman WRITER Lloyd Kaufman, Joe Ritter CINEMATOGRAPHY Lloyd Kaufman, James A. Lebovitz EDITING Richard Haines ORIGINAL MUSIC Mark Hoffman PRINCIPAL CAST Mark Torgl, Pat Ryan, Andree Maranda, Jennifer Prichard, Cindy Manion, Gary Schneider

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

gender ambiguity that surrounds his heroic status. For instance, the scene that involves Melvin’s transformation into the Toxic Avenger involves the character being cajoled into donning a pink leotard and tutu in the belief that he is about to experience a sexual encounter with Bozo’s female accomplice in the locker room. Although Melvin’s subsequent toxic makeover results in a newly hyper-masculine appearance, his chemical fusion also results in the permanent moulding of the ‘feminine’ health club tutu onto his flesh. As a result, his body connotes a grotesque excess of both male and female signifiers that rival the transgendered glory of Divine in John Waters’s early productions. While the gender constructions of these toxic antiheroes may remain ambivalent, the social ramifications of their appearance remain 100 CULT FILMS

unambiguous, with Kaufman seeing a clear political metaphor behind Tromaville: Basically, my movies are set in the same small town of Tromaville and the people there are perfectly able to govern themselves … unfortunately the people of Tromaville find that they fall victim to a conspiracy of elites: the labour elite, the bureaucratic elite and the corporate elite and all three of these conspire together to undermine the ordinary people of this fictional town. Sometimes the little people of Tromaville need the Toxic Avenger to get rid of this conspiracy of elites, sometimes Sargent Kabukiman NYPD has to save the day and sometimes the little people of Tromaville have to take matters into their own hands as they did in Troma’s War.

XM

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Two-Lane Blacktop US, 1971 – 103 mins Monte Hellman

‘Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.’ This line from Kris Kristofferson’s song ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ has become identified with the experience presented in Two-Lane Blacktop – a film that gives insight by refusing to comment. Blacktop does not hand out themes or messages, it does not instruct or recruit its viewers into anything, nothing is gained and nothing is produced. It embraces nothingness as the ultimate freedom. Most road movies are about people finding their identity through the vehicle of the car. But Blacktop is not really interested in learning about people’s feelings. We find out more about the Chevy 55 (known as The Car) than its operators, who do not even have names. They are known only by their function, The Driver and The Mechanic, and their parts are played by non-professional actors: singer-songwriter James Taylor and the drummer of the Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson. At the start of Blacktop a full five minutes go by without a word spoken, without music, with no sound other than the revving of engines, a muttering car radio and a briefly stumbled ‘there’, for directions. When The Driver and The Mechanic speak, they talk in car jargon, or in brief spurts, and they avoid opening up at all costs. Nor does Blacktop present any big metaphors for America – the possible exceptions being apathy and existentialist meaninglessness. Even the plot is so thin that there is hardly any narrative progression. Driving from Los Angeles to the East Coast along Route 66, the Chevy 55 is challenged into a race with a Pontiac GTO (its driver, played by Warren Oates, is only known as GTO). Soon, however, the race is abandoned, as are all other goals temporarily pursued in the film. Even The Girl (Laurie Bird), who causes a rift between The Driver and The Mechanic, abandons the film. None of the characters ever gets to any of the cities they mention. ‘Columbus, Ohio?’ suggests The Driver; ‘No good’ is the curt reply of The Girl, and she takes off with a biker. Dialogue is sparse. Most of what GTO says is untrue anyway. Music is only used sparingly too, though ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, ‘Hit the Road, Jack’ and The Doors’ ‘Moonlight Drive’ all make pointed appearances. ‘Here’s to destruction’, says GTO to The Driver during a nightly drink. Blacktop takes this remark seriously. The directionless, elliptical runs of tracks, street races and scenic drives stop abruptly, when, during a race, everything quiets, the camera slows down, stops and the film stock appears to burn in the projector. For the longest time, Blacktop has remained, just like The Car at the end of the film, suspended outside of time. Hyped as the new Easy Rider (1969) and released, amid a wave of other road movies such as Vanishing Point (1971) and Duel, it was met with high expectations. Audiences and critics sought deep metaphors and explications that Blacktop did not deliver. It received mixed reviews and such disappointing box office that it nearly ended the career of director Monte Hellman (a former protégé of Roger Corman). Thereafter, Blacktop quickly left the public eye and in spite of occasional screenings, and the sad suicide of Laurie Bird, it disappeared into oblivion. But its cult grew, made up of fans who saw it as a depiction of the 212

DIRECTOR Monte Hellman PRODUCER Michael Laughlin, Gary Kurtz WRITER Rudy Wurlitzer, Will Cory, Floyd Mutrux CINEMATOGRAPHY Jack Deerson, Gregory Sandor EDITING Monte Hellman ORIGINAL MUSIC Billy James PRINCIPAL CAST James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton, Laurie Bird

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

true, opaque and evaporating America, ‘in which everyone is lost, unable to find themselves’, as Jason Wood (2007) put it. Despite fan petitions, obstacles from distributors and rights holders prevented any home-viewing release for decades. Since the 1999 DVD release, Blacktop has finally re-entered culture. It is now easily available in an

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edition that is almost too luxurious. All the extra baggage refuses once more to let the film be what its fans want it to be – minimalist, aimless, nomadic and awkward, void of prescribed meaning so it can be matched with our own fantasies – to meet, as the last line in the film goes, our own hollow ‘permanent satisfactions’. EM

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Two Thousand Maniacs! US, 1964 – 87 mins Herschell Gordon Lewis

Working with exploitation entrepreneur David F. Friedman, American director Herschell Gordon Lewis pioneered a series of 1960s shockers that punctuated surreal narrative structures with effectively realised gore inserts. Some of these seminal titles included Blood Feast (1963), The Gruesome Twosome (1967) and The Gore-Gore Girls (1972). For those fortunate to have seen any of Lewis’s productions, it is specific (splatter) scenes rather than the narrative as a whole that imprint themselves on the viewer’s memory. In the case of Blood Feast, the forced extraction of a female victim’s tongue by a crazed killer gained the film instant notoriety, as well as securing its longtime outlaw status on the UK ‘video nasty’ list. Although these films were clearly saturated with gouts of blood, they also featured a startling film style where bodily dismemberment jostled for attention with distinctly realised film frames. In this respect, it comes as little surprise to find the title of Lewis’s 1965 film is Color Me Blood Red. Although this tale revolves around a crazed artist who starts using blood instead of paint to create his works of art, the title applies as much to Lewis’s distinctive celluloid palates, as to any of his crazed fictional creations. While the typical Lewis production pushed the image track into frenzied and gruesome overload, his productions were also marked by high-pitched and hysterical soundtracks that the director frequently scored himself as a way of keeping production costs to a minimum. For instance, in Blood Feast, he composed a near tuneless, experimental bass drum score to accompany the devilish crimes of Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold), an ‘exotic Egyptian caterer’ who is using prime slices of American womanhood to revive his long dead love. It is a similar fusion of on-screen scares and a distinctive musical score that also dominates Two Thousand Maniacs! Here, Lewis turned in a fast-tempo, high-tension, hillbilly soundtrack to accompany the tale of a set of suburban thrillseekers who get waylaid and wasted by a town of Southern degenerates celebrating a centenary of local carnage. To accompany these morbid music moments (often realised in a self-reflexive address to the camera), Lewis even concocted a series of fiendish torture weapons to be used by the crazed country bumpkins who populate the film. These included a barrel full of spikes in which one poor, unfortunate, Brylcreemed beefcake is forced to lie, before being rolled down a hill in order to maximise his suffering. The city-slicker-as-victim’s female partner fares little better, being fêted in the town square by the locals before being crushed by a giant boulder rolled onto her from a high crane tower above. Although Gordon Lewis’s maverick production tendencies and quest to expose the viewer to new heights of visceral overload made him an easy target for critics, his movies retain an archaic charm lacking from other splatter productions produced in the decade. Indeed, despite their swinging 60s locations, moods and design, the films appeared curiously dated, partly due to the static and semi-silent audiovisual processes they employed, which perfectly capture the spirit of Tom Gunning’s (1990) ‘cinema of attractions’ vaudeville 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Herschell Gordon Lewis PRODUCER David F. Friedman WRITER Herschell Gordon Lewis CINEMATOGRAPHY Herschell Gordon Lewis EDITING Robert Sinise ORIGINAL MUSIC Larry Wellington PRINCIPAL CAST Connie Mason, William Kerwin, Jeffrey Allen

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film aesthetic. At the level of content, Lewis further eschews the contemporary by fixating on established tropes of fear within the American psyche. In the case of Two Thousand Maniacs!, the film highlights the long-established trait of ‘hicksploitation’, or the dangers of the dispossessed rural poor, which gains cult credence when placed in close proximity to the urban, civilised American. As Lewis has himself commented: Someone can go from New York to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Miami and not be in the least bit uncomfortable. But if your automobile breaks down in the middle of some rural area and some local comes along and says, (adopting Southern accent) ‘Help you with your car mister?’ At that moment, fear suddenly emerges.

