Horror films are often seen as intrinsically trash in the sense of being disreputable, offensively taboo-breaking, and at the lowest end of popular culture. This chapter looks at “bad” horror films that have attracted significant cult followings, typified by passionate advocacy and intense repeat viewing. Although exploitation generally is a cult field, fans have singled out these films for their compelling difference, unpredictability, and comic surrealism. Cultists' ritual return to the scene of the abject is a way, both masterful and masochistic, of coping with threatening images and experiences and domesticating them through compulsive repetition. The chapter focuses strictly on exploitation films which, to cultists, can appear so beguilingly distant from the conventions of mainstream cinema as to represent an alternative universe of cinematic practice, an exotic far shore of incompetence and tastelessness.
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