This class explores the often-outrageous genre of cult films and the plethora of marginal cinematic phenomena that it suggests – exploitation films, trash cinema, B-movies, and camp appropriation (fanzines and midnight audiences). Cult cinema connotes not only Japanese Godzilla films of the 1950s and beach-party musicals of the 1960s, but also offbeat art films like Paris, Texas as well as revisionist Thai Westerns and educational hygiene films. Owing to this heterogeneity, cult films are predictably objects of both patronizing ridicule and canonizing adulation, depending on one's tastes and conceptual frames of reference.

In this course, we will not confine our readings of such culturally transgressive films as Freaks, Eraserhead, and Pink Flamingos to a content-based model of narrative difference. Instead, we will explore these and other key films within specific historical contexts. By taking a broad overview of the genre, we can begin to ascertain its cultural significance across the spheres of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception.