Books in the Cultographies series

Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) is an enigma. A box-office failure when initially released on the grindhouse circuit, it has since been embraced by art-house audiences, and referenced in countless films, television series, and songs. A riot of styles and story cliches lifted from biker, juvenile delinquency, and beach party movies, it has the coherence of a dream, and the improvisatory daring of a jazz solo. John Waters has called it the greatest movie ever made, and Quentin Tarantino has long promised to remake it. But what draws them, and so many other cult fans to Pussycat? To help answer that question, this book looks at the production and critical reception of the film, its place within the cultural history of the 1960s, its representations of gender and sexuality, and the specific ways it meets the criteria of a cult film.

Banned soon after its first midnight screenings, Jack Smith's incendiary Flaming Creatures (1963) quickly became a cause celebre of the New York underground. This study of Smith's magnum opus explores its status as a cult film that appropriates the visual texture, erotic nuance, and overt fabrication of old Hollywood exoticism.

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) is both a successful mainstream horror film and an esoteric object for cult audiences who are convinced that the film means something totally different. This book investigates what has made The Shining a key cult film while also addressing the range of meanings and interpretations assigned to it.

Meir Zarchi's I Spit On Your Grave (1978) is of the most controversial films ever made-both condemned as misogynistic and praised for raising uncomfortable issues about sexual violence. David Maguire investigates the historical, social, and political landscape of the film's release and how it has become ground zero for the rape-revenge genre.

Joss Whedon's Serenity (2005) is at once a symbol of failure and a triumphant success of fan activism. This book examines the relationship between the film and its peculiar cult following and situates the film in relation to the series Firefly and its other transmedia continuations to plumb the status of different media texts and their platforms.

This book probes the production history, initial reception, aesthetics, and legacy of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise in order to understand its place in the cult film canon. It explores early-1980s New York downtown culture and Jarmusch's involvement in music, as well as reflecting on the film's status alongside Jarmusch's subsequent output.

Tracing Deep Red's history of censorship, re-edited releases, and its subsequent celebration by cult film audiences, this book considers how these competing discourses have helped to transform the film's cultural status and to fashion it as an exemplar of cult cinema.

Despite its association with the broadly disparaged rape-revenge category, Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45 is today considered one of the most significant feminist cult films of the 1980s. Straddling mainstream, arthouse, and exploitation film contexts, Ms. 45 is a potent case study for cult film analysis. At its heart lies two figures: Ferrara himself, and the movie's star, the iconic Zoe Lund, who would further collaborate with Ferrara on later projects such as Bad Lieutenant. This book explores the entwining histories and contexts that led to Ms. 45's creation and helped establish its enduring legacy, particularly in terms of feminist cult film fandom, and the film's status as one of the most important, influential, and powerful rape-revenge films ever made.

James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) spawned a phenomenon that has been rooted in world culture for decades. This cinematic Prometheus has generated countless sequels, remakes, rip-offs, and parodies in every media, and this granddaddy of cult movies constantly renews its followers in each generation. Along with an in-depth critical reading of the original 1931 film, this book tracks Frankenstein the monster's heavy cultural tread from Mary Shelley's source novel to today's Internet chat rooms.

With its gothic tale of a troubled teen haunted by visions of a figure in a Halloween rabbit suit, Donnie Darko was among the first cult movie phenomena of the twenty-first century, making debut director Richard Kelly Hollywood hot property before he reached his thirtieth birthday. This study narrates the film's journey from box-office bemusement through word of mouth success to the recent director's cut of the film, and also discusses fans' reactions to the film's enigmatic conclusion, explaining how Donnie Darko gripped the imagination of Generation X teenagers across the world.

Born out of the cultural flamboyance and anxiety of the 1980s, They Live (1988) is a hallmark of John Carpenter's singular canon, combining the aesthetics of multiple genres and leveling an attack against the politics of Reaganism and the Cold War. The decision to cast the professional wrestler "e;Rowdy"e; Roddy Piper as his protagonist gave Carpenter the additional means to comment on the hypermasculine attitudes and codes indicative of the era. This study traces the development of They Live from its comic book roots to its legacy as a cult masterpiece while evaluating the film in light of the paranoid/postmodern theory that matured in the decidedly "e;Big 80s."e; Directed by a reluctant auteur, the film is examined as a complex work of metafiction that calls attention to the nature of cinematic production and reception as well as the dynamics of the cult landscape.

Danger: Diabolik (1968) was adapted from a comic that has been a social phenomenon in Italy for over fifty years. This study examines its status as a comic-book movie, traces its production and initial reception in Italy, France, the U.S., and the UK, and its cult afterlife as both a pop-art classic and campy "bad film."