Overview

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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9781501375200

Table of Contents

Reviews

Through its ambitious curatorial framework and critical impulse to re-conceptualize transnationalism and decolonization with nuance and rigour, Global Cult Cinemas makes a crucial intervention that contests normative geopolitics of canonization in Anglophone film studies. The contributors’ diverse critical rapport with the core concepts of film studies (e.g. authorship, cultural translation, extraction, fandom, genre, Indigeneity, racialization, post-coloniality, and spectatorship) opens new theoretical paradigms to re-locate cult film in and out of the field’s canonizing drives. Moving beyond the institutionally driven, critically shallow, and culturalist agendas of decolonization, the editors treat the complexities of knowledge production with great enthusiasm and care. * Cüneyt Çakirlar, Associate Professor of Film and Visual Culture, Nottingham Trent University, UK, and editor of Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics (2025) *

Author Information

Dolores Tierney is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. Iain Robert Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London, UK. Shruti Narayanswamy is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews, UK.

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