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The traits of hicksploitation (which were evidenced in reality through controversial, eugenic-based studies and pseudo-scientific social policy), also highlighted a gender distinction to rural perversity by contrasting the features of ramshackle male indolence with unabashed female sexuality in the Southern dweller. Lewis perfectly manages to capture these various demarcations in the catalogue of rural typage, with his static camera displays of Southern physiology often appearing as if ethnographic study, rather than exploitation exposé. While it is possible to see a trajectory from this film to the growth of the American backwoods horror movie of the 1970s, the high-pitched battlecry of ‘The South’s Gonna Rise Again’ which dominated the soundtrack to Lewis’s production was itself revitalised in the Eli Roth-produced sequel 2001 Maniacs (Tim Sullivan, 2005). XM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

The Vanishing The Netherlands, 1988 – 107 mins George Sluizer

The figure of the random abductor and murderer from folklore tales and urban legend has a deep resonance in cult cinema. So does the figure of the killer as a self-perceived Übermensch who tries to assert his superiority through the murder of innocents, and who claims he ‘gives them what they really want’. These killers often display what Mark Seltzer (1998) has called a ‘leaky self’: they can only sustain their own existence through the ‘ownership’ of others, and their methodic preparations for heinous crimes resemble the production of labour that is typical for capitalism. In Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), Dutch thriller The Vanishing possesses such a calculated and evil creature. He abducts Saskia (Johanna Ter Steege) from a service station where she and her boyfriend Rex (Gene Bervoets) have stopped for gas. Three years later, Rex is contacted by Lemorne and brought to France, only to discover, with the viewer, that what appeared to be a crime of near perfection, was in fact one big coincidence. Saskia was not the victim Lemorne rehearsed for. She just happened upon him. But Lemorne is a great seizer of opportunities and Rex too is soon experiencing what Saskia felt – buried alive, he slowly sees the flame of his lighter die. More than the suspense of the story, it is the many tiny unsettling moments that give The Vanishing an eerie mood of lingering doom. Lengthy flashbacks show the details of Lemorne’s preparation. We witness him triggering his wife and two daughters into a game of ‘piercing screams’ while they are at their vacation home in the countryside. Later, Lemorne jokingly rehearses his abduction method with one of his daughters. But the mood of doom is not limited to Lemorne. Even before the abduction, there is the faint smile on Rex’s face when he leaves Saskia behind in the dark after their car has broken down in a tunnel (a metaphor for the start of her hellish ordeal). ‘I liked it when you called my name’, admits Rex later, even though he knows very well she finds loneliness unbearable – a nightmare she recounts predicts they will meet, each of them encased, entombed in a ‘golden egg’ from which they cannot break free. The Vanishing predates a string of serial-killer movies of which Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990) is the most notorious and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) the most successful. Yet its subdued tone and its lack of spectacle meant it remained largely overlooked. It was only after the release of a Hollywood remake, also directed by Sluizer but with significant changes to the narrative, that The Vanishing developed a cult following. The loss of complexity and ambiguity in the remake rendered the original more unique, and as a result it became a treasured film for fans wanting something aside from Hannibal Lecter. The film also benefited from a spike in attention for films from Belgium and the Netherlands – compatriot cult films Crazy Love (1987) and Man Bites Dog* broach similar themes of abduction and repressed sexuality. According to Steven Jay Schneider (2004), Rex’s open admiration for the killer and his willing submission to Lemorne’s invitation to ‘experience’ Saskia’s ordeal lend the film a 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR George Sluizer PRODUCER Anne Lordon, George Sluizer WRITER George Sluizer, Tim Krabbé (book by Tim Krabbé) CINEMATOGRAPHY Tony Kuhn EDITING Lin Friedman, George Sluizer ORIGINAL MUSIC Henny Vrienten PRINCIPAL CAST Gene Bervoets, Johanna Ter Steege, Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gwen Eckhaus, Bernadette Le Saché

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homoerotic subtext, one that he also observes in the Dutch films of Paul Verhoeven. Lemorne is Satan fulfilling the secret wish Rex had in the tunnel: to be the ultimate object of someone’s desire. After

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all, he admits, his search for Saskia is not really an attempt to find her; it is more ‘a homage to the vanished loved one’. With Lemorne he finally becomes that object. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Videodrome Canada, 1983 – 87 mins David Cronenberg

Most science-fiction films never see their Utopia or dystopia become real, and the few that do appear outdated. Not so for sci-fi-horror hybrid Videodrome. Its speculations on virtual reality, first-person shooter games, twenty-four-hour surveillance, reality TV, torture porn, convergence culture, media piracy and payper-view pornography are all part of our world now, engrained in the media landscape of which the film is so critical. The story is centred on controversial television-station owner Max Renn (James Woods). Max is in search of ‘nasty, tough’ material for his niche broadcasts. A media pirate introduces him to the illegal torture show ‘Videodrome’, which is so powerful it sends him into hallucination. Soon, Max believes he is part of an ultra-paranoid plot, pushed around by shady figures and media prophets competing for control over the viewer’s mind. Max becomes violent, and eventually his body mutates. A slit appears in his stomach, for VCR insertion; and a gun grinds itself into his arm. He assassinates several people, retreats into isolation and commits suicide. The overt theme of Videodrome is perception. Throughout the story Max finds himself in situations that confirm there is no truth outside one’s perception. ‘There is nothing real outside our perception of reality’, states one of the film’s most enigmatic characters, Professor Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley). Media that point to this message abound in Videodrome: on screens, on office walls, at home, in stores, in the street – almost each scene sees Max try a new method or device for seeing reality, yet the harder he tries the less of the truth he sees. At the climax of the film, as a delusional Max guns down what he thinks (perceives) to be opponents during a trade show organised by a corporation called Spectacular Optical, the stage is replete with slogans such as ‘love comes in at the eye’ and ‘the eye is the window of the soul’. As if to ensure there are obstacles to any unfiltered perception, Videodrome has a subtext of overstimulation and messiness. We ‘crave stimulation for its own sake’, says radio personality Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry) during a television-show panel discussion with Max. She adds: ‘I live in a highly excited state of overstimulation.’ This overstimulation translates itself into messiness – overcrowded frames. As the plot becomes gradually more muddled, and Max gets more messed up, more clutter appears. Some of this clutter contains ingenious comments, by association more than by inference, on pop culture, for instance in the cameo appearances of pop-rock star Deborah Harry (from the band Blondie), or of radio host Reiner Schwartz. In the rubble of the dense networks and connections of these little appearances lies the film’s true meaning: Videodrome’s network media do not so much send a directive about perception as bury the viewer under endlessly interconnected mindless bits of perceptions. Not the perception of violence makes Max mad, but the fact that he cannot tear himself away from any overstimulated perception. It feeds his paranoia and becomes his drug. There is only one location that is ‘clean’ (though not spotlessly shiny), and that is the 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR David Cronenberg PRODUCER Claude Héroux, Pierre David, Victor Solnicki WRITER David Cronenberg CINEMATOGRAPHY Mark Irwin SPECIAL EFFECTS Rick Baker, Mark Shostrom EDITING Ron Sanders ORIGINAL MUSIC Howard Shore PRINCIPAL CAST James Woods, Deborah Harry, Sonja Smits, Peter Dvorsky, Leslie Carlson, Jack Creley, Lynne Gorman, Reiner Schwartz

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renaissance room of Videodrome’s main opponents the O’Blivions, a sanctuary from a media-infested real world, where they defiantly try to preserve art treasures from contamination. Videodrome had almost no release at all. At disastrous test screenings audiences reacted adversely to some of the horrific imagery. By Cronenberg’s standards that imagery is rather restrained, with the exception of visual effects (supervised by Rick Baker) such as the gunarm or the slit in Max’s stomach, which are still worthy of the Baron of Blood – Cronenberg’s nickname in the cult of horror’s hall of fame. Still, distributor Universal forced Cronenberg to re-edit the ending, an intervention that further muddied the film’s resolution. Instead of following the tested procedure of distributing Videodrome location by location, Universal also insisted on a blanket release. It led to disappointing box-office results. A hastily composed publicity campaign was largely ineffective, though it produced a gem of an endorsement from Andy Warhol, who called Videodrome ‘the Clockwork Orange of the 1980s’. Before the film had a chance to sediment into markets, Universal pulled it from theatres. It was not until Cronenberg’s next project, the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone (1983), became

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successful that Videodrome regained some attention. It was inserted into a few European festivals that screened The Dead Zone, and astonished critics praised it as a masterpiece. Gradually, Videodrome built a loyal fan following through video rentals and cable broadcasts. By the time Cronenberg had become a cultural hero (and an established subject of academic scholarship), Videodrome was enjoying a cult status as his most personal statement. Cronenberg himself called it his first-person film. That status was soon solidified through an elaborate and prestigious DVD release, and through homages in a string of horror and science-fiction films of a new generation of filmmakers for whom Videodrome had totemic significance. Since Videodrome, Cronenberg has let his subject matter be dictated by external, mostly literary sources. It brought him a lot of prestige. But for cult fans it is more important that Videodrome remains Cronenberg’s last real original screenplay (his 1999 mini-cult film eXistenz, for many a Videodrome-lite, is only technically an exception). In that sense too the film assumes the identity of a prophet. In line with the argument of Prof. O’Blivion, Videodrome retains its enigma as long as its cult fans perceive it as such. EM

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The Warriors US, 1979 – 93 mins Walter Hill

