ABSTRACT
Cult cinema is a super-genre whose participants fetishize the cultural illegitimacy of their own cult activities and forms, often wearing their “shame” as a badge of honor in cult contexts. In a sense, this illegitimacy lends these participants a narrow mystique with a restricted legitimacy. Because this legitimacy is only intermittently recognized outside the cult nexus, we may refer to it as “subcultural legitimacy.” These assertions can help us understand cult cinema’s complex overlaps with other fields. For example, cult cinema’s intersection with art cinema produces “cult-art cinema.” As a cult variety, cult-art cinema is striking in that it exemplifies the cult identity even as its manifest aspiration to high-art distinction threatens to erase that identity. At the same time, cult-art cinema’s cult identity always calls into question its high-art distinction. This conflicting, often ambivalent nature is at the heart of cult-art cinema.
