Cult,what is it all about? The term 'cult' was originally used to describe a group of people who worshiped a deity.
But later on, some people began to use new terms 'new religious movement' to describe most of the groups that had come to be referred to as 'cult'.
Max Weber (1864-1920), one of the first scholars to study cults.
Next,what about a cult film?
A cult film is characterized by its active and lively communal following.
Highly committed and rebellious in their appreciation, cult audiences are frequently at odds with cultural conventions – they prefer strange topics and allegorical themes that rub against cultural sensitivities and resist dominant politics.
Cult films transgress common notions of good and bad taste, and they challenge genre conventions and coherent storytelling.
Among the techniques cult films use are intertextual references, gore, loose ends in storylines, or the creation of a sense of nostalgia.
Often, cult films have troublesome production histories, coloured by accidents, failures, legends and mysteries that involve their stars and directors.
In spite of often-limited accessibility, they have a continuous market value and a long-lasting public presence.
A cult film is defined through a variety of combinations that include four major elements:
- Anatomy: the film itself – its features: content, style, format, and generic modes.
- Consumption: the ways in which it is received – the audience reactions, fan celebrations, and critical receptions.
- Political Economy: the financial and physical conditions of presence of the film – its ownerships, intentions, promotions, channels of presentation, and the spaces and times of its exhibition.
- Cultural status: the way in which a cult film fits a time or region – how it comments on its surroundings, by complying, exploiting, critiquing, or offending.
We do not propose that all of these elements need to be fulfilled together. But we do suggest that each of them is of high significance in what makes a film cult.
The Anatomy of Cult Film
It's midnight somewhere! "Cult movie" is a hard thing to pin down.Here are some examples of the greatest cult movies of all time:
1. Barbarella (1968)
The first R-rated comic-book movie stars Jane Fonda as a planet-hopping secret agent who has trouble keeping her clothes on. It was directed by Fonda's then-husband, Roger Vadim, who must have seen it as an opportunity to spend nine million dollars' of producer Dino De Laurentiis' money just to tell every ticket-buying man in the world, "Eat your heart out!" — P.N.
2. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
James Whale's sequel to his own 1931 Frankenstein is the wildest and greatest of all the classic Universal horror movies, and, with Ernest Thesiger's high-camp performance as the misanthropic mad scientist, an early Hollywood landmark of coded gay sensibilities. — P.N.
3. Brazil (1985)
Terry Gilliam's Brazil is the arguably the best (unofficial) movie version of Orwell's 1984 ever made, and certainly beats the pants off every official version. The movie only became more legendary, and more dear to the hearts of its cultists, thanks to Universal Pictures' attempts to geld it; their "happy ending" version is hilarious precisely because it looks as if it had been re-edited by Brazil's propagandist villains. — P.N.
4. The Brood (1979)
David Cronenberg redefined the possibilities of the horror movie as a vehicle for personal film making with this, his first great movie. Samantha Eggar plays a woman who becomes so successful at channeling the rage she feels towards her parents, her estranged husband, and others, that she literally births a series of monsters that brutally attack whoever she's mad at. Cronenberg, who conceived the film while going through a divorce, calls it his version of Kramer vs. Kramer. — P.N.
5. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
Russ Meyer's best-known (and least breast-obsessed) exploitation classic is the kind of fantasy that most people would only put on film if they already had plans to burn the negative before any respectable people could get a look at it. The first twenty minutes — featuring freelance dominatrix babes racing their sports cars in the desert and killing anyone who looks at them funny — are like a drive-in movie from Mars. What happens after that? I'm not sure. I usually just watch the first twenty minutes again. — P.N.
References from http://www.nerve.com/movies/the-fifty-greatest-cult-movies-of-all-time?page=2
For my opinion, cult plays an important role not just in our life,but also in film.
I hope that more directors could find more about 'cult' in order to produce more cult movies so that people can get more knowledge about cult.
People or audience like us too may watch more these kind of movies in order to expose cult movie to the world.
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