On the surface The Warriors is a film about street gangs in New York. The Warriors are a gang from Coney Island, which is invited to join a revolution of the major gangs of New York. After the revolution’s leader, Rufus, is assassinated, the Warriors are wrongly accused of the murder and, as they are being hunted down by all the other gangs, they have to fight their way back to their own turf. Several of their members succumb to attacks, including their leader, but as the sun rises again they reach the beach – home. To call Warriors simplistic is to miss the brilliance of its imbalances. It is inviting to see in this story a metaphor for the US in the 1960s and 70s – for the Vietnam war, civil rights struggle and political violence, but also for the precarious situation of New York City, a city that in the 70s was seen as dirty, dangerous and destitute, a cesspool of decadence at the brink of the apocalypse. The locations in which Warriors is set reinforce this impression. Streets are littered with garbage; subway trains are soiled with graffiti; the few citizens that come out at night look ravaged. At the same time Warriors is more than just a document of its era – it is epic, heroic and relentlessly frenetic. The direct inspiration for Warriors comes from a 1965 novel by Sol Yurick. But the more prominent influence was the ancient Greek account Anabasis, written by Xenophon. Anabasis tells of the journey of the Ten Thousand, a group of Greek mercenaries who had to fight their way back to the sea. Warriors retained much of that original tale – and it showed more respect and admiration for the plight of the warriors than the 1965 book. Hill turns the Warriors into mythical archetypes. To that effect, the film also uses names that plug directly into history and mythology, such as Swan, Ajax, Rembrandt, Cochise, Cowboy, Masai and Luther. The Warriors’ leader Cleon (Dorsey Wright), for instance, was historically known for his aversion to nobility, a trait that neatly fits proletarian gangs. Within this core structure are mixed various other themes and styles. Warriors has the swagger of a blaxploitation film, and the frontier motif of a Western. It is equally a city symphony or, better, a subway symphony, because much of the journey occurs along the tracks of New York’s iconic transport system. For its physical confrontations Warriors borrows from the martial-arts film, but also from the musical; its visceral choreography is superior to that in Grease and West Side Story, two other films that entertain street-gang aesthetics. It has the class critique, desolation and meanness of a zombie film. As Danny Peary (1981) notes, it is also a sporting contest, ‘analogous to a baseball game’. A play-by-play announcer, who calls the gang ‘minor leaguers’, comments on the Warriors’ journey home. Only after they beat the Baseball Furies (one of the fiercest rivals they confront, outfitted as a cross between the New York Yankees and a Gothic heavy-metal band) do they earn respect. Warriors adopted a comic-book style to depict the visual make-up of the gangs and their fights. Indeed, the look of the gangs is one of the main attractions of the film. Next to the Furies, there are the Mime Gang (straight from A Clockwork Orange, 1971), the Pimps in their disco-glitter ballroom suits, the all-female, lesbian Lizzies, the menacing, black-clad Grammercy Riffs, the skinhead Turnbull ACs, 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Walter Hill PRODUCER Lawrence Gordon WRITER Walter Hill (books: Sol Yurick, Xenophon) CINEMATOGRAPHY Andrew Laszlo EDITING David Holden ORIGINAL MUSIC Barry De Vorzon PRINCIPAL CAST Michael Beck, Deborah Van Valkenburgh, James Remar, David Patrick Kelly, Thomas Waites, Dorsey Wright, Brian Tyler, David Harris, Marcelino Sanchez

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the low-life Orphans (‘so far down they ain’t even on the map’), the rollerblading Punks and the real assassins of Rufus, the psychotic Rogues. Such a loaded plate creates imbalances – are we watching war or play? The frenetic pace, the swooshing editing and cinematography and highly varied use of bright colours suggest this is entertainment. The story suggests differently. This ambiguity is captured in the chilling trademark line from the film: when Rogue leader Luther (David Patrick Kelly) challenges the Warriors to fight, his whining, shrill voice calls out as he clangs on some bottles: ‘Waaaaariors, come out to plaaaay.’ The release of Warriors was supported by a controversial publicity campaign: a poster depicting a crowd of gang members read ‘These are the armies of the night. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City.’ After scuffles broke out at

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screenings manipulated by the press into a hysteria about riots, distributor Paramount withdrew further promotion. But the seeds for an adverse reaction had been sown. To some extent, the film has been trivialised by its adoption by pop culture at large (Michael Jackson’s video Beat It, 1983). Critics also keep denouncing the film for its simplicity. At points it does seem like Warriors races from set-piece to set-piece without much pause for thought. Dialogue is wooden, cliché-laden. But Warriors can only be accused of anti-intellectualism, and of nihilism, in the same way as the punk movement or real-life street gangs. To do so is to miss the tragedy of the situation the Warriors are in: only the rush of the very present (the next run, fight or thrill) can keep them going. The moment any of them pauses, they are eliminated – exactly what happens to Ajax (James Remar). For the Warriors, there is no future, only the ‘life that’s left’. EM

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Witchfinder General UK, 1968 – 86 mins Michael Reeves

Having already directed the Eurotrash monster fest The She Beast (La sorella di Satana, 1966), British-born Michael Reeves returned to the UK, and established himself as a significant director with two works that screamed across the late 60s horror scene. The first of these productions was The Sorcerers (1967), which paired former Universal horror icon Boris Karloff with Catherine Lacey, as a perverse elderly couple able to implant murderous thoughts into the mind of a disenfranchised beatnik, played by Ian Ogilvy. The film’s theme of the violent discontinuity between the established and upcoming generations played well in the era of late 1960s countercultural politics, and set the scene for Reeves’s next cinematic masterpiece: Witchfinder General. This film (the second that Reeves was to helm for Tony Tenser’s exploitation outfit Tigon Films), once again explores the theme of sadistic manipulation between the generations in its characterisation of Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price), an ageing lawyer turned religious zealot, who roams the seventeenth-century Norfolk countryside orchestrating witch hunts with his licentious assistant Stearne (Robert Russell). Using the English Civil War to whip up local uncertainties and rural misconceptions in the town of Brandeston, the pair accuse the local priest John Lowes (Rupert Davies) of idolatry, as well as of abusing his naive niece Sara (Hilary Dwyer), who attempts to save her innocent relative by offering sexual favours to her perverse confessor. When she is later raped by the jealous Stearne, and Lowes is tortured and hung at Hopkins’s request, the pair arouse the wrath of Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy), Sara’s suitor and a serving army officer. The scene where Marshall performs an illegitimate marriage ceremony to Sara in her uncle’s ransacked church indicates the stark examination of moral decay underpinning Reeves’s nihilistic narrative. It is Marshall’s revenge quest to destroy the ‘Witchfinder General’ as Hopkins becomes known, that occupies the remaining running time of the movie, though Reeves counterbalances this personal pursuit with wider subplots detailing the visceral tortures enacted by Hopkins and Stearne. In the film’s grisly finale, Hopkins imprisons Sara and Marshall in a tower in an attempt to torture confessions of devilry out of the pair. As the soldier’s colleagues come to rescue the pair, they are horrified to discover that Marshall has managed to overpower his oppressors and is hacking Hopkins to death, limb by limb, with an axe. It is the terrified and deranged image of Sara’s face captured in an agonised, monochrome freeze-frame that ends Witchfinder General. With its nihilistic ending and unsettling scenes of state-sanctioned brutality, Witchfinder General is a film whose bloody imprint impinged on the unsettled public consciousness of the period. Indeed, the fact that Hopkins’s perverse quest displays a distinct gendered drive to expose the ‘foul ungodliness in womanhood’ has not been lost on those commentators who have linked the film’s release to the emergence 100 CULT FILMS

DIRECTOR Michael Reeves PRODUCER Louis M. Hayward, Arnold Miller, Tony Tenser, Philip Waddilove, Samuel Z. Arkoff WRITER Tom Baker, Michael Reeves, Maria Minestra CINEMATOGRAPHY John Coquillon EDITING Howard Lanning ORIGINAL MUSIC Paul Ferris PRINCIPAL CAST Vincent Price, Robert Russell, Rupert Davies, Hilary Dwyer, Ian Ogilvy

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of sexual politics and the feminist agitation proliferating during the period. While the cult brilliance of Reeves’s film was to use its historical backdrop to capture the wider barbarism of the late 60s era, it was its shock value rather than its subtext that dominated the film’s original reception. Indeed, the Monthly Film Bulletin review of Witchfinder General from July 1968 harnessed the hostility evidenced from wider press reporting, noting that ‘Not since Peeping Tom has a film aroused such an outcry about nastiness and gratuitous violence as this one.’ Although the journal goes on to unpack the merits of the movie beyond its sensationalist tag, scenes of female victimisation, torture and sexual mutilation led to the film coming under scrutiny from John Trevelyan, Head of the British Board of Film Censors. While it is the film’s visceral trajectory that has generated much of its cult cachet, recent authors such as Ben Halligan (2003) have also documented its complex and compromised production

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history, which saw Reeves’s first choice of Donald Pleasence for the role of Hopkins being overturned in favour of Vincent Price by American co-funders AIP (which released it in the US under the title Conqueror Worm). As Halligan notes, the casting of Price and his subsequent and often fractious relationship with the young director led to to the actor having to adopt a far more muted performance than evidenced by his flamboyant excesses in the Poe adaptations in circulation at the time. However, Price’s dour delivery here perfectly matches the sombre tone of the movie and is aided by the stylistic flourish that Reeves added to proceedings (most evident in the way in which he captures the foreboding nature of the Norfolk landscape). Although downbeat and traumatic in tone, the great tragedy of Witchfinder General remains the unexpected death of its young director Michael Reeves, who succumbed to depression, drug abuse and alcoholism at the age of twenty-five, soon after the film’s release. XM

