Current Tonight | May 03, 2010 | 0 comments

What makes a cult film?

Image
CarolineS
Cult film is being celebrated by thousands of fans in London in a festival of strange outfits and aficionado enthusiasm. But what makes a film become cult?

A fully-grown man - lawyer by day - constructs a fully-functional Predator costume for a themed party.

At another party a different fully-grown man arrives with rouged lips, stockings and suspenders in homage to Dr Frank N Furter.

This kind of behaviour usually signals when a movie has achieved cult status.

Cult film is a tricky term.

The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that cult films should have "enduring appeal to a relatively small audience", and be "non-mainstream". But search the internet, and you see the cult badge has been applied to a plethora of disparate films.

Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is a cult classic. The director's withdrawal of the film in the UK soon after its release denied it a place in the mainstream.

But it lived on in the form of battered VHS tapes passed reverentially between teenagers, becoming a small screen rite of passage in the near three decades until it was finally rereleased.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8640334.stm
  1. groups:
    Entertainment,   WTF,   Current Tonight,   Film,   2 more
  2. tags:
    Movies Classics Cult Film Rocky Horror Picture Show 1 more
  3.     
    |

0 comments // What makes a cult film?

more from Current Tonight:

top videos