Don’t get him started on movies like Attack of the Killer Bimbos (1988). Will Dodson sets strict standards in his book, Cult Films (published by QNY). For him, a cult movie isn’t simply a theatrical failure that eventually found an audience, nor a Killer Bimbo “intentionally made to appeal to cult film afficionados, and marketed as cult films without any actual cult audiences.” Quentin Tarantino doesn’t make cult films but “cult pastiches.” Dodson’s cult film is usually a happy accident that can occur in any genre (and be directed by geniuses or mad hacks) if it organically gains a fervent audience and stands outside the norm but eventually influences mainstream filmmaking.
Cult Films is a swift, breezy look at several such movies as well as an attempt to define an aesthetic of appreciation. “We can laugh at disastrously inept films like Reefer Madness,” he writes, referencing Susan Sontag on camp, but adds that not all cult films are inept. Tod Browning’s well-wrought Freaks (1932) shocked moviegoers in its day but found favor in the 1960s with a countercultural audience that waved its freak flag high.
Films that became culty were made in the 1930s but “the very possibility of cult film began retrospectively.” Until the ‘50s most movies disappeared into the vaults after their initial theatrical run, never to be seen again—or so it was thought. Television changed that. Soon enough, cults formed around the old movies that filled off hours and late nights. Eventually odd new films (Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eraserhead) that found their way onto the midnight movie cinema circuit in the ‘70s gained cult status without really trying, giving birth to the careers of influential figures in Hollywood and new ways of filmmaking.
