Define Cult Cinema

John Landis posed this question at a cult film conference, “Back in the day, when someone called your film cult it meant it had bombed. Why study failures?” (qtd. in Mathjis Sexton, 2011, 26). I can think of a few reasons. Instead of making everything "go viral" and being banished to obscurity (Dayummm Daniel!), why not go cult? While I do not tackle using cult cinema techniques for marketing in this essay (perhaps one day...), I do take on what it means to be a cult movie. I wrote this essay as a final paper for a grad level class in May of 2013. You can read the full essay here.