Global Cult Cinemas: De-Westernizing Cult Film Studies

Global Cult Cinemas calls for a decolonisation of cult film studies.

To date, discourses of cult cinema have predominantly focused upon Anglo-American cinema and its reception in the West. Even when cult scholarship has expanded to include non-English language cinema from regions such as East and Southeast Asia, what nevertheless tends to define these cinemas as cult has been the subcultural fandom for those films in the West. Shifting the focus onto cult film traditions and fandoms beyond the Anglosphere, Global Cult Cinemas makes a decisive intervention in the field by calling for a decolonisation of cult film studies.

This volume therefore interrogates both the coloniality and gendered nature of much cult scholarship and the extent to which an implicit white male perspective needs challenging in an age of decolonising the academy. Our contributors focus their research on circuits of cult film production and reception beyond the predominant Anglophone centres, with particular attention to cult practices across the Global South. Chapters include investigations of specific cult film traditions within countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan, alongside explorations of the politics of indigenous cult filmmaking, the global circulation of cult icons such as El Santo, and the status of auteurs such as Alejandro Jodorowsky in the era of #MeToo. In sum, this collection critiques the Eurocentric assumptions that lie at the heart of much existing cult film scholarship, and offers new ways of theorizing global cult cinemas to work towards the goal of decolonising cult film studies.

Dolores Tierney is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. She has written extensively on Latin American exploitation and horror cinemas including the co-edited anthologies Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas and Latin America (2009) and The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (2014), and chapters and articles in Cinema Journal (2014), Porn Studies (2019), and The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema (2019).

Iain Robert Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, UK. He is the author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (2016) and co-editor of the collections Transnational Film Remakes (2017) and Media Across Borders (2016). He co-founded the SCMS Transnational Cinemas SIG and he is currently working on a monograph on cult traditions within Indian cinema.

Shruti Narayanswamy is a PhD candidate in Film studies at the University of St. Andrews, UK. Her PhD research explores the representation of women in early Bombay cinema. She recently published an article in Transnational Screens on low-budget superhero films produced in Malegaon (2019) and she is currently preparing a post-doc project on the emergence of cult fandom within India and the South Asian diaspora.