You Can't Kill Cult Movies

Cult cinema will thrive in the face of streaming suppression.

Sometimes it seems like the cult movie is a recent invention, something from the back half of the 20th century. But while the term may have originated there, the actuality of cult films definitely did not. In fact, Nosferatu is probably the first cult movie. The 1922 silent film, directed by the early cinema legend FW Murnau, was an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula - it was IP infringement. The estate of Bram Stoker wouldn’t sit for it, and they had all copies of the film destroyed. Except that it never works out quite that way, and some prints survived, falling into the hands of fans who understood what a landmark movie this was. The prints survived, and copies of those prints were made, and now, 101 years later, there’s a new version of the film coming from Robert Eggers (the second remake) and Nosferatu is accepted as a classic film, a watershed moment in German Expressionist cinema. None of this would have happened if people had not kept the movie alive in the face of official suppression; Nosferatu is not just the first cult movie, it’s probably the ultimate example of what a cult movie can become, and how cult cinema works. 

Recently a tweet went viral in the film space; I’m not going to link to the tweet because the tweeter isn’t saying something bad, they’re just kind of wrong. Or at least ignorant of how cult movies work. Here’s the text of the tweet: 

There will never be another cult classic. If your movie or show underperforms, it will be removed from sight, and that eventual groundswell of support that's turned everything from Blade Runner to Heathers from disastrous flops to huge successes will never find it. The end.

This was in response to the news that Craters, a movie on Disney+ no one ever heard of and apparently no one ever watched, was yanked from streaming just weeks after it debuted. There is one aspect of this I want to address before we move onto the meat of the tweet, the stuff about cult classics. 

The Batgirl situation has broken how everyone thinks of streaming. You remember that Warner Bros shot and edited an entire Batgirl movie and, rather than release it in theaters or on streaming, opted to stick it in a vault to never be seen again. The reason? Because they could take a write-off on the movie, something they wanted to do in order to bring their quarterly numbers more in line with something shareholders wanted to see. 

But Batgirl is an outlier. In the time since then other movies and shows have been pulled off of streaming networks, and many people have assumed that they were being disappeared like Chilean dissidents in the 70s. The truth is much less outrageous; most of these shows and movies have been removed from streaming networks in order to license them to third parties. The HBO show Insecure, for instance, got yanked and people were upset. But it just turned up on Netflix, because Warner Bros is interested in exploiting the show in a different way. 

There is still outrageous shit behind this - the company is looking for a way to wiggle out of streaming payments to the creators of these programs. That sucks. But the corporations most likely do not want these shows/movies to be gone forever. They want to license them to Netflix or Mubi or Pluto or whoever will pay a fee, and in the process change how the payouts to the creators work. That’s shitty, but it’s not the same as Batgirl. Of course some of these shows/movies may functionally disappear because nobody wants to license them, but I suspect that the streamers are not only licensing these things a la carte but also offering them up as packages. So who knows what will happen. 

At any rate, it’s likely that Craters will show up out of nowhere on some ad-based streaming service eventually. It’s not like Nosferatu, where the mandate was to physically destroy all traces of its existence. It’s not like Batgirl, where the value of the movie now lies in it being completely bricked up like Fortunato in The Cask of Amontillado. If anything, Craters has now entered a world more likely to make it a cult classic, but more on that later. 

So what even is a cult movie, which one assumes a film must be in order to become a cult classic? Some folks would take issue with the two films listed in the tweet above, as they’re both studio movies. While Nosferatu might be the first cult film, the term “cult movie” didn’t really come into being until the 60s, and it referred to underground films and midnight movies. These were usually out-there, non-mainstream works - think Alejandro Jodorowsky and John Waters - but the seminal, most important midnight movie of all time was released by a studio. That’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which Fox tried to release twice - once on a double bill with Phantom of the Paradise - before finally striking gold with a midnight release. 

So let’s use Rocky Horror as the defining “cult” film - it’s a movie that was not initially successful or appreciated that over time grew a following. But the following isn’t just made up of people who like the film - it’s kind of important that the following be people who appreciate the film on an elevated level, who integrate elements and quotes from the film into their lives. Rocky Horror, with its decades-worth of midnight shows where people come in costume, have scripted ripostes to shout at the screen and perform the entire movie on stage as the movie is playing, exemplifies this. But not every cult film needs to have a following as intense as that. 

What a cult movie needs is to be able to operate as a secret language between cult members. I have a tattoo of the Phantom mask from Phantom of the Paradise, and fellow fans of that film know that I’m cool (within that community, not really in the larger world) when they see it. It’s the tattoo that gets the most attention, but only from people who already know what it means. Fans of these movies have secret handshakes, ways to know who is in and who is out. There is a subculture for this fandom.

By the way, I think this already discounts Heathers and The Thing from being cult classics. They don’t have the secret handshake or the subculture because, like The Big Lebowski for instance, they’re absolutely mainstream. Now, they weren’t always - thirty years ago you might have been able to use “I love my dead gay son” as a secret handshake - but they’re just staples of the cinema at this point. It’s hard to imagine finding out someone likes Heathers and taking that as an indicator of their status as a person in the know. I’m not sure the last time I met someone who was into horror movies who didn’t love The Thing. These are movies that are pretty well known and appreciated. 