227

Withnail & I UK, 1987 – 107 mins Bruce Robinson

Produced by George Harrison’s HandMade Films (also responsible for the earlier and equally iconic Life of Brian, 1979), Withnail & I is the archetypical British cult film, with its mixture of eminently quotable dialogue, quirky characters and curious mix of both outrageous farce and social commentary. The story follows two unemployed actors, the irascible and permanently drunk Withnail (played with intense, fey aplomb by Richard E. Grant) and Marwood (the titular ‘I’ played by Paul McGann). Tiring of the dreariness and grind of eking out a borderline subsistence existence in a grubby Camden Town flat, replete with overflowing sink and peeling wallpaper, they both head off to the Lake District holiday cottage of Withnail’s fruity Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths), where Withnail sardonically declares ‘We have gone on holiday by mistake.’ With little money, hardly any food and no idea how to behave in their new environment, they manage to offend the locals and kick up a storm among the local chattering classes. Based on writer-director Robinson’s own experiences of unemployment in an equally dingy and dishevelled Camden-Town flat in the 1960s, the film’s release in the mid-1980s almost inevitably saw it read as an allegory for Thatcherite Britain, reflecting the hopelessness and despair faced by those living close to or below the poverty line. Shots of condemned, rundown houses, together with the film’s grimy, muddybrown aesthetic contributed to the sense that, regardless of the actual events inspiring Robinson’s screenplay, the film itself was very much an observation of – if not explicit critique of – a deepening social inequality. Part of the power of the film undoubtedly lies in the nature of both the two central characters and the performances by Grant and McGann. Whereas Grant plays Withnail as a sometimes uptight, sometimes laconic but always provocative bon viveur who will do anything (and indeed drink anything) in order to bring some colour into his ultimately doomed existence, McGann’s performance is both calm and intensely reflective. The film is replete with highly quotable dialogue, from the flamboyant and predatory old queen Uncle Monty who, upon sneaking into Marwood’s bedroom in the middle of the night declares his undying love for him before tartly declaring ‘I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary!’, to Withnail’s demand in the genteel tearoom of their holiday village, ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now!’ Lines like these have undoubtedly contributed to the film’s cult appeal and the existence of a Withnail & I drinking game – where players have to match the prodigious Withnail drink for drink (although excused the more toxic of his increasingly desperate concoctions) – is a testament to both its cult status and continuing appeal to successive generations. By the end of the film, Marwood has been offered the lead in a play, cut his hair and left Withnail in order to catch a train to his new job and we presume a stable, secure future. But it is the lone figure of Withnail, drinking and declaiming lines of Shakespeare to the wolves of London Zoo that really catches both his own hopelessness and best reflects the contemporary zeitgeist. EM/RH 228

DIRECTOR Bruce Robinson PRODUCER George Harrison, Denis O’Brien, Paul Heller WRITER Bruce Robinson CINEMATOGRAPHY Peter Hannan PRODUCTION DESIGN Michael Pickwoad EDITING Alan Strachan PRINCIPAL CAST Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Richard Griffiths, Ralph Brown

BFI SCREEN GUIDES

The Wizard of Oz US, 1939 – 101 mins Victor Fleming

The Wizard of Oz is the United Nations of cultism: it has attracted a complex mosaic of cult receptions that carry radically different implications yet appear to coexist tolerantly. No wonder UNESCO counts it as part of the world’s heritage, and author Salman Rushdie credits it with making him a writer. The story of Oz, originally published as a book in 1903, is an allegory for the industrialisation of America, and the profound shifts in human relationships this brought. A twister propels the farmhouse of Dorothy (Judy Garland) from the sepia-toned countryside of Kansas into the Technicolor fantasy world of Oz. It sets Dorothy, in ruby slippers that immunise her from harm, on a mission to the Emerald City to see the Wizard (Frank Morgan), who can bring her home again. Dorothy and her ragtag band of the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), the Tin Man (Jack Haley) and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr), eventually discover that the power to make their inner desires come true lies within themselves. After repeating ‘There’s no place like home’, Dorothy does indeed go home, to sepia Kansas. The production of Oz was fraught with mishaps and nasty rumours, from multiple changes in director to accidents and unrest within the Munchkins, the support cast of midgets (a staple feature of cult film). Though most rumours were subsequently proven to be unfounded, the film gained an instant reputation as ‘problematic’. That did not improve after a disappointing release. Since the 1950s, however, annually repeated telecasts of Oz began to attract a loyal viewership that grew fond of the nostalgia in the film (‘no place like home’), and of a kind of Hollywood that had passed – the Hollywood of, among others, the cult of unspoiled child stars such as Garland or Deanna Durbin. That nostalgia helped Oz become a cornerstone of the yuletide cult, the annual ritual of end-of-year commemorations. Simultaneously, the burgeoning gay following for Garland in the 1950s and 60s meant that Oz began to be mined for queer subtexts, and became a subject for camp readings. On top of that came a cultist appropriation that celebrated the source material as if it were a biblical guide to understanding modern America. To this day, The international Wizard of Oz Club fiercely guards that legacy and, thanks to the tireless work of Garland biographer John Fricke, Oz became part of that heritage. Oz continues to generate new readings that lead to new kinds of followings. Among the most recent components of its compound cult is the renewed queer following of the witches Glinda and Elphaba, instigated by the lesbian subtext in the spin-off book and stage musical Wicked (first performed in 2003), and the hilarious and near-mystical appeal of The Dark Side of Oz, an experience that involves the screening of the film synchronised to the music of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon – a remarkable fit that nudges Oz towards a more contemporary college-crowd following. As one announcement of a screening of The Dark Side read, ‘What you do on your own time is your own business.’ It may have referred to the taking of illegal substances, but it neatly sums up the colourful wealth of ways to cultify Oz, and it reminds us of a key element of any cult film – the wasting of time in the face of modernisation. EM 1 0 0 C U LT F ILMS

DIRECTOR Victor Fleming (+ George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, King Vidor, uncredited) PRODUCER Mervyn LeRoy WRITER Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allen Woolf (book by L. Frank Baum) CINEMATOGRAPHY Harold Rosson EDITING Blanche Sewell ORIGINAL MUSIC Harold Arlen, E. Y. Harburg PRINCIPAL CAST Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke, Margaret Hamilton

231

Key Reading

An, Jinsoo, ‘The Killer: Cult Film and Transcultural (Mis)Reading’, in Esther Yau (ed.), At Full Speed; Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 95–113. Anger, Kenneth, Hollywood Babylon (San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow Books, 1965–1975). First published in English in 1965, then banned, and republished in 1975. It was published in French in the late 1950s. Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1968). Atkins, Barry, ‘Replicating the Blade Runner’, in Will Brooker (ed), The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), pp. 79–91. Austin, Bruce, ‘Portrait of a Cult Film Audience: The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, Journal of Communication vol. 31 (Spring 1981), pp. 43–54. Austin, Guy, ‘Emmanuelle and the Legitimising of the Porn Film’, in Contemporary French Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 46–7. Azuma, Hiroki, Otaku. Japan’s Database Animals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Barker, Martin and Ernest Mathijs (eds), Watching The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s World Audiences (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Barker, Martin, Ernest Mathijs, Jamie Sexton, Kate Egan, Russ Hunter and Melanie Selfe, ‘*Audiences and Reception of Sexual Violence’ in Contemporary Cinema [http://www.bbfc.co.uk/downloads/ index.php]*’, Report to the British Board of Film Classification, Aberystwyth University, 2008. Barratt, Jim, Bad Taste (London: Wallflower Press, 2008). Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Bissell, Tom, ‘Cinema Crudité: The Mysterious Appeal of the Post-Camp Cult Film’, Harper’s Magazine vol. 321 no. 1923 (2010), pp. 58–65. 232

Blake, Linnie, ‘Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantiks: Things to Do in Germany with the Dead’, in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945 (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), pp. 191–202. Bordwell, David, Planet Hong Kong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Bowman, Paul, Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film-Fighting-Fantasy-Philosophy (New York/Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2010). Briggs, Joe Bob, J. Hoberman, Damien Love, Tim Lucas, Danny Peary, Jeffrey Sconce and Peter Stanfield, ‘Cult Cinema: A Critical Symposium’, Cineaste vol. 34 no. 1 (2008), pp. 43–50. Brooker, Will, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (New York: Continuum, 2002). Brophy, Philip, ‘Horrality: The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films’, Screen vol. 27 no. 1 (1986), pp. 2–13. Brophy, Philip, ‘Monster Island: Godzilla and Japanese SciFi/Horror/Fantasy’, Postcolonial Studies vol. 3 (2002), pp. 39–42. Budd, Mike (ed.), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories (Piscataway, NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1990). Burfeind, Solveig, ‘Becky Driscoll as Femme Fatale? Elements of Film Noir in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, in Sonja Georgi and Kathleen Loock (eds), Of Body Snatchers and Cyberpunks: Student Essays on American Science Fiction Film (GSEP 5) (Göttingen: Göttingen University Press, 2011), pp. 151–7. Campbell, Lindsey, ‘From Cop Killer to Killer Cop: Black Masculinities in Jamaican Cinema’, Offscreen vol. 12 no. 6 (2008), online at www.offscreen.com. Carroll, Noel, ‘The Future of Allusion’ and ‘Back to Basics’, in Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 240–65, 265–73. Chion, Michel, David Lynch. New Enlarged Edition (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma Livres, 2001). BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Christie, Ian (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). Church, David, ‘Of Manias, Shit, and Blood: The Reception of Salò as a “Sick Film”’, Participations vol. 6 no. 2 (2009), online at: http://www.participations.org/ (accessed 18 August 2010). Church, David, ‘Freakery, Cult Films, and the Problem of Ambivalence’, Journal of Film and Video vol. 63 no. 1 (2011), pp. 3–17. Cohen, Stanley, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: Routledge, 2003 [1972, 1980]). Conrich, Ian, ‘Musical Performance and the Cult Film Experience’, in Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell (eds), Film’s Musical Moments (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 115–31. Corliss, Richard, ‘A Happy Birthday for The Kids of Kane’, Time Magazine (13 May 1991), online at www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,972906-2,00. Corrigan, Timothy, ‘Film and the Culture of Cult’, Wide Angle vol. 8 nos 3–4 (1986), pp. 91–9. Cowan, Douglas and David Bromley, Cults and New Religions (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). Cox, Alex, Moviedrome (London: BBC, 1993, 1994). Crane, Jonathan, ‘A Lust For Life: The Cult Films of Russ Meyer’, in Xavier Mendik and Graeme Harper (eds), Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and Its Critics (Godalming: FAB Press, 2000), pp. 87–101. Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Davis, Ben, ‘Children of the Sixties: An Interview with the Owners of the Elgin’, Film Quarterly vol. 52 no. 4 (2000), pp. 2–15. Davis, Glyn, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (London: Wallflower Press, 2008). De Seife, Ethan, This Is Spinal Tap (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Desser, David, ‘When We See the Ocean We Figure We’re Home: From Ritual to Romance in The Warriors’, in Murray Pomerance (ed.), City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 122–35. Dika, Vera , Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Donnelly, K. J., The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: BFI, 2005). 100 CULT FILMS

