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I was so obsessed by that film and I still am.
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One of my all-time favourites as a teenager. That idea that there’s this crazy messed-up kid who doesn’t feel like he fits into this perfect suburban world who ends up being this schizophrenic superhero? It had everything! I actually watched it recently about two weeks ago with someone who hadn’t seen it before and I still love it. I think the reason it got popular here is that me and my coursemates and people my age related to it so much. I have this book on Donnie Darko and at the beginning there is a letter that director Richard Kelly wrote thanking the British audience because the film grew very popular here, it started getting popular in America. It didn’t do well in America at all, but it became very popular in the UK. I was at film school in London when it came out and I became so obsessed with it. Now it’s considered one of the best horror movies ever made. It was only years later with home video that it became more popular because people started to rewatch it over and over and to see all the layers and start reading more and more into it. It won two Razzies for Kubrick – can you believe that?!. While these are all arguably acclaimed films now, they weren’t so highly regarded when they were first released…įamous case: when The Shining came out – nobody liked it.
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Even so, the term ‘cult movie’ was pretty much an “American thing” according to programmer-turned-film historian Jane Giles, author of Scala Cinema 1978-1993. This alternative film canon contained such world offerings as El Topo, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s hallucinogenic head-trip of an ‘Acid Western’, and naughty French softcore classic Emmanuelle. In it, Peary picks out 100 films from Andy Warhol’s Bad to The Wizard Of Oz which “have elicited a fiery passion in moviegoers that exists long after their initial releases”. So where does the ‘original’ meaning lie? US film writer Danny Peary supposedly first gave the term currency with his 1980 book Cult Movies. “Some people talk of Star Wars being a ‘cult’ film because it has such a developed fandom and subculture but I think ‘cult’ should fundamentally exist in the original ways we understood it – a celebration of lowbrow culture, based around ideas of camp and irony, transgression and subversion.” And while the Star Wars universe might hold many wonders, there’s a notable lack of zombie cheerleaders or obese transvestites eating real dog poo on the Death Star (unless I missed that in the Blu-Ray extras). “We have to be careful not to overuse the word ‘cult’ so it loses all meaning,” agrees Blyth. “When it was released, it wasn’t a critical or commercial success and yet it found an audience who so fell in love with it, they got together to have this celebratory union, where they could dress up and quote along with and create a whole subculture out of this film that would otherwise have been lost or forgotten.” For him, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) gives the cult classic blueprint. “Every time you think about ‘cult’ and what it means, there’s always an exception to the rule,” admits Michael Blyth, who programmes the annual Cult strand for the BFI’s London Film Festival alongside their LGBTQ+ festival BFI Flare.
#CULT CLASSIC GAY MOVIES MOVIE#
Yet smelling out a genuine classic from just another ‘bad’ or misjudged movie (hallo Cats! Though give that time…) is trickier than you might think, even for the experts, as we found when we set out to compile a new cult canon. The most comforting films for tough times What crazy alchemy can transform the worst movie of all time into a golden work of staggering genius? When it’s dubbed a cult classic, of course! Welcome to the cinematic universe of the second coming, where Return Of The Killer Tomatoes! is as venerated as Citizen Kane and the offbeat, experimental, queer, schlocky, flawed and downright weird is worshipped.