10 Cult Classic Movies That Found Their Audience Years Late

Nobody sets out to make a cult film. A cult film is often what happens when a movie fails the first time and refuses to go away. It gets bumped to the bottom of a double bill, sold to late-night television for almost nothing, or lost in a legal mistake, and then a small group of people start showing it to their friends.

Several of the films below were dismissed or ignored on release. All of them are now studied, remade, quoted or programmed at midnight somewhere in the world.

What makes a cult classic

• Many failed first. Bad reviews, a bad release, or no release at all.
• Somebody rescued it. Television, college film societies, midnight screenings, home video.
• It does something nobody else was doing. Often because nobody with money would have allowed it.

10 cult classic movies to watch

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

A group of Pittsburgh friends made it for about $114,000, using gear from their own commercial production company and a cast of people they knew. When the distributor changed the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters, the copyright notice was left off the new print. The film fell into the public domain almost immediately, which cost the makers their share of its earnings and made it one of the most widely screened horror films ever.

It also redefined the zombie. Before this, zombies were hypnotised slaves in voodoo pictures. After it, they were the dead, they were hungry, and there were a lot of them. Duane Jones, a Black stage actor, plays the lead in 1968 without the script ever mentioning it. The ending still lands.

Horror

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Carnival of Souls (1962)

Herk Harvey made industrial and educational films in Lawrence, Kansas. On a drive back from California he passed the abandoned Saltair pavilion on the Great Salt Lake and decided it needed a horror film. He shot one there and in Lawrence for about $30,000, took three weeks off work to do it, and went back to making training films.

The film vanished into drive-ins and then into late-night television, where it built a following. Critics have traced its influence on George Romero and David Lynch. The organ score, the pale man at the window and the dance hall full of ghosts are all copied to this day.

Horror

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The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

Roger Corman shot the interiors in two days on sets left standing from another picture. A young Jack Nicholson has one scene as a dental patient who enjoys the drill a little too much. It opened in 1960 as the lower half of a double bill.

Television kept running it, and in 1982 it became an off-Broadway musical, then a 1986 film with Rick Moranis and a singing plant. Every version since starts here, with a flower shop on Skid Row and a plant that says feed me.

Comedy

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Reefer Madness (1936)

It began as Tell Your Children, a church-funded warning about marijuana. An exploitation distributor bought it, recut it and sent it round the roadshow circuit. It played under a string of titles for twenty years, then faded out.

In the early 1970s it resurfaced in a film archive and started playing college campuses, where audiences treated it as a comedy. The piano scene became famous. It is now the textbook case of a film becoming a cult hit by being taken exactly the wrong way.

Comedy

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House on Haunted Hill (1959)

William Castle was a showman before he was a director. For this one he rigged cinemas with a plastic skeleton on a wire that flew out over the audience at the key moment. He called it Emergo. Teenagers threw things at it.

The film under the gimmick is better than it needs to be. Vincent Price hosts a party in a haunted house and offers $10,000 to anyone who lasts the night, and his performance is the reason people kept coming back once the skeleton was gone.

Horror

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The Last Man on Earth (1964)

The first film of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and still the most faithful. Vincent Price plays a scientist who spends his days hunting the infected and his nights barricaded inside. It was shot in Rome, whose modernist suburbs stand in for an empty American city.

Matheson disliked the result enough to take his name off it. George Romero said he took the idea for Night of the Living Dead from Matheson's novel, which puts this story at the root of the modern zombie film.

Drama

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Messiah of Evil (1974)

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz shot this strange coastal nightmare in 1971, the same year they were writing American Graffiti. The money ran out before it was finished, and it was released under a string of different titles.

What survived is two of the most unsettling scenes of the decade: a supermarket at night, and a cinema that fills up behind a woman watching the screen. It has since been restored, and critics now rank it among the best American horror of the 1970s.

Horror

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The Brood (1979)

David Cronenberg wrote it in the middle of a divorce and custody fight, and later described it as his version of Kramer vs. Kramer. Oliver Reed plays a therapist whose method draws his patients' rage out of their bodies. Samantha Eggar is the patient whose rage takes shape.

Censors cut it and many critics hated it. It is now seen as the film where Cronenberg's body horror first becomes personal.

Horror

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Night Tide (1961)

Dennis Hopper's first lead role, as a young sailor on shore leave who falls for a woman playing a mermaid in a pier sideshow. Curtis Harrington shot it on the Santa Monica and Venice seafront on almost nothing, and after a 1961 festival premiere it waited two years for an American release.

It plays like a waking dream: jazz clubs, fortune tellers, a carousel and a woman who may believe her own act. It owes an open debt to Cat People.

Horror

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Spider Baby (1967)

Jack Hill shot it in 1964, then the producers went bankrupt and it sat on a shelf for three years. It came out as half of a double bill and was forgotten.

It found its audience years later. Lon Chaney Jr. plays the loyal chauffeur of a family whose children regress a little further every year, and the film is funny and horrible at once. It got to the backwoods horror family years before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Comedy

Where to go next

• Films made badly with total conviction, and loved for it, are in So Bad It's Good Movies.
• For how a studio system produced this many cheap, strange pictures, start with What Is a B Movie?.