Dyer, Richard, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986). Eco, Umberto, ‘Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’, in Travels in Hyperreality (London: Picador, 1986), pp. 197–211. Egan, Kate, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of Video Nasties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Egan, Kate, The Evil Dead (London: Wallflower Press, 2011). Everman, Welch, Cult Horror Films (New York: Citadel Press/Virgin Books, 1993). Frayling, Christopher, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). French, Philip and Karl French, Cult Movies (Pavilion Books: London, 1999). Girard, René, La Violence et le Sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972). Grant, Barry Keith, ‘Science-Fiction Double Feature: Ideology in the Cult Film’, in J. P. Telotte (ed.), The Cult Film Experience: Beyond All Reason (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), pp. 122–37. Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Adam Barker, Thomas Elsaesser (eds), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 56–62. Halligan, Ben, Michael Reeves (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Hammond, Paul (ed.), The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2000). Hantke, Steffen (ed.), Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004). Haraway, Donna, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, Socialist Review vol. 80 (1985), pp. 65–108. Havis, Alan, Cult Films (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008). Hebdige, Dick, Subculture and the Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979). Hills, Matt, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002). Hills, Matt, Blade Runner (London: Wallflower Press, 2011). Hoberman, J., ‘Bad Cinema’, Film Comment (July), reprinted in Philip Lopate (ed.), American Movie Critics (New York: Library of America, 1980), pp. 517–28. 233

Hoberman, J. and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1983). Hodkinson, Paul, Goth: Identity, Style, and Subculture (London: Berg, 2002). Hollows, Joanne, ‘The Masculinity of Cult’, in Mark Jancovich et al. (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 35–53. Imanjaya, Ekky, ‘The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult Films’, Colloquy vol. 18 (December 2010), online at www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/colloquy/journal/ issue018/. James, Noah, ‘The Horrifying David Cronenberg’, Maclean’s (9 July 1979), p. 7. Jancovich, Mark (2002), ‘Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the Production of Cultural Distinctions’, Cultural Studies vol. 16 no. 2 (2002), pp. 306–22. Jancovich, Mark, Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andy Willis (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). Jerslev, Anne, ‘Semiotics by Instinct: “Cult Film” as a Signifying Practice between Film and Audience’, in Michael Skovmond and Kim Schröder (eds), Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 181–98. Kelman, Ken, ‘Smith Myth’, in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Film Culture Reader (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1970), pp. 280–5. Kermode, Mark, ‘I Was a Teenage Horror Fan: Or, ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linda Blair’, in Martin Barker and Julian Petley (eds), Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 126–34. Kerr, Darren and Claire Hines (eds), Hard to Swallow: Reading Pornography on Screen (London: Wallflower Press, 2011). Kinkade, Patrick and Michael Katovich, ‘Towards a Sociology of Cult Films: Reading Rocky Horror’, Sociological Quarterly vol. 33 no. 2 (1992), pp. 191–209. Klinger, Barbara, ‘Becoming Cult: The Big Lebowski, Replay Culture and Male Fans’, Screen vol. 51 no. 1 (2010), pp. 1–20. Kracauer, Siegfried , From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959). 234

Kyrou, Ado, ‘The Marvelous Is Popular’, in Paul Hammond (ed.), The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2000), pp. 68–71. Luckett, Moya, ‘Sexploitation as Feminine Territory: The Films of Doris Wishman’, in Mark Jancovich et al. (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 142–56. MacDonald, Scott, ‘Elias Merhige: On Begotten’, in A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 284–92. Macias, Patrick, Tokyoscope: The Japanese Cult Companion (San Francisco, CA: Cadence Books, 2001). MacKenzie, Scott, ‘Baise-moi, Feminist Cinemas and the Censorship Controversy’, Screen vol. 43 no. 3 (2002), pp. 315–24. Maltby, Richard, ‘A Brief Romantic Interlude: Dick and Jane Go to 3 1/2 Seconds of Classical Hollywood Cinema’, in David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 434–59. Martin, Adrian, ‘Ozploitation Compared to What? A Challenge to Contemporary Australian Film Studies’, Studies in Australasian Cinema vol. 4 no. 1 (2010), pp. 9–21. Mathijs, Ernest, ‘Bad Reputations: The Reception of Trash Cinema’, Screen vol. 46 no. 4 (2005), pp. 451–72. Mathijs, Ernest, The Cinema of David Cronenberg: From Baron of Blood to Cultural Hero (London: Wallflower Press, 2008a). Mathijs, Ernest, ‘Cult Film: A Critical Symposium’, Cineaste vol. 34 no. 1 (2008b), online at http://www.cineaste.com/articles/cultfilm-a-critical-symposium. Mathijs, Ernest, ‘Television and the Yuletide Cult’, Flow TV vol. 11 no. 5 (2010a), online at http://flowtv.org/?p=4683. Mathijs, Ernest, ‘Time Wasted’, Flow TV vol. 11 no. 10 (29 March 2010b), online at http://flowtv.org/2010/03/time-wasted-ernestmathijs-the-university-of-british-columbia/. Mathijs, Ernest and Xavier Mendik (eds), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945 (London: Wallflower Press, 2004). Mathijs, Ernest and Xavier Mendik (eds), The Cult Film Reader (New York: McGraw-Hill-Open University Press, 2008). BFI SCREEN GUIDES

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Index

2001 Maniacs 216 2001: A Space Odyssey 6–7, 8–9 The 36th Chamber of Shaolin 81 4 mosche di velluto grigio see Four Flies on Grey Velvet

À bout de souffle 47 Abbott, Bruce 161 L’Âge d’or 49 Aguirre: The Wrath of God 4 AIP see American International Pictures Akerman, Chantal 3 Akira 10, 11–12, 196 Alice in Wonderland 69 Aliens 148 Allen, Woody 47, 145 American International Pictures 143 An, Jinsoo 130 And Now for Something Completely Different 145 Anderson, Pamela 183 Anderson, Rafaëla 19 Angel of Vengeance 4, 13–15, 14 Anger, Kenneth 4, 23, 90, 126–7 Antonioni, Michelangelo 62, 120, 193 236

Ardolino, Emile 63 Argento, Dario 2, 3, 55, 61–2, 70, 191–3, 192 Arkush, Alan 157, Army of Darkness 85 Arnold, Mal 215 Arrabal, Fernando 207 Artaud, Antonin 49, 207 Arzner, Dorothy 3 Asano, Tadanobu 119 Ashby, Hal 107 Asher, Jane 143 Audition 119, 120 Avati, Pupi 115–16, 177 Axén, Eva 191 Azuma, Hiroki 12

Bach, Karen see Lancaume, Karen 19 Back to the Future 63 Baclanova, Olga 95 Bad Lieutenant 15 Bad Taste 16–17 Baise-moi 3, 18, 18–19 Baker, Rick 157, 221 Bakhtin, Mikhail 155 La banda del gobbo I Brothers till We Die 174 Barenholz, Ben 84 Barker, Clive 110–11, 111 Barratt, Jim 17

Barry, Stephen Charles 20 Basic Instinct 183 Batman 12 Bauer, Michelle 42 Bava, Mario 4 The Beatles 200 Beausoleil, Bobby 126 Begotten 2, 3, 20–1 Behind the Green Door 22, 205 Bell, Wayne 199 La belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast) 23 Belmondo, Jean-Paul 47 Belvaux, Rémy 139–40 Bennett, Joan 191 Berger, John 77 Bergman, Ingmar 204 Bergman, Ingrid 46 Berkley, Elizabeth 181–3 Bervoets, Gene 217 A Better Tomorrow 130 Beuys, Joseph 20 Beyond Re-Animator 161 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls 24–5 The Big Bird Cage 50 The Big Lebowski 2, 26–7, 27 Bigelow, Kathryn 3, 147–8 The Bird with the Crystal Plumage 61, 191 Bird, Laurie 212 Black Emanuelle 79

Black Sister’s Revenge see Emma Mae Blade Runner 28, 29–30, 196 The Blair Witch Project 45 Blake, Linnie 149 Blazing Saddles 145 Blodgett, Michael 24 Blood Feast 141, 215 Bloody Mama 143 Blow-Up 62 Blue Steel 147 Blue Sunshine 31–2, 32 Blue Velvet 83, 175 The Body Snatchers 123, 125 Bogart, Humphrey 46–7 Boggy Depot 206 Bolger, Ray 231 Bolkan, Florinda 70 Bolla, Richard see Kerman, Robert Bonham-Carter, Helena 88 Bonzel, André 139–40 Boos, Walter 203 Bordwell, David 130 Borowcyk, Walerian 79 Bosch, Hieronymus 109, 121, 145 Bostwick, Barry 171 Bowman, Paul 81 Bradley, Doug 110–11 Bradshaw, Booker 51 Braindead 17 Brakhage, Stan 84, 210 BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Brauner, Arthur, 179 Brazil 33–4 Breillat, Catherine 3 Bride of Frankenstein 29, 35–7, 36 Bride of Re-Animator 161 Bridges, Jeff 26 The Brood 38–9, 39 Brooker, Will 188 Brooks, Louise 49 Brooks, Mel 145 Brophy, Philip 16, 104 Brothers till We Die 174 Browning, Tod 95–6 Bubba Ho-Tep 87 Bucci, Flavio 191 A Bucket of Blood 143 Budd, Mike 41 Buñuel, Luis 49 Burfeind, Solveig 125 Burnama, Jopi 132 Burns, Marilyn 198 Burr, Raymond 103 Burton, Tim 73–4, 159 Bush, George Sr 69 Bush, George W. 135 Buttgereit, Jörg 149–50

