Cult Movies

A cult movie is rarely made on purpose. It is usually a film that failed, puzzled its first audience or played in the wrong places, then found people who would not let it go. This section is about those films and the screenings, fans and rituals that kept them alive.

The best cult movies explains how a film becomes a cult classic, with titles across genres and decades. Midnight movies tells the story of the late-night screenings that built cult audiences in the 1970s, and so bad it's good looks at the famous failures audiences love anyway.

The section also covers stranger corners, such as cult sci-fi movies that were too ambitious or too odd for their time. Nothing here links to a film; where a title can be seen, the article says only that it may be found through public-domain archives or licensed services.