But what really makes them not cult classics, in my opinion, is exactly the thing that the tweet is saying we’re losing - they’ve always been easy to access. This is the real defining line, and is why Rocky Horror has been a cult movie but Star Wars never has been. It’s scarcity that truly makes something a cult film, and it’s the effort required to see it that cements its place in the canon. For decades the only way to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show was to go to a midnight screening. It wasn’t until 1990 that the movie hit home video in the US, a decade into the VHS boom. If you wanted to do the time warp, you had to go find a theater playing the movie and you almost certainly had to be willing to stay up half the night. Star Wars, on the other hand, despite having a subculture surrounding it that even includes its own secret handshakes (it’s an interesting franchise because while it is the most popular thing in pop culture history, it also has the space for a real intense nerdy appreciation - there’s a huge difference between someone who knows who Chewbacca is and someone who knows what Kashyyyk is) has always been easily available since the home video era began. It was the first VHS tape my family bought, way back in 1982. Heathers and The Thing have been easy to access for decades. I’d wager you could walk down almost any block in America and find a copy of one of these two movies in someone’s collection. 

Scarcity is the key. And I don’t even mean a movie as hard to see as Rocky Horror; it could be a movie that was on home video in the 80s but just wasn’t the kind of tape that Blockbuster would carry. You’d have to go to the mom and pop, maybe even the sketchy place a town over. You’d have to go to Kim’s Video and dig through the titles. You went to a convention and found it on a bootleg, complete with all the commercials from when it was taped off the Million Dollar Movie. 

This scarcity is what actually creates the subculture. You would search for the thing, find the thing and you would have to share the thing. You’d build your own little community around it with the like-minded folks. You’d meet like-minded weirdos when you were out hunting for the movie, or for things related to the movie (don’t even get me started on how scarce merch was for the real cult films). The effort needed to watch the movie was part of the experience of watching the movie. 

Again, this isn’t just about obscure indies. Movies like Mommy Dearest are cult classics, and that one did pretty well at the box office and would pop up on TV from time to time. But when certain people caught the film - often randomly, when just seated in front of the TV watching whatever was on - they were in turn caught by the film. I’ve long felt that one of the worst parts of the modern streaming on-demand world is that lack of surprise discovery, the experience of simply watching whatever came on after the news and M*A*S*H reruns because you were awake anyway. You’d find these movies that were shuffled off to fill dead air and approach them with a totally open mind - you couldn’t look up the cast or the Rotten Tomatoes rating. You’d just experience them fresh. At any rate, Mommy Dearest wasn’t exactly obscure, but appreciation of it was, and if you found that movie in someone’s collection you immediately knew something about them. 

So if Craters gets shunted off to Pluto and some kid is just letting the Pluto app play while he’s, I don’t know, on his Switch or building a Lego set or whatever it is the kids do these days, and Craters just comes on… well, maybe that’s the moment Craters’ journey to cult status begins. Maybe this kid looks up and is enthralled by this movie he never heard of, and then he has to show it to his friends and then he has to go online to find other people who have seen this movie he didn’t know existed before today. 

You can’t keep a cult movie down because keeping it down is exactly what makes it a cult movie. It is appreciated by a small, passionate audience. It is sometimes not legally available. It is sometimes actually, actively suppressed. Movies can go from unappreciated to beloved - see The Thing and Heathers - but that doesn’t make them real cult classics. A real cult movie, a real cult classic, is defined most of all by the cult, and the cult will not let the movie go away. 

When I read that tweet I was filled with a bit of sadness, because to me it represents a modern state of learned helplessness - if a corporation isn’t giving us something, we can’t get it. The film community suckles at the teets of big (or small) companies, which is actually wild in an era where piracy is easier than it ever has been. But throughout the history of cinema it has rarely been the studios or the big corporations that kept these movies alive, it has been the cult itself. Even Rocky Horror keeps chugging along not because Fox is out there marketing it but because the cult keeps showing up and indoctrinating new members. Cult movies are kept alive not because of studios but despite them, and I hate the idea that this kind of dedication might be gone. 

The true guardians of film history - all of it, not just cult cinema - are us. We are the last line of defense before films fall into the void. It has always been so, from the days of Nosferatu, and it always will be so. Instead of looking at the changing media landscape with despair we should be looking at it with purpose - how can we keep these movies alive, how can we keep them going into the future? In the course of my life I have technically broken the law to see and share movie - I have bought and traded bootlegs, I have been at unsanctioned screenings of versions of movies that are not supposed to be available to the general public* (I’m scowling at you, Mr. George Lucas).  

*Small tangent - I’m in good company. In the 1970s Roddy McDowall - yes, from Planet of the Apes - was raided by the FBI because of his collection of bootleg movies, which he had for private screenings for other film lovers. It was, at the time, the biggest movie bootleg bust in the FBI’s history. 

Now, we can’t do the real work of archiving and saving these movies - there is a technical aspect to this that would be beyond most of our means and abilities. But in the meantime rather than begging the faceless corporations to keep streaming things we can be finding ways to keep those things going, to keep getting them in front of new eyes. And I’m talking about going DIY as hell - having people over to watch a bootleg, having an outdoor screening, renting a local theater to surreptitiously play a 35mm film print you’re legally not supposed to have.The era of on-demand streaming has made us dependent on the whims of executives who know nothing about film and whose only interest is the bottom line. The truth about cult movies is that they’re not big earners - they can be steady earners, but the American business culture today does not look beyond the current quarter’s financials, so who gives a shit that a movie like Rocky Horror Picture Show can earn every weekend for more years than some of the folks reading this have been alive? No, there is no solution coming from the corporate powers-that-be. 

Release the despair and accept the responsibility - it’s up to us to keep cult film alive, and to keep creating new cults around films. It’s up to us to keep carrying the torch of loving, celebrating and saving these movies. It’s up to us to fulfill the one true commandment of cult cinema: Keep circulating the tapes.