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari 40, 41, 49, 73 Café Flesh 42–3, 205 Cameron, James 132, 144, 147, 157 Campbell, Bruce 85 Campbell, Lindsey 105 Cannibal Holocaust 44–5, 60 Capolicchio, Lino 115 Carpenter, Karen 190 100 CULT FILMS

Carpenter, Richard 190 Casablanca 2, 46–7, 47 Casini, Stefania 191 Castellari, Enzo G. 66 Chambers, Marilyn 22 Chan, Jackie 80 Chaney, Lon 96 Chaplin, Charles 34, 49, 73, 210 Chapman, Sean 110 Chase, Mary 69 Un chien andalou 48, 49, 90 Chion, Michel 83 Christensen, Benjamin 109 Christie, Ian 34 Church, David 95, 178 City of Lost Souls 119 Clark, Bobby 123 Clark, Jim 59–60 Cleese, John 145 Clerks 188 Cliff, Jimmy 105–6 Clive, Colin 35 A Clockwork Orange 221, 223 Clouse, Robert 80–1 Cocteau, Jean 4, 23 Coen, Ethan 26–7 Coen, Joel 26–7 Coffy 4, 50–1, 51 Color Me Blood Red 215 Colt Concert 66 Combs, Jeffrey 161 Constable, Barbara Anne 132, 133 Cooper, Ann 32 Coppola, Francis Ford 144 Corazzari, Tonino 115 Corbucci, Sergio 65–6 Corliss, Richard 20

Corman, Roger 50, 105, 143–4, 157, 212 Cort, Bud 107 Court, Hazel 143, 144 Cox, Alex 166–7 Craig, Kenneth 163 Crampton, Barbara 161 Crane, Jonathan 24, 25 Crawford, Joan 205 The Crazies 153 Crazy Love 217 Creed, Barbara 38 Creley, Jack 219 Crevel, René 41 Cronenberg, David 3, 38–9, 196, 219–21 Crowded House 42 Crowley, Aleister 126 Cuny, Alain 77 Curry, Tim 171 Curtiz, Michael 46–7

Daktari Lorenz, Bernd 149 Dalí, Salvador 49 The Dam Busters 4 D’Amato, Joe see Massaccesi, Aristide Damiano, Gerard 59 Danger: Diabolik 4 Danielle, Juliette 175 Dante Alighieri 177 Dante, Joe 144, 157–8 The Dark Side of Oz 231 The Dark Side of the Moon 231 Daughters of Darkness 4, 52–3, 53 Daumal, René 113 Davies, Rupert 225

Davis, Glyn 190 Davis, Phyllis 24 Dawn of the Dead 54, 55–6, 153 Day of the Dead 153 Day, Josette 23 De Niro, Robert 144 De Quincey, Thomas 193 Dead or Alive 119 The Dead Zone 221 Deadly Weapons 3, 57, 58 Dean, James 11 Debbie Does Dallas 59–60 Dee, Frances 117 Deep Red 61–2, 191 Deep Throat 22, 57, 59, 205 Dekker, Desmond 105 Delia, Joe 15 Demme, Jonathan 144 Dempsey, Donna 20 Deodato, Ruggero 44–5, 60 Depp, Johnny 73–4, 159 Dern, Bruce 144 Despentes, Virginie 3, 18–19 Dick, Philip K. 29 Dietrich, Marlene 23, 52 Dika, Vera 63 Dillman, Bradford 157 Din of Celestial Birds 21 Dione, Rose 95 Dionysus 21, 90, 126 Dirty Dancing 4, 63, 64, 69, 186 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie 92 Disney, Walt 193 Divine 155, 156, 181, 211 Django 65–6, 106 Do Qui, Robert 50 Dog, Snoop 185 Donnadieu, Bernard-Pierre 217 237

Donnelly, Kevin 6 Donnie Darko 63, 67–9, 68 Don’t Look Now 121 Don’t Torture a Duckling 2, 70–1 The Doors 212 Double Agent ’73 57 Dracula 96 Dre, Dr 185 The Driller Killer 13 Duel 137, 212 Dukakis, Michael 69 Dulac, Germaine 49 Dullea, Keir 6 Duran Duran 69 Durbin, Deanna 231 Dwyer, Hilary 225

E.T. 67 Earles, Daisy 95 Earles, Harry 95 Eaten Alive 60 Eaton, Marion 205 Ebert, Roger 24, 38 Echo and the Bunnymen 69 Eck, Johnny 95 Eco, Umberto 47 Ed Wood 159 Edward Scissorhands 72, 72–4 Egan, Kate 85 Eggar, Samantha 38 Elliott, William 50 Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals 75–6 Emge, David 56 Emma Mae 185 Emmanuelle 52, 77–9, 78 Emmanuelle 3 (aka Goodbye Emmanuelle) 79 238

Emmanuelle 5 79 Emmanuelle 7 79 Emmanuelle II 79 Enter the Dragon 80–1, 81 Eraserhead 3, 82, 83–4, 177 Esper, Dwain 31, 96, 163 Estevez, Emilio 166 The Everly Brothers 90 Everman, Welch 104 The Evil Dead 16, 67, 85–7, 86 Evil Dead II 85 eXistenZ 221

The Fall of the House of Usher 143 Fame 172 Fanaka, Jamaa 184–5 Fargo 26 Farrell, Colin 121 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 150 Female Trouble 156 Ferreti, Dante 178 Fiennes, Ralph 121 Fight Club 88–9, 89 Fincher, David 88–9, 89 Finney, Jack 123 Fisher, Carrie 188 Five Deadly Venoms 81 Flaming Creatures 90–1, 205 Fleming, Victor 231 Fonda, Peter 144 Ford, Harrison 29 Foree, Ken 56 Forte, Joseph 165 Four Flies on Grey Velvet 61, 191 Franco, Jesús 179–80 Frankenstein 35

Frayling, Christopher 6 Freak Orlando 3, 92–3, 93 Freaks 92, 94, 95–6, 109 Freud, Sigmund (also: Freudian) 23, 52, 61, 62, 111, 143, 144, 153, 161 Fricke, John 231 Friedman, David F. 215 Frightmare 67 Froom, Mitchell 42 Fulci, Lucio 66, 70–1 Furyô anego den: Inoshika Ochô see Sex and Fury

Gabor, Zsa Zsa 57 Gale, David 161 Garbo, Greta 52 Garland, Judy 231 Gasnier, Louis J. Gates, Bill 140 Gavin, Erica 24 Gemser, Laura 75–6, 79, 203 Gershon, Gina 181 Ghost in the Shell 12, 196 Gibson, Mel 137 Gibson, William 11 Gilliam, Terry 3, 33–4, 145 Ginger Snaps 4, 97–9, 98 Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning 99 Ginger Snaps: Unleashed 99 Gleeson, Brendan 121 Goblin 55, 193 Godard, Jean-Luc 47, 120 Godard, Mark 31 The Gods Must Be Crazy 100, 101–2 Godzilla 103–4, 104

Gondry, Michel 69 Gone with the Wind 186 The Good German 47 Gordon, Gavin 35 Gordon, Ruth 107 Gordon, Stuart 161–2 The Gore-Gore Girls 215 Gorfinkel, Elena 57 Gould, Steve 209 Goya, Francisco 109 Grant, Barry Keith 137, 156 Grant, Richard E. 228 Grease 186, 223 Gremlins 158 Gremlins: The Next Batch 158 Grier, Pam 50, 51 Griffiths, Richard 228 Grotowski, Jerzy 20 The Gruesome Twosome 215 Guest, Christopher 200 Gunning, Tom 215 Gurian, David 24 Gyllenhaal, Jake 67

H. Tjut Djalil 132 Haig, Sid 50–1 Hairspray 156 Haley, Jack 231 Halligan, Ben 227 Halloween 67 Handmade Films 228 Hansen, Gunnar 198 The Happiness of the Katakuris 186 Haraway, Donna 29, 196 Hard Boiled 130 The Harder They Come 105–6, 106 BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Hardman, Karl 151 Hardwicke, Catherine 4 Harold and Maude 107 Harper, Jessica Harris, Fox 166 Harrison, George 228 Harry, Deborah (Blondie) 219 Harvey 69 Hauer, Rutger 29 The Haunting 187 Häxan (Witchcraft through the Ages) 108, 109, 117 Haynes, Todd 190 Heggie, O. P. 35 Hellman, Monte 212–13 Hellraiser 73, 110–11, 111 Hemmings, David 61–2 Hendra, Tony 200 Henreid, Paul 46 Henry & June 49 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer 217 Henzell, Perry 105–6 Herz, Michael 210–11 Herzog, Werner 4, 150 Hewlett, Jamie 195 Higgins, Claire 110 Highway Patrolman 167 Hill, Jack 50–1 Hill, Walter 223–4 Hills, Matt 29 Hilton Twins (Daisy and Violet) 95 Hindle, Art 38 Hinds, Cindy 38 Hines, Claire 59 The Hitch-Hiker 3 Hoberman, J. 41, 84, 141 Hobson, Valerie 35 100 CULT FILMS

Hodkinson, Paul 73 Hollmann, Frank see Franco, Jesús Hollows, Joanne 195 Hollywood Boulevard 157 Holmes, John 15 The Holy Mountain 112, 113–14 The Homecoming see The Masters of Horror Hooper, Tobe 198–9 Hopf, Heinz 203 Hopper, Dennis 144, 175 The House with the Laughing Windows 115–16 Hoven, Adrian 179 Howard, Ron 144 The Howling 157 Hu, King 80 Huddleston, David 26

I Spit on Your Grave 19 I Walked with a Zombie 117–18, 118 Ichi the Killer 119–20 The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus 34 Imanjaya, Ekky 132 In Bruges 5, 121–2, 122 In the Realm of the Senses 42 Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome 126 India Song 92 Ino’o, Rie 168 The Intruder (1961) 143 The Intruder (1986) 132 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 123–5, 124

