What Is a Cult Film? The Community of Images Left After Midnight

Not Strange Films, but Strange Ways of Watching

Calling a cult film "a strange film" misses the point a little.

Of course, many cult films are strange. The story does not move. The characters' motives are unclear. Religious images suddenly appear. Violence or sexual imagery stays on the screen after the story has stopped explaining it. The music alone feels oddly strong. The ending is less a resolution than a kind of abandonment.

But if that were all, cult film would be hard to distinguish from experimental film, art cinema, B movies, or certain failed works.

A film becomes a cult film because viewers return to it. They expose themselves again to something they did not understand. They want to explain it to someone. Unable to explain it, they still want to bring someone along. Midnight theaters, campus screenings, repertory cinemas, imported videotapes, bootlegs, DVDs, streaming. The medium changes, but there remains a feeling that "we know, just a little, where the entrance to this film is."

That feeling is dangerous. Shared secrecy quickly becomes a sense of election. It can also become a game of pretending to understand difficulty.

Still, it has a temperature different from an ordinary hit. The audience acts not as consumers, but as discoverers. The film is treated less like a product than like a found foreign object.

Jodorowsky and the Myth of the Midnight Screening

If we talk about the mythology of cult film, Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970) cannot be avoided.

ABKCO's description positions El Topo as the film that began the 1970s countercultural midnight movie phenomenon, explaining that its early screenings at New York's Elgin Theater gave rise to that current. It also notes that the movement was accelerated by the support of John Lennon and Yoko Ono.²

Here, the content of the film and the format of its exhibition were almost fused.

El Topo takes the shape of a western. A man with a gun moves through the desert. Blood flows. Religious signs pile up. Zen, the Bible, mysticism, spectacle, the roughness of exploitation cinema, the smell of the European avant-garde. The story moves, but the viewer is drawn less into plot than into ritual.

Seen in an ordinary daytime program, it might look like merely excessive cinema. At midnight, the meaning changes. The city has gone quiet, the screening has slipped outside the normal timetable, and viewers watch it as a ritual of their own. The theater becomes not a box for showing a film, but a machine for making a community.

Jodorowsky's cinema fit that space exactly.

The soundtrack for El Topo was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and released by Apple Records in 1971. ABKCO's description notes that John Lennon brought the film to Allen Klein's attention.³ The AFI Catalog also explains that Lennon's enthusiasm moved Klein, then the Beatles' business manager, leading to the international distribution of El Topo and to the financing and production of Jodorowsky's next film, The Holy Mountain.⁴

This was not simply a celebrity recommendation.

From the late 1960s into the early 1970s, rock, Eastern thought, drug culture, antiwar feeling, dreams of community, religious imagery, and disgust with capitalism were mixed together in a fairly rough form. I think Lennon responded to El Topo because the film sounded like a film of the rock era.

A psychedelic album made not with guitars, but with cinema.

El Topo and The Holy Mountain have that texture. Like a song, they leap over logic. Like an album cover, their images turn into signs. Like a live performance, they come directly at the viewer's body. What remains after watching is less the understanding of a story than a rough mixture of color, posture, pain, laughter, disgust, and sacredness.

Parajanov and the Cult Quality Made by Censorship

Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates (1968, often introduced as 1969) became a cult film through a different circuit from Jodorowsky.

If El Topo multiplied through midnight screenings and the heat of counterculture, The Color of Pomegranates survived through censorship, reediting, underground screenings, and restoration.

BFI explains that after the international success of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), Parajanov was commissioned by Armenfilm Studios to make a film about the life of the eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova. Instead of making a conventional biopic, he chose to visualize poetry. The film, mixing folk ritual and surreal events, was judged obscure by Soviet authorities, reedited, and given only limited release.⁵

Criterion also explains that because the film moved away from the realism that dominated Soviet cinema at the time, authorities blocked its distribution, and it was rarely shown in a restructured form at underground screenings.⁶

The Color of Pomegranates is not a film that "tells" a story.

Cloth, fruit, books, water, wool, bloodlike red, stone, costume, the movement of hands. Characters do not move so much through psychology as they are placed inside images. The frame does not push into depth; it looks back at us as a plane. Although it is cinema, it feels less as if time is flowing than as if an icon or tapestry is breathing.

The cult quality of this film is not sensational excess. It lies, rather, in the stillness that refuses explanation.

The viewer gives up on following the plot fairly early. Then the surface of the image suddenly comes close. The red of the pomegranate, the weight of costume, wet cloth, funeral ritual, bodies arranged across gender. Meaning remains unclear, but the feeling that something decisive is happening remains.

If Jodorowsky intoxicates the viewer with excessive meaning, Parajanov stops the viewer with images before they become meaning.

Both stand outside the ordinary speed of cinema.

Shuji Terayama and the Memory of Pastoral

In Japan, this lineage cannot be approached without Shuji Terayama.

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971) was already a film whose title pushed the viewer outside the screen. Eiga.com introduces it as an adaptation of a documentary musical of the same name, performed more than a hundred times around Japan by Terayama's theater laboratory Tenjo Sajiki, with Terayama handling production, original work, screenplay, and direction.⁷

The film information page at Eiga Natalie describes it as a cine-essay with no firm story, centered on a young man while reality, past, and fantasy appear as various images.⁸

But if we are thinking about Terayama as cult cinema, Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) matters even more.

