The Genre Of Cult Film - 1741 Words

The area of study to be explored is genre and my investigation will look into ways we are able to clarify the vast genre of cult film. Speculated by theorists such as Sconce, Jancovich and many others, cult film is one of the most diverse and ambiguous genres of the past 60 years in motion picture history. Beginning in the 1950s with unconventional flicks like Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Blob, cult film as a ‘quasi-genre’ began to not only reject one set of stylistic conventions, but also started to expand into various sub-genres that it could ‘umbrella’. Highlighted by Sconce in his study, ‘[cult film] would include entries from disparate sub-genres such as â€Å"bad films†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦and just about every other manifestation of exploitation cinema†¦show more content†¦In addition to this, those who construct and encode ideologies and messages into cult films need to know and implement a repertoire of elements that will go against the pl easures of recognition and provide a more sophisticated and untraditional narrative experience. Whether through manipulating time and space, or providing powerful subject matter, it is through these technical and visual codes that the text will continuously challenge audience expectation and draw a preferred or oppositional reading to the weird and wonderful it tries to represent. As argued by Thornton, ‘it is not defined according to some single, unifying feature shared by all cult movies, but rather through a ‘sub-cultural ideology’ in filmmakers, films or audiences are seen as existing in opposition to the mainstream.’ Therefore, the audience appeal for cult film is not only through its quirky and abnormal generic values, but also through the plurality of artistic control that is held by the auteur and its audience’s desires. In order to go into more extensive detail, I have selected Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive and David Fincher’s Fight Club – two contrasting texts with diverse ideologies and technical codes yet both linked by