By Maia Engelbrecht
During the Halloween season and its following weeks, independent theatre establishment ‘The Projector’ had been screening films decades older than the average age of its patrons, proving the enduring nature of the cult film community and offering a space for the unique experiences that come with it.
In all great narratives, there is an emphasis on the outsider, the being who watches the world laid before them for others to experience. Someone who, for whatever reason, cannot appeal to themselves or others, the perception of which is socially acceptable, and although critics can pretend to be omniscient figures of art and objectivity, there are narratives that no one, not the mainstream nor the intellectuals can assimilate for whatever reason. But here lies the phenomenon of the cult classic, a term that no one truly understands, because all that that are considered cult classics are not defined by similar characteristics or circumstances. Some are defined by their rejection, innovation or absurdity, but one thing that always prevails regardless is people’s constant need to experience them over and over.
The films that the projector had been screening during the fall season were not all focused on this outsider narrative necessarily; at times, the allure of societal rejection came from the actual films themselves, based on their financial and/or critical failure.
I had not gone to see all of the films in question, them being The Bodyguard (1992), The Queen of Black Magic (1981), Troll 2 (1990) and The Lost Boys (1987). I had; however, gone to see the latter two, both of which, despite being over 3 decades old, not only proved the robust capacity for theatres to profit off of people’s sentiments but also displayed the enduring nature of the communities that form around such films.
The theatres for each film were far from packed, but hardly were they empty, and any space left in the room was easily compensated for with the uninhibited laughter of its patrons. There was a sentiment shared throughout everyone there, a feeling as though you knew each other without needing to exchange a word because you share that unique experience due to the niche commitment and strange affiliation for something that only you few understand.
In film critic Pauline Kael’s essay ‘Trash, Art and the Movies’, she more or less elaborates on this phenomenon. She claims that a good movie makes one feel like themselves again: alive. And how good it is, isn’t based on objectivity, but is rather about a certain idiosyncrasy that speaks to you.
“Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do… The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen…You know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.”.
Infamously considered one of the worst movies ever made, ‘Troll 2’, was objectively bad, but I hardly remember it that way. I only remember how close I felt to the people at the back of the theatre, to the actors on the screen, and to everyone who sat in their seats in the eccentricity of their appearance (though being Halloween it was appropriate), types of people who had never crossed my mind to have shared interests with me. The director, Claudio Fragrasso might as well have put his heart on his sleeve during its production, as its fallibility and complete unintentional deterrence from normality is what people connected with for one reason or another.
I digress, but It’s quite significant that these screenings would occur around Halloween because although some of these films are horror, the outsider narrative is often never more apparent than it is within the genre. Such is especially true in classics such as Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and even one of the earliest examples of a cult classic film, Freaks (1932), a movie about circus performers exacting revenge on a trapeze artist, that the BBFC had banned for over 3 decades for its depiction and supposed exploitation of disability; however, Freaks was shunned merely because it made audiences uncomfortable, as its themes of morality and righteousness were explored along with how those things could be deceptive, especially within a person that coincides with society’s expectation of attractiveness: it implicitly explored entrenched prejudice in society and was subsequently treated that way by audiences who couldn’t stand to have their morals questioned.
But for those who already felt like outsiders, or for those that defied the status quo simply in an attempt to understand them, here was a medium through which they come across each other, perhaps in a theatre. They might never say a word to each other, but they would know instantly that they weren’t alone.