Invocation of my Demon Brother 126–7, 127 Isabelle, Katherine 97 It 67 It’s a Wonderful Life 128–9, 129, 186

Jackson, Michael 224 Jackson, Peter 3, 16–17, 135–6 Jagger, Mick 126 Jalil Jackson see H. Tjut Djalil James, Kevin 42 Jaws 157 Jeanne Dielman 3, 92 Jett, Joan 195 Jodorowsky, Alejandro 3, 113–14, 207–9 Jones, Duane 151 Jones, Terry 145 Jules, Gary 69 Just before Dawn 31

Kill Bill Volume 1 203 The Killer 80, 130–1 Killer Fish 157 Killing Zoe 139 King Kong 103 King, Stephen 67, 221 King, Zalman 31 Kinkade, Patrick 96 Klein, Allen 113, 209 Klinger, Barbara 26 Korda, Susan see Miranda, Soledad Kracauer, Siegfried 41 Kramer vs. Kramer 38 Krauss, Werner 41 Kristel, Sylvia 77–9 Kristofferson, Kris 212 Kubrick, Stanley 6–7 Kuchar, George 205 Kuchar, Mike 205 Kümel, Harry 4, 52–3 Kurosawa, Akira 80 Kyrou, Ado 49

Kaplan, Jonathan 144 Karlen, John 52 Karloff, Boris 35–7, 225 Katovich, Michael 96 Kaufman, Lloyd 210 Kaufman, Philip 125 Keaton, Buster 49 Keesey, Pam 53 Kelly, David Patrick 223 Kelly, Jim 80 Kelly, Richard 67 Kelman, Ken 90 Kerman, Robert 44, 59–60 Kerr, Darren 59

La Zar, John 24 Lacan, Jacques 89 Lady Terminator 4, 132–3 Lahr, Bert 231 Lancaume, Karen 19 Lanchester, Elsa Lang, Fritz 41 Last Year in Marienbad 52, 92 Laurence, Ashley 110 LaVey, Anton 126 Lavia, Gabriele 61 Ledger, Heath 34 Lee, Bruce 2, 80–1 Lee, Danny 130 239

Leeds, Marcie 147 Lennon, John 27, 113, 209 Lenzi, Umberto 60, 173–4 Lewis, Herschell Gordon 215–16 Lewis, Jerry 145 Lewton, Val 117 Lieberman, Jeff 31–2 Life of Brian 228 Ligeti, György 7 Lindberg, Christina 203–4 Little Shop of Horrors 143 Locharchy, David 155 The Lord of the Rings 17, 134, 135–6 Lorre, Peter 46 Lost Highway 83 The Loveless 147 Lowe, Jim 22 Lucas, George 7, 188–9 Luckett, Moya 57 Lugosi, Bela 96 Lund, Zoë 13 Lupino, Ida 3 Lynch, David 83–4, 196

MacDonald, Scott 20 MacKenzie, Scott 19 MacLachlan, Kyle 181 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior 137–8, 138 Magee, Patrick 143 Maltby, Richard 46 Mamma Mia! 186 Man Bites Dog 139–40, 140, 217 Maniac 163 Maniac Cop 87 240

Manos, the Hands of Fate 3, 141 Manowski, Beatrice 149 Marais, Jean 23 Margheriti, Antonio 157 Marihuana 31 Martin 153 Martin, Alan 195 Marx Brothers 34 The Masque of the Red Death 142, 143–4 Massaccesi, Aristide 75–6 Massey, Edith 155 The Masters of Horror (TV series) 158 Mathijs, Ernest 6, 52 Matinee 158 The Matrix 12 Matsushima, Nanako 168 Mayhew, Peter 188 McBroom, Marcia 24 McCarthy, Kevin 123, 157 McCollum, Warren 163 McDonagh, Martin 121–2 McDowell, Curt 205–6 McGann, Paul 228 McKean, Michael 200 Meat Loaf 88, 171 Medley, Bill 63 Mekas, Jonas 90 Menzies, Heather 157, 186 Merhige, E. Elias 20–1 Merli, Franco 178 Merli, Maurizio 173, 174 Metropolis 29 Meyer, Russ 24–5 Midnight 153 Miike, Takashi 2, 119–20 Miles, Lillian 163

Milian, Tomas 173 The Milky Way 92 Miller, Dick 157 Miller, George 137–8 Miller, Henry 49 Mills, Danny 155 Miranda, Soledad 179–80 Mitchell, Artie 22 Mitchell, Jim 22 Modleski, Tania 57 Mondo Trasho 156 Monty Python 34, 145, 146 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 145, 146 Moore, Julianne 26 Morgan, Chesty 57 Morris, John 126 Moviedrome (TV show) 166 Ms. 45 see Angel of Vengeance Mueller, Cookie 155 Mulholland Drive 83 Multiple Maniacs 156 Murray, Margaret 109 My Name Is Bruce 87 Myers, Cynthia 24 Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) 141

N!Xau 101 Nakajima, Sadao 203 Nakata, Hideo 168–9 Nance, Jack 83 Narcotic 163 Natural Born Killers 139 Near Dark 3, 147–8 Nekromantik 149–50 Nekromantik II 149 Nero, Franco 65, 66, 106, 173

Neuromancer 11 New Line Cinema 85, 136 New World Pictures 50, 144 The New York Ripper 71 Newitz, Annalee 196 Nichols, Andy 42 Nicholson, Jack 144 Nicolodi, Daria 61, 193 Nietzsche, Friedrich 207 Night of the Living Dead 55, 136, 151–3, 152 Nightmare on Elm Street 136, 195 Nillson, Kjell 137 Nitsch, Hermann 20 Noriega, Chon 103 Norris, Chuck 80 North, Alex 6 Norton, Edward 88

O’Brian, Peter 132 O’Brien, Dave 163 O’Brien, Richard 171 O’Dea, Judith 151 Oates, Warren 212 Of Freaks and Men 4 Ogilvy, Ian 225 Ommagio, Maria Rosaria 174 Omori, Nao 119 Orridge, Genesis P. 20 Ortolani, Riz 44, 70 Ôtaka, Rikiya 168 Otomo, Katsuhiro 11–12 Ottinger, Ulrike 3, 92–3

Page, Jimmy 126 Partain, Paul A. 198 BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Pasdar, Adrian 147 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 4, 177–8, 178 Pearce, Mary Vivian 155 Peary, Danny 4, 23, 42, 126, 171 Peeping Tom 4, 227 Peggy Sue Got Married 63 Pellegrini, Ines 177 Pembalasan ratu pantai selatan see Lady Terminator Penitentiary 184 Perkins, Emily 97 Petty, Lori 195 Phantom of Paradise 171 The Piano Teacher 19 Pinard, Sir Lancelot 117 Pink Flamingos 155–6 Pink Floyd 231 Piranha 157–8 Piranha II: The Spawning 157 Piro, Sal 171 The Pit and the Pendulum 143 Pitt, Brad 88 Plan 9 from Outer Space 141, 159–60, 160 Play It Again Sam 47, 145 Pleasence, Donald 227 Poe, Edgar Allan 143–4 Poelvoorde, Benoît 139–40 Poésy, Clémence 121 Point Break 147, 195 Polyester 156 Pomerance, Murray 73 Porel, Marc 71 Porter, Cole 195 Poruno no joô: Nippon sex ryokô (aka The Pornstar Travels around Japan) 203 100 CULT FILMS

Prentice, Jordan 121 Price, Vincent 2, 73, 142, 143, 225, 227 Prince Randian 95 Prinsloo, Sandra 101 A Professional Gun 66 Profondo rosso see Deep Red Pryce, Jonathan 33 Pulp Fiction 139

Rabelais, François 155 Rademaker, Claudia Angelique 133 Raimi, Sam 85–7 Rain, Douglas 6 Rains, Claude 46 The Ramones 96 Rape of the Vampire 4 Rau, Andrea 52 The Raven 143 Ravera, Gina 181 Read, Dolly 24 Re-Animator 161–2, 162 Rebel without a Cause 4 Red, Eric 147 Reed, Oliver 38 Reefer Madness 31, 109, 136, 163–5, 164 Reems, Harry 57 Rees, A. L. 90 Reeves, Michael 225–7 Reimann, Walter 41 Reiner, Rob 200–1 Reiniger, Scott H. 56 Repo Man 166–7 Return of the Living Dead 16 Reynolds, John 141

Richardson, Sly 166 Ringu 168–9, 169 Robinson, Andrew 110 Robinson, Bruce 228 RoboCop 183 Robson, Mark 117 The Rocky Horror Picture Show 2, 145, 170, 171–2 Roeg, Nicolas 121, 144 Röhrig, Walter 41 Rollin, Jean 4 The Rolling Stones 126 Roma a mano armata see Rome Armed to the Teeth 173–4 Romance 3, 19 Rome Armed to the Teeth 173–4 Romero, George A. 3, 55–6, 118, 151–3 The Room 5, 175–6, 176 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 41, 84 Ross, Gaylen 55 Roth, Eli 216 Rothman, Stephanie 3 Rushdie, Salman 231 Russell, Robert 225 Russo, John A. 151, 153 The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash 200 Ryan, Pat 210

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom 177–8, 178 Salzberg, Brian 20 Sanada, Hironyuki 168 The Saragossa Manuscript 4 Sarandon, Susan 171