Eiga.com introduces Pastoral as an autobiographical work written and directed by Terayama, adapted from his poetry collection of the same title. It is set in a village at the foot of Mount Osore in Aomori. The boyhood "I," having lost his father, has an itako summon his father's spirit, while a woman from the neighboring house and a visiting circus tempt him toward escape. Later, after moving to Tokyo and becoming middle-aged, "I" makes a film, and his boyhood self appears before him. The music is by J. A. Seazer, and the film was distributed by ATG.⁹

Here, cinema does not reproduce memory. Memory itself is broken and remade inside the film.

Mother, Mount Osore, the itako, the circus, the boy's desire, the presence of the dead. In Pastoral, the home village does not return as a place of nostalgia. It rises on the screen as a place to which one cannot return. Strong reds and greens, a village that looks like stage design, folk ritual, and the sudden presence of spectacle make autobiographical memory increasingly unreliable.

That is why Terayama's cinema becomes "cult" in a different sense from Jodorowsky or Parajanov.

Jodorowsky pulls the midnight audience into ritual. Parajanov arrests the viewer with images that have passed through censorship. Terayama rebuilds his own memory and birthplace as spectacle, making the viewer wonder whether this is really the past at all.

Tenjo Sajiki still matters. Terayama's cinema carries theater, poetry, song, the street, and the smell of spectacle. But if we are choosing one film through which to think about Terayama as a cult filmmaker, Pastoral is stronger than Throw Away Your Books. It does not send the viewer into the city so much as take the viewer down into memory, where words like "hometown," "mother," and "I" can no longer be trusted.

For Terayama, songs and sound do not decorate scenes. They cut scenes apart, alter the viewer's distance, and reconnect cinema to theater, the street, and spectacle. If cult film is made by the way an audience watches, Pastoral is a film that makes the act of looking at memory itself feel unstable.

What the Three Share

Jodorowsky, Parajanov, and Shuji Terayama are not the same kind of filmmaker.

Jodorowsky turns religion, tarot, the body, cruelty, and spectacle into pop and psychedelic excess. Parajanov turns folklore, poetry, ritual, costume, and handwork into cinema that resembles still images. Terayama turns theater, poetry, popular song, hometown, mother, and the presence of the dead into cinema that makes memory itself suspect.

They look scattered, but there is one thing they share.

They do not treat story as a tool that serves the viewer.

In ordinary cinema, images exist to move the story forward. Characters have reasons for acting. One scene connects to the next. Everything is arranged toward an ending.

In these three filmmakers' works, the image stands apart from story. The image faces the viewer as image, as ritual, as provocation.

That is why their films are difficult.

But they are not cult films because they are difficult. They become cult films because that difficulty remains inside the viewer. After the screening, the film has not quite ended. You want to talk to someone. You want to resist it. You want to see it again. You may never want to see it again, yet a scene returns.

That way of remaining is the strength of cult film.

Can Cult Film Still Exist Now?

Today we have access to far more films than before.

Search on a streaming platform, and you may reach films that once required repertory theaters, imported discs, or bootlegs. Restored versions appear. Commentary is available. Reactions can be found on social media. Cult films are no longer secret.

That is also a good thing. Films by directors like Parajanov, politically repressed and pushed out of circulation, can be restored, subtitled, and delivered to another generation. Films by Jodorowsky or Terayama, which once lived through rumors among a limited audience, now have wider entrances.

But something is lost in exchange.

The fact that a film could be seen only at midnight. The feeling of going somewhere slightly guilty. Going home unable to explain what you had just watched. The smallness of the audience creating a thicker community. Such conditions of screening are hard to reproduce through streaming.

Cult film does not exist through the work alone. It includes the time of viewing, the place, who watched it with you, and how it was talked about.

So if we think about cult film now, it is not enough to say, "This image looks cultish."

What kind of audience does the film create?

In what place does it take on another meaning?

Through what prohibitions, misunderstandings, and rumors does it remain for a long time?

With those questions included, cult film is not over.

What Remains

In Jodorowsky's desert, gunshots and mysticism sit in the same frame.

In Parajanov's interior, the red of the pomegranate sinks into memory before story does.

In Terayama's village, boyhood memory returns in the colors of a sideshow.

In different ways, all three pull cinema away from being something that ends when it is watched. Toward ritual, toward image, toward memory. That is why cult film is not simply a name for strange cinema.

It is probably closer to a phenomenon in which a film enters the viewer's life and makes another kind of time.

After watching, you cannot explain it well. You cannot immediately decide whether you liked it or hated it. But some part of the image remains. The color of the desert, the red of fruit, the village as sideshow, the seats at midnight. Those fragments continue screening inside the body longer than ordinary films do.

Cult film, I think, is the name for that way of remaining.

Watch the Trailers

Here are trailers for the films discussed in the piece.

El Topo

The Holy Mountain

The Color of Pomegranates

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets

Pastoral: To Die in the Country

References