Before the internet made (no pun intended) virtually everything accessible, I used to wonder how it was that knowledge of the obscure, the forgotten, or the "cult" films came from. The information seemed to travel like a meme; no one could pinpoint exactly where they heard it from, or declare with any certainty that this knowledge originated from any source more reliable than a "friend of a friend told me." It just appeared - one day you didn't know about these movies, and the next you did.
Voracious readers experience a similar phenomenon, one that provides a gateway into the experience I'm talking about: at a certain point in time, almost invariably high school, some students clue in to "alternative" literature, seemingly without a point of reference. The only point of entry that makes sense is the one student that always seems to carry around The Portable Beat Reader, but how one makes the leap from Jack Kerouac to Aldous Huxley or Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, or Hunter S. Thompson, I can't say. If my library had a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I didn't know it. I don't even remember how I knew the book existed: I just did. Ironically, years before I had been reading issues of Rolling Stone that Thompson wrote essays for (the one that springs to mind is "Polo is My Life," which became the book he never released between Better Than Sex and Kingdom of Fear), but I didn't read those articles. In retrospect, I wish I had, but the literary "virus" infects without warning.
The same is applicable to film, even if there are a few more tangible sources to point towards. Most film "geeks" spend (spent? considering current trends) hours poring through the titles at video stores, attracted to lurid cover art or titles that confound the mind. The video store clerk, not always the stereotypical "comic book guy" from The Simpsons, was handy in offering suggestions. True story: while applying for a job at a local video store (a job I did not end up getting because I was too young), the manager interviewing me suggested that I watch Swimming with Sharks because I really enjoyed Kevin Spacey in The Ref. Had she not suggested I rent Swimming with Sharks, I may have missed out on the film entirely for years.
Looking back on the job I did get, a seasonal shift working for Suncoast Video (now FYE), the root cause for the cinephile "meme" still remains elusive: aside from a friend asking me to find Sid and Nancy*, much of my time working there wasn't spent combing through titles I didn't recognize or hadn't heard of. To be fair, it was the holiday season and I was only sixteen, but both prime opportunities to identify an originating "there" for the cinematic virus both come up blank.
The truth is that I don't know who told me that The Evil Dead was a film to see. Maybe it was The Video Movie Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter - that was, I recall, the first time I ever heard that Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn was practically a "remake of the first film" - then again, maybe it was a review of Army of Darkness in the local newspaper. I didn't see Army of Darkness at the time, but I knew it existed, and with a bit of diligent investigation, it's possible I traced the sequel back to Sam Raimi's debut. The problem is that you always seem to be telling other people about these films, but can never suss out how you knew about them. Nobody told me about The Rocky Horror Picture Show; it just always seemed to be there, a midnight listing for The Rialto every week. One week, we decided to go, not really knowing much more about the film or the rules than when we didn't want to go.
Once the meme reaches you, infects you, the information and the desire to learn more increases exponentially. One film leads to another, that leads to another, that leads to a dead end, a rumor, a film no one can find: the Cannibal Holocaust's, the "director's cut" of Dawn of the Dead, a "workprint" cut of Alien 3, the "five hour" Dune. At the time, with limited resources, these seem like impossibilities. They have to be "out there" because you read some arcane reference to the fact, or saw a discrepancy in the running time** somewhere.
Now, things are a little different: the internet leveled out much of the conjecture, many of the second or third-hand sources, and the growing availability of DVDs have, in many ways, altered the landscape permanently. Access is different, although surprisingly as vague as the meme was before an era of instant availability. While it's much, much easier to find out about apocryphal "geek" trivia, like what's missing in different versions of a film (see Movie-Censorship dot com), the paper trail is nevertheless no more definite. The availability of information is more prevalent; it's source remains nearly as ethereal.
Apropos to this discussion is the fact that I don't consider the internet to have "ruined" geek culture: Patton Oswalt made several salient (if tongue in cheek) points in a Wired article titled "Wake Up, Geek Culture: Time to Die" and maybe the "cult" aspect of fandom is vanishing thanks to over-saturation. We live in an age when the random, the lost-in-the-shuffle, the marginal can not only be found on the Internet Movie Database, but the poster is only a Google Image Search away (often linked to a page where it's for sale), has at least one link on Amazon***, and if an industrious pirate has enough perseverance, the film itself is floating somewhere in the digital cloud.
The digital cloud, so to speak, has become another fold in which the film meme hides itself. What's different is that the limited resources of fifteen or twenty years ago have, for the most part, disappeared. People visit this blog as a result of image searches for films like Monsturd, a movie I can't imagine is really that widely discussed. Still, someone heard the title from a friend of a friend (or from Netflix), and plugged the title in. They ended up here, and I take great pride in being a source that passes on the film meme, or Cinephilia as I like to classify it. Maybe I can tell you where I heard about these films from, but I'll be more than happy to pass them on if they're worth your while.
* True story - Sid and Nancy was, at that point, not available on VHS. I jokingly suggested she buy a sixty dollar Laserdisc copy of the film. The laserdisc's publisher? Criterion.
** This continues to be a point of curiosity among friends: when Artisan released The Ninth Gate, the Spanish running time was fifteen minutes longer than the American version, which I have never found any accounting for, or if a longer cut even exists.
*** Take, for example, Five Minutes to Live, also known as The Door-to-Door Maniac: a Johnny Cash and Ronnie Howard vehicle from the 1960s that most Cash fans don't even know exists. Seven Amazon listings for the DVD as of five minutes ago.
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