Cult Films: Taboo and Transgression (review)

Difficult to pin down precisely, the cult film has a special relationship with its audiences. As Allan Havis argues it is an experience that is at once nostalgic and ephemeral, but "no one agrees, about the top selection of such benchmark films." While Havis is quick to point out the obvious cult (and camp) champion, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), he wisely does not dwell there, given the attention it has already received. Instead, his selection of three key cult films made in each decade from the 1920s to the 2000s allows him a broad perspective. This results in some omissions beyond Rocky Horror that Havis points out in the introduction. He is quick to convey that he wants to "rule out any archival encyclopedia for the sheer avoidance of the drudgery of cataloguing", but in doing so, Havis probably engages in too much mentioning' of cult films in place of analytical insight.

This is not to say that Havis' remarks about each of the chosen twenty-seven films are not discerning. On the contrary, his lucid, although sometimes too brief, observations afford an incisive glimpse at the inner machinations of cult films and their followers. "The cult viewer," he writes, "slips beyond the usual ways of seeing, sensing, and empathizing with the visual story and the film's characters." Cult films tend to other their audiences, offering a safe glimpse at the exotic, enacting a spectatorial positionality for its viewers as having a sort of "unrepressed secret identity, an amoral doppelganger. The cult filmgoer half suspects this truth and may even whisper it aloud, but dare he call it his true 'Other'?"

His thoughts on cinema's earlier cult films are especially perceptive. Freaks (1932) was largely banned at the time of its release, a feat Havis describes as "a badge of cult honor" while King Kong (1933)—transgressive for its sympathy for the Beast and for its critique of American xenophobia—"commands the most unique place in our cinematic imagination." .The propaganda film Reefer Madness (1936) is an example of a 'bad' film becoming re-appropriated by later audiences.

Functioning largely on the latent fears and anxieties white society had toward nonwhites, countercultures, and drugs, Reefer Madness, "in its inauthentic reportage, debauched moralizing, and hokey melodrama .is truly a perverse fairy tale 'flashing' its sex and drugs." It is "one of the clumsiest and dumbest films ever made, [one that] attempts to portray American lost innocence, but paradoxically the filmmakers appear wonderfully naïve and moronic to all generations."

Other subversions abound: the homosexual/transvestite/transgender themes of Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1952); the Communist overtones of Invaders from Mars (1953); the emasculation anxieties of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957); the psychotic transvestite killer and the killing of a heroine so quickly in Psycho (1960); the pastoral perversions in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973); the postapocalyptic dystopias in Road Warrior (1981) and Blade Runner (1982); and the eccentrically kitschy Blue Velvet (1986), Delicatessen (1991), and Naked Lunch (1991).

Selecting films that are sometimes campy and indeed have ardent followers, Havis perhaps stretches the definition of 'cult film' too thinly. While Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) is certainly cultish, the characteristics of Run Lola Run (1998), The Ring (2002), and Sin City (2005) do not really scream 'cult.' They seem not only too mainstream, but also too straightforward in their execution. Run Lola Run, an exception, is pure postmodern jouissance, but it has been widely appreciated.

And where is the irony in watching The Ring? Its theme of moral compromise in the face of parasitic technology was interesting and popular in its day, but the film hardly has a cult-like following, especially considering the Japanese horror genre's quick demise. And while Sin City does depict a "depraved metropolis," where does it transgress society's norms? Its stylistic expression was indeed splashy at the time, but the word 'fanboy' probably encapsulates its audience more than 'cult' does. Instead of those, what about...