
From our magazine archive, Nick Fuller looks at what makes a cult film, and why we love them.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 37.
After a few beers it’s never difficult to coax a gathering of film fans to come up with a ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ or ‘I’ll tell you what would make a great film’ proposal. The chances of bringing those brainwaves to life may well seem much greater if we’re talking cult films. After all...
...They’re amateurish and (sometimes) just plain bad
There’s no need to worry about structure, tight scripting or even coherence - films don’t need any of that stuff to be ‘so bad they’re good’. Valley Of The Dolls is often described as unintentionally funny, a frequently recurring term around this theme; Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes pretty much speaks for itself.
That’s far from a hard and fast rule, though. Nobody would question the quality of Stanley Kubrick’s Apocalypse Now or Dr Strangelove, yet both are often cited as examples. The same can be said of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up.