Saxon, John 80 Sayadian, Stephen 42–3 Sayles, John 157 Schaefer, Eric 165 Schechner, Richard, 20 Schneider, Cynthia 190 Schneider, Gary 210 Schneider, Steven Jay 184, 217 Schulmädchen-Report 203 Schwartz, Reiner 219 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 175 Scorpio Rising 92, 126 Scorsese, Martin 144 Scott, Ridley 13, 29–30 The Seashell and the Clergyman 49 Seawart, Charlotte 83 Sestero, Greg 175 Se7en 88 Sex and Fury 203 Sex Pistols 200 Sexton, Jamie 6 Seyrig, Delphine 52, 92 Shadow of the Vampire 21 Sharman, Jim 171–2 Sharp, Marie 42 She Killed in Ecstasy 179–80 Shearer, Harry 200 Shih, Kien 80 Short, Dorothy 163 Showgirls 4, 181–3, 182 Siamese Twin Pinheads 206 Sid and Nancy 167 Siegel, Don 123–5 The Silence of the Lambs 217 Sins of the Fleshapoids 205 Sissi 186 241

Sleeper 145 Sluizer, George 217–18 Small Soldiers 158 Smith, Jack 90–1, 205 Smith, Kevin 188 Smith, Oliver 110 Smoodin, Eric 128 The Smurfs 69 Snow White 193 Society 161 Soderbergh, Steven 47 Sonnett, Esther 195 Sontag, Susan 176 Soul Vengeance 184–5 The Sound of Music 186–7, 187 Spartacus 6 Spiderman 87 Spielberg, Steven 7, 157 Splatter 144 Splet, Alan 83 Squirm 31 Stanton, Harry Dean 166, 212 Star Trek 29, 187 Star Wars 29, 135, 188–9, 189 Steele, Barbara 203 Sternberg, Josef Von 52 Stevens, Cat 107 Stewart, James 69, 126 Stinkybutt 206 Stole, Mink 155 Straight to Hell 167 Strange Days 147 Strauss, Richard 6 Streiner, Russell 151 Strömberg, Ewa 179 Stuck 162 Sullivan, Tim 216 242

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story 3, 190 Suspiria 191–3, 192 Suzuki, Norifumi 203 Suzuku, Koji 169 Swayze, Patrick 63, 69 Switchblade Sisters 50

Takeuchi, Yuko 168 Talalay, Rachel 3, 194 Tales of Terror 143 Tamerlis, Zoë see Lund, Zoë Tank Girl 3, 194, 195 Tapert, Robert 85 Tarantino, Quentin 50, 80, 121, 139, 166, 203, 207, 209 Taylor, James 212 Tears for Fears 69 Tell Your Children see Reefer Madness Tenser, Tony 225 Ter Steege, Johanna 217 The Terminator 132, 175 Tetsuo 196–7 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 136, 141, 198–9 Thelma and Louise 13 Thesiger, Ernest 35 They Call Her One Eye see Thriller: A Cruel Picture This Is Spın¨al Tap 139, 200–1, 201 Thriller – en grym film see Thriller: A Cruel Picture Thriller: A Cruel Picture 19, 203–4, 202 Thundercrack! 43, 205–6 Tinti, Gabrielle 75

Titanic 4, 63 Tokyo Decadence 205 Tolkien, J. R. R. 135 The Tomb of Ligeia 143 Tombs, Pete 132 Tonelli, Bob 115 El Topo 2, 92, 109, 126, 177, 207–9, 208 Topor, Roland 207 Torgl, Mark 210 A Touch of Zen 80 Tourneur, Jacques 117–18 The Toxic Avenger 210–11, 211 Trinh Thi, Coralie 3, 18–19 The Trip 143 Troma Pictures 210 Troma’s War 211 True Romance 139 Tsukamoto, Shinya 119, 196–7 Tweed, Shannon 183 Twilight 4 Twilight Zone 157 Two Thousand Maniacs! 215–16 Two-Lane Blacktop 137, 212–13, 213

Uccello dalle piume di cristallo see The Bird with the Crystal Plumage Uys, Jamie 101–2

Valli, Alida 191 Vampiros Lesbos 179 Van Damme, Jean-Claude 80

The Vanishing 2, 217–18 Vanishing Point 212 Veidt, Conrad 41 Velvet Vampire 3 Verhoeven, Paul 181–3, 182, 218 Verwey, Louw 101 Vibenius, Bo Arne 203–4 Victor, Henry 95 Videodrome 34, 196, 219–21, 220 Vigo, Jean 49 Visitor Q 119

Walken, Christopher 15 Walter, Tracey 166 Warhol, Andy 221 Warm, Hermann 41 Warren, Harold P. 141 Warren, Jennifer 63 The Warriors 222, 223–4 Waters, John 4, 136, 149, 155–6, 181, 195, 210, 211 Watts, Naomi 195 Welcome Home Brother Charles see Soul Vengeance Welles, Orson 159, 187 Wells, Vernon 137 West Side Story 186–7, 223 Weston, David 143 Weyers, Marius 101 Whale, James 4, 35–7 Whelehan, Imelda 195 When Harry met Sally 47 Whirrey, Shannon 183 White, Thelma 163 BFI SCREEN GUIDES

Wicked 231 Wiene, Robert 41 Wiest, Dianne 73 The Wild Angels 143 Wild at Heart 83 The Wild Party 3 Williams, Edy 24 Williams, Linda 35–7 Wilson, Dennis 212 Winters, Deborah 31 Wise, Robert 186–7

100 CULT FILMS

Wiseau, Tommy 175–6, 176 Wishman, Doris 3, 57 Witchfinder General 225–7, 226 Withnail & I 228, 229 The Wizard of Oz 230, 231 Wood, Ed 57, 159–60, 160 Wood, Jason 212 Wood, Robin 38, 125 Woods, Bambi 59–60 Woods, James 219

Wright, Dorsey 223 Wright, Jenny 147 Wynter, Dana 123

Xena: Warrior Princess 87 Xenophon 223 The X-Files 160

Young, Carleton 163 Young, Elizabeth 37 Young Frankenstein 145 Yun Fat, Chow 130 Yurick, Sol 223 Yuzna, Brian 161–2

Zanchi, Mónica 76 Zedd, Nick 4 Zlatin, Chuck 209

243

List of Illustrations While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright holders, this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in any future editions. 2001: A Space Odyssey, © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.; Akira, Akira Committee; Angel of Vengeance, © Navaron Film; Baise-moi, © Pan-Européene Production/Ciné Valse; The Big Lebowski, © PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, Inc.; Blade Runner, © Blade Runner Partnership; Blue Sunshine, Ellanby Films/Blue Sunshine Company; Bride of Frankenstein, © Universal Pictures Corp.; The Brood, Mutual Productions/Elgin International; Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Decla Filmgesellschaft; Casablanca, © Warner Bros.; Un chien andalou, Luis Buñuel; Coffy, American International Pictures; Daughters of Darkness, Showking Film/Maya Film/Roxy-Film/Ciné-Vog/Gemini Pictures International; Dawn of the Dead, Laurel Entertainment/Dawn Associates; Deadly Weapons, Juri Productions; Dirty Dancing, Vestron Pictures/Great American Films Limited Partnership; Django, B.R.C. Produzione/Tecisa; Donnie Darko, © Pandora, Inc.; Edward Scissorhands, © Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; Emmanuelle, Trinacra Films/Orphée Productions; Enter the Dragon, Warner Bros./Concord Productions; Eraserhead, © David Lynch; The Evil Dead, Renaissance Pictures; Fight Club, © Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation/© Monarchy Enterprises B.V./©Regency Entertainment, Inc.; Freak Orlando, Ulrike Ottinger Filmproduktion/Pia Frankenberg Musik-und Filmproduktion; Freaks, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; Ginger Snaps, © Oddbod Productions, Inc.; The Gods Must Be Crazy, Mimosa Films/Cat Films; Godzilla, Toho Co. Ltd/Jewell Enterprises; The Harder They Come, © International Pictures; Häxan (Witchcraft through the Ages), Svensk Filmindustri; Hellraiser, Film Futures/Rivdel Ltd/New World Pictures/Cinemarque Entertainment Ltd; The Holy Mountain, © Abkco Films, Inc.; I Walked with a Zombie, RKO Radio Pictures; In Bruges, © Focus Features LLC; Invasion of the Body Snatchers, © Allied Artists Pictures Corporation; Invocation of My Demon Brother, Kenneth Anger/Puck Film Productions; It’s a Wonderful Life, © Liberty Films, Inc.; The Lord of the Rings, © New Line Productions, Inc.; Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Kennedy Miller Productions; Man Bites Dog, © Belvaux-Bonzel-Poelvoorde for Les Artistes Anonymes; The Masque of the Red Death, © Alta Vista Productions; Monty Python and the Holy Grail, © National Film Trustee Company Ltd; Night of the Living Dead, Image Ten; Pink Flamingos, Dreamland Productions; Plan 9 from Outer Space, © Reynolds Pictures, Inc.; Re-Animator, Empire Pictures/Dove Productions; Reefer Madness, G.H./Motion Pictures Ventures/New Line; Ringu, © Omega Project; The Rocky Horror Picture Show, © Houtsnede Mattschappij N.V.; The Room, Chloe Productions; Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, P.E.A./Les Productions Artistes Associés; Showgirls, © Chargetex 6 S.A.; The Sound of Music, © Argyle Enterprises, Inc./Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; Star Wars, © Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; Suspiria, Seda Spettacoli S.p.A.; Tank Girl, © United Artists Pictures, Inc.; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Vortex; This Is Spın¨al Tap, © Embassy Pictures; Thriller: A Cruel Picture, BAV Film; El Topo, Abkco Films/Producciones Panic; The Toxic Avenger, Michael Herz, HCH Company/Troma/Palan Productions; Two-Lane Blacktop, Universal Pictures/Michael S. Laughlin Enterprises; Two Thousand Maniacs!, © FriedmanLewis Productions; Videodrome, Filmplan International/GuardianTrust Company/Canadian Film Development Corporation/Famous Players; The Warriors, © Paramount Pictures Corporation; Witchfinder General, © Tigon British; Withnail & I, © HandMade Films; The Wizard of Oz, Loew’s Incorporated. 244

BFI SCREEN GUIDES