Global Cult Cinemas
Decolonizing Cult Film Studies
Global Cult Cinemas
Decolonizing Cult Film Studies
Description
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.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Contributors
Introduction: Towards a Decolonisation of Cult Film Studies
Iain Robert Smith (Kings College London, UK), Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex, UK) and Shruti Narayanswamy (St Andrews University, UK)
Part I – Reconsidering the Cult Paradigm: Race/Gender/Postcoloniality
1. The Whiteness of Cult
Iain Robert Smith (Kings College London, UK)
2. Alejandro Jodorowsky in the era of #MeToo
Victoria Ruétalo (University of Alberta, Canada)
3. De- and anti-colonial pathways: Reframing methodologies in the analysis of Latin American horror
Valeria Villegas Lindvall (Independent Scholar, UK)
4. Running Free? Aesthetics and Receptions of First Nations Cult Cinema Utopias
Ernest Mathijs (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Part II – Cult Audiences and Reception
5. Re-Imagining the Origins of Cult Cinema: Spanish-Language Theatres and Their Audiences in 1969-1970 New York City
Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex, UK)
6. Cine de culto / Cine bizarro: Cult Cinema and Its Divergences in Argentina
Jonathan Risner (Indiana University Bloomington, USA)
7. Between Anarchy and Conformity: Czechoslovakia's 'Crazy Comedy' Genre
Jonathan Owen (Independent Scholar, UK)
8. Cult Cinema and Cinephilia in 1970s Pakistan
Syeda Momina Masood (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
9. Beyond 'Crazy Indonesia': Reframing Cult Cinema from an Indonesian Perspective
Ekky Imanjaya (Bina Nusantara University, Indonesia)
Part III – Cult Auteurs, Stars and Genres
10. Opportunism, Precarity, and a Stroke of Luck: Raffaele Rossi and Cult Cinema in Brazil
Stephanie Dennison (University of Leeds, UK) and Laura Loguercio Cánepa (Universidade Paulista, Brazil)
11. Roger Corman in Ireland: The Cult Auteur, the Celtic Tiger, and the Nascent Irish Cult Cinema Canon
Nessa Johnston (University of Liverpool, UK)
12. Cult Genealogies of El Santo Films
Antonio Lázaro-Reboll (University of Kent, UK)
13. Tales of Entrails: animist cult horror in Southeast Asia
Rosalind Galt (King's College London, UK)
Index
Product details
| Published | 22 Jan 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 280 |
| ISBN | 9781501375217 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 15 bw illus |
| Series | Global Exploitation Cinemas |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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