The Cult Film Reader

by Mathijs, Ernest; Mendik, Xavier

• ISBN13: 9780335219230
• ISBN10: 0335219233
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-12-01
• Publisher: Open University Press

Summary

Whether defined by horror, kung-fu, sci-fi, sexploitation, kitsch musical or 'weird world cinema', cult movies and their global followings are emerging as a distinct subject of film and media theory, dedicated to dissecting the world's unruliest images.

Author Biography

Ernest Mathijs heads the Centre for Cinema Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

..Xavier Mendik is Director of the Cult Film Archive and Convenor of the MA in Cult Film and TV at Brunel University, UK..

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. ix
Foreword	p. xvii
Cult corner: acknowledgements	p. xix
Publisher's acknowledgements	p. xxi
Editorial introduction: What is cult film?	p. 1
Note on the organization of materials	p. 13
The concepts of cult	p. 15
Introduction	p. 15
'Film cults'	p. 25
'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction'	p. 29
'Notes on "camp"'	p. 41
'Uses of camp'	p. 53
'Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage'	p. 67
'Science fiction double feature: Ideology in the cult film'	p. 76
'Semiotics by instinct: "Cult film" as a signifying practice between film and audience'	p. 88
'"Trashing" the academy: Taste, excess and an emerging politics of cinematic style'	p. 100
'Sleaze mania, Euro-trash and high art: The place of European art films in American low culture'	p. 119
'Media fandom, neoreligiosity and cult(ural) studies'	p. 133
'Cult fictions: Cult movies, subcultural capital and the production of cultural distinctions'	p. 149
Cult case studies	p. 163
Introduction	p. 163
'Un chien andalou'	p. 173
'The anxiety of influence: Georges Franju and the medical horrorshows of Jess Franco'	p. 176
'The obscene seen: Spectacle and transgression in postwar burlesque films'	p. 186
'Orson Welles and the big experimental film cult'	p. 200
'Little cinema of horrors'	p. 208
'What is a cult horror film?'	p. 212
'Blaxploitation horror films: Generic reappropriation or reinscription?'	p. 216
'Carter in context'	p. 226
'The future of allusion: Hollywood in the seventies (and beyond)'	p. 240
'Hitchcock in Texas: Intertextuality in the face of blood and gore'	p. 244
'The essential evil in/of Eraserhead (or, Lynch to the contrary)'	p. 250
'The cult of horror'	p. 257
'The Blair Witch Project: Film and the internet'	p. 263
National and international cults	p. 275
Introduction	p. 275
'El Topo: Through the wasteland of the counterculture'	p. 284
'Playing with genre: An introduction to the Italian giallo'	p. 294
'Han's Island revisited: Enter the Dragon as transnational cult film'	p. 301
'Magical girls and atomic bomb sperm: Japanese animation in America'	p. 309
'The Killer: Cult film and transcultural (mis)reading'	p. 320
'Trading in horror, cult and matricide: Peter Jackson's phenomenal bad taste and New Zealand fantasies of inter/national cinematic success'	p. 328
'Invisible representation: The oral contours of a national popular cinema'	p. 339
'Mute bodies, disembodied voices: Notes on sound in Turkish popular cinema'	p. 349
'Ichi the Killer'	p. 360
Cult consumption	p. 369
Introduction	p. 369
'Cult of distraction: On Berlin's picture palaces'	p. 381
'Introduction to Distinction'	p. 386
'Portrait of a cult film audience: The Rocky Horror Picture Show'	p. 392
'Subcultural studies and the film audience: Rethinking the film viewing context'	p. 403
'Fans' notes: The horror film fanzine'	p. 419
'"Get a life!": Fans, poachers, nomads'	p. 429
'The cultural economy of fandom'	p. 445
'The Crash controversy: Reviewing the press'	p. 456
'Beaver Las Vegas! A fan-boy's defence of Showgirls'	p. 472
'Menstrual monsters: The reception of the Ginger Snaps cult horror franchise'	p. 482
Cult bibliography	p. 495
Index of film titles	p. 523
General index	p. 533
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