The Best Cult Movies: How a Film Becomes a Cult Classic

In 1932 MGM released a horror picture so disturbing to its first audiences that the studio cut it heavily, and in Britain it was refused a certificate for roughly three decades. That film was Tod Browning’s Freaks. It ended its director’s run as a major studio talent, and today it sits in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. The distance between those two facts is, more or less, the whole story of cult cinema. Any honest list of the best cult movies is really a list of films that failed, or were misunderstood, or were simply too strange for their moment, and then found the audience that was waiting for them.

I host a film quiz night, and the cult round is always the loudest one. Nobody shouts out answers about a dutiful Oscar winner. They shout about the movie they discovered at the wrong age on a late-night broadcast or a worn rental tape. That personal sense of discovery is the engine of the whole phenomenon.

What makes a cult film?

There is no committee that awards cult status, which is part of the appeal. Critics have argued about definitions for decades. Danny Peary’s book Cult Movies (1981) treated the term broadly, and Umberto Eco’s essay on Casablanca famously argued that even a mainstream classic can work as a cult object because audiences can lift its lines and scenes out and play with them. Still, most films that earn the label share a few traits:

• A rocky first release. Many were commercial disappointments, were cut or shelved by their studios, or were dumped onto the bottom half of a double bill.
• A devoted minority. The audience is smaller than for a hit but far more intense, returning to the film again and again.
• Repeat viewing as ritual. Fans quote it, dress up for it, talk back to it, and introduce it to friends like a password.
• Something nobody else was doing. A tone, a world or a central performance that feels slightly out of step with the industry around it.
• A second life outside first-run cinemas. Midnight shows, college campuses, television reruns, home video and later the internet did the work that the original marketing campaign could not.

That last point matters most. Cult status is usually built by a delivery system. In the 1970s it was the late-show circuit (that history has a separate guide to midnight movies). In the 1980s and 1990s it was the video store shelf and cable television. The film itself has to be distinctive, but it also has to be available long enough for its audience to find it.

The best cult movies, decade by decade

This list deliberately crosses genres. Science fiction has so many cult titles that it gets its own article on cult sci-fi movies, and the gloriously inept end of the spectrum lives in a separate piece, so the picks below lean toward horror, comedy, musicals, crime and the plain uncategorizable.

The early outliers

Freaks remains the strangest case on the list because it was made inside the most glamorous studio of its era. Browning cast performers from the sideshow world rather than actors in makeup, and the film ends with a revenge sequence that still unsettles people. Its reputation recovered in the 1960s, when it was revived on the art-house and campus circuit, and its long British ban only added to its aura.

Night of the Living Dead came from the opposite direction: no studio at all. Romero and his collaborators made it in and around Pittsburgh on a tiny budget, in black and white, with a mostly unknown cast. Its grim ending and its matter-of-fact horror made it a fixture of late-night screenings, and nearly every zombie film since owes it something. It was added to the National Film Registry in 1999.

The 1970s: cult cinema finds a home

Harold and Maude pairs a death-obsessed young man with a cheerful elderly woman, and Paramount did not know what to do with it. It slipped out of first-run theaters quickly, then settled into long engagements at individual cinemas and college towns, which is exactly how many cult reputations were built before home video.

The Wicker Man has a famously tangled release history. British Lion trimmed it and sent it out as the second half of a double bill with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and different cuts have circulated ever since. A policeman’s search for a missing girl on a remote Scottish island, it feels like no other horror film of the period, with folk songs where the shocks ought to be.

Then there is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the film that turned cult viewing into a participatory event. It flopped in its first release and was rescued by midnight screenings, where audiences began shouting lines, dressing as the characters and acting out the film in front of the screen. No movie better illustrates how a cult can be built by the audience rather than the filmmakers.

The Warriors follows a New York gang trying to get home across the city after being framed for a killing. It drew controversy in 1979, and its stylized look, almost a live-action comic book, has kept fans coming back ever since.

The video-store generation

From the mid-1980s, the rental shelf became the most powerful cult machine ever invented. John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China, an action-comedy built around a boastful truck driver who has no idea he is the sidekick in his own story, underperformed in theaters and found a second audience on tape. The Princess Bride followed a similar path; it was a moderate success on release, but repeated home viewing made its lines part of everyday speech for a generation.

Withnail and I, made by HandMade Films, is the British entry in this group: two unemployed actors in 1969 London escape to a damp cottage in the countryside and fare badly. Its following grew largely through home video and student flats, where fans recite it scene by scene. Heathers took the American high-school movie and filled it with poison, and its reputation grew steadily after a weak theatrical showing.

The late-1990s cult

By the end of the century cult audiences could organize themselves. The Big Lebowski was received politely in 1998, yet within a few years fans had launched a festival in Louisville, Kentucky, devoted to it, complete with bowling and costumes. Office Space, Mike Judge’s comedy about cubicle life, did little at the box office and then became a staple of cable and DVD, quoted in break rooms everywhere. Both show that cult status no longer required a midnight screen; a passionate audience with a shared reference point was enough.

Why some films never make the jump

Plenty of flops stay flops. The films that become cult classics usually reward the second viewing more than the first, contain lines or images that work as shorthand, and carry a sense of a single vision that the marketplace did not quite allow. They also tend to be generous to the audience: they leave room for participation, whether that means dressing up, quoting along or arguing about an ending.

How to start a cult-movie habit

• Watch with a crowd if you can. Repertory cinemas and film societies still program cult titles, and the shared laughter or silence is half the experience.
• Look for the right version. Several of these films exist in different cuts, so check which one a restoration presents.
• Follow the double bills. Many cult reputations were made in pairs, so seeing two films the way a 1970s audience did can be revealing.
• Use legitimate sources. Most of these titles can be found through licensed services or physical media releases, and older ones occasionally turn up in public-domain archives.

Cult movies resist ranking, and any list starts arguments, which is exactly as it should be. If one title above makes you think “that’s not a cult film,” you are already doing what cult audiences have always done: claiming a movie as your own.