Cult
WR: Mysteries of the Organism: The Cult Film That Argued With Politics
Wilhelm Reich, orgasms, Stalin and a severed head that keeps talking
Topic
Cult
23 articles
Cult
The Holy Mountain: Jodorowsky's Alchemical Provocation
A thief, an alchemist, and the most beautiful act of hostility in cult cinema
Cult
Dead Alive (Braindead): Peter Jackson's Splatter Comedy Peak
The lawnmower, the kung-fu priest, and the goriest comedy ever committed to film
Cult
Street Trash: The Melt Movie as Reagan-Era Fable
A case of poisoned wine, a junkyard full of the forgotten, and the goriest social satire of 1987
Cult
Ten Under-Seen Genre Films on the Streaming Edges
The gems buried three pages deep in the menu — the horror, sci-fi and cult films the algorithm keeps hiding from you
Cult
The Midnight-Movie Canon
The films that only made sense after dark, in a full house of strangers who came back every week — the strange, the filthy and the sublime
Cult
Zardoz: Boorman's Folly and the Case for Watching It Anyway
A giant flying stone head, Sean Connery in thigh boots, and the most sincere failure in 1970s science fiction
Cult
The Best Genre Debuts: First Features That Announced a Career
A dozen first films that arrived fully formed — the ones where you can already hear the whole career in the opening reel
Cult
Flash Gordon (1980): Camp, Queen, and the Best Bad Good Film
Dino De Laurentiis, a Queen soundtrack and a football hero make the most sincere silly film ever
Cult
Society (1989): The Body-Horror Satire With the Nastiest Ending
Brian Yuzna's debut spends an hour as a paranoid teen thriller before the flesh melts
Cult
Big Trouble in Little China: The Action Film Where the Hero Is the Sidekick
Carpenter's flop turned cult classic runs on one great joke about who gets to be John Wayne
Cult
Hard to Be a God: German's Medieval Mud and the End of the World
Aleksei German's final film is a three-hour descent into a planet that never had a Renaissance
Cult
A Field in England: Wheatley's Monochrome Bad Trip
Alchemy, mushrooms and the English Civil War, shot in black and white
Cult
Tetsuo: The Iron Man: Tsukamoto's Body-Horror Assault
Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989 metal-flesh nightmare is 67 minutes of stop-motion industrial dread that still outruns everything it inspired
Cult
Beyond the Black Rainbow: The Synth-Drenched Slow Nightmare
Panos Cosmatos's 2010 debut is a cold, hypnotic retro-future about a psychic prisoner and the New Age messiah who keeps her
Cult
Mandy: Cosmatos, Cage, and Grief Rendered in Lava Light
Panos Cosmatos's 1983-set revenge nightmare is a heavy-metal album cover animated by one of Nicolas Cage's greatest performances
Cult
Phantom of the Paradise: De Palma's Rock Opera of Faustian Rot
Brian De Palma's 1974 glam-horror musical fused three old myths into the most stylish nervous breakdown of the decade
Cult
Repo Man: Punk, Aliens, and the Great Los Angeles Nowhere
Alex Cox's 1984 debut turned repossession, neutron bombs and generic groceries into the strangest LA film of its decade
Cult
Escape From New York: Carpenter, Snake, and the Dystopia on a Budget
How six million dollars and a good eyepatch built the coolest future in genre film
Cult
The Warriors: The Gang Odyssey That Became a Comic Book
Walter Hill turned a slice of New York panic into a neon fairy tale
Cult
Santa Sangre: Jodorowsky's Circus of Guilt and Armless Mothers
The film where the acid-Western surrealist finally found a beating heart
Cult
Hausu (1977): The Haunted House as a Sugar-Rush Fever Dream
Nobuhiko Obayashi's commercial-director haunted house, dreamed up by his daughter
Cult
El Topo: Jodorowsky and the Birth of the Midnight Movie
The acid Western that invented the after-hours cinema cult