Cult Movies, Continued.

editor's note: I woke up to discover this, for some reason, hadn't been posted on Saturday evening when it was written. Apologies.

I was looking through some of the vintage pieces from the Blogorium "vault", and I realized while reading one about what classifies a "cult" movie that I suddenly had a serious problem with my premise.

The issue isn't so much about what is or isn't a "cult" movie but more about the nature of the cult movie phenomenon itself:

Does it still exist?

When I was in high school, in the early days of the internet (when you couldn't actually find anything if you didn't know exactly where to look), I was kinda/sorta doing some student teaching during an "independent study" period, and one of the students came up to me and said "I want to know what 'the list' is."

I wasn't sure what she meant, but it turned out she was talking about "the list" of books you're "supposed" to read that aren't part of the high school curriculum. As recently as ten years ago, this was something that someone brought to you: usually the cool kid who seemed wiser than their years or the outsider or whoever. The list itself had no origin that anybody knew of, existed as a meme or as viral content. One day you didn't know it existed; the next day you did.

Suddenly you knew that you needed to read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. You needed to read Catch-22, Brave New World, Naked Lunch, beat poetry, and other subversive-for-its-time literature. You would seek the books out and be able to recognize those who were ready to take a similar journey, but it was never thought of or referred to as "the list". It just was.

(The music industry figured out a way to capitalize and exploit this during the nineties in an all-inclusive banner called "alternative", and many of us drank the Kool-Aid in one form or fashion.)

For movies it was a little trickier, because you really needed someone who worked in a video store to steer you away from renting everything (something I discussed not too long ago). The other helpful method was to have (or read) one of those movie guides cover to cover and be dedicated enough not just to skip over something you didn't recognize. You had to spend a LOT of time getting past the lurid cover art to really discover something worth passing along, and the "list" of cult films was pretty short, even when I was in high school.

It went something like this:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Evil Dead trilogy
Eraserhead
Escape from New York
Shaft
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Halloween
A Clockwork Orange
Meet the Feebles
Dead Alive
The Big Lebowski


eventually, in college, it expanded considerably, thanks in part to more access to film fans, video stores, classes, better independent theatres. Notice how few foreign films are on the list of "cult" films as I understood them in high school. Shit, notice how few films there are period, how many classics I'm leaving out (Polyester, for chrissakes!).

As the internet started to grow, and as people became more easily connected, suddenly more and more movies that had been lost in the shuffle got out there, and something changed to the "cult" movie phenomenon: more people new about them. Not only did they know more about them, but they could point you to where they heard about them in a concrete manner. It wasn't Dave at Carbonated Video, it was the Entertainment Weekly list of "Best Cult Films" or Cult Movie Watch*, or Videohound's Guide to Cult Movies You Must See Before You Die.

So I must ask: if almost anyone can tell you they know that Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn exists, and that they or someone they know has seen it, is it a "cult" film anymore? Does the film reach a point where it is so well recognized because of its presence online that it ceases to be something unknown and "discovered"?

I suppose then the followup question is "would that be such a bad thing?" Do we need to have the sense of discovering something to really enjoy it? When I saw Donnie Darko for the first time, no one I knew had seen it or heard about it. I read a review in the News and Observer that mentioned a giant bunny named Frank and then it never came out. Showing it to everyone I knew was like sharing a secret, and then about six months later everyone knew about it. It was all over college campuses and for some reason, things were less fun. It's weird.

Discovering movies is really hard now, because most of the time I hear about it all over the place online before I think about renting it. The last "discovery" I can think of was Primer, and that was after months of reading about the film. Word of mouth still happens, but it's usually coupled with "yeah, I saw that online" or "I read about that" The conversations about "Holy Fuck have you heard of this movie about puppets throwing up and killing each other?!" don't seem to happen as much. It's kind of a bummer.

Rarer and rarer are the days of something like Blood Car, a movie that came from a friend of Neil's that I'd never heard of before and, had he not brought it to our attention, I may well have never seen. The same goes for Terrorvision, which came from the memories of Major Tom. Both of those are "must see" movies, and they're pretty tough to find if you don't know where to look, but that ilk of movie is getting more and more difficult to find these days. Mrm.


* I don't actually know if that exists but if googled, I wouldn't be surprised to find it.