With the rise of streaming platforms, downloadable purchases, and Blackbeard levels of internet piracy, along with pedantic debate amongst cineastes and cultural scholars regarding its definition, the term ‘cult movie’ has kinda been eroded to the point of non-existence.

In a time where most films with the historical designation of ‘cult’ can be watched through the website of trillionaire egghead Jeff Bezos, as you wait for him to deliver a u-shaped memory foam toilet mat via his prime delivery service, the modern world has a feeling of being one giant gelatinous cultural gloop that we’re all kind of stuck in, with very little way of getting out.

And although there are still small sub-cultures that exist, that independently make / unearth / distribute / champion films they love, even most of those end up high-jacked by hipsters and violated by a sort of cavalier voguish fandom that surely must have some metaphysical impact on all involved.

Bottom line is this: I think we can all agree that the term ‘cult movie’ is a vaguely amorphous one – it means different things to different people. There’s probably some films on the list below that some people would not even define as cult ones. But in the words of the American writer Audre Lorde:

‘It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.’

So with that in mind, here’s my list of 10 great cult movies you’ve probably never seen …

Celebrate it.

1. Shock Treatment (1981)

Following the overwhelming success of 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Richard O’Brien began development of what would eventually become 1981’s Shock Treatment, a not-really-a-continuation-more-of-a-spiritual-sequel type film, that took The Picture Show’s normie protagonists Brad and Janet (now played by Cliffe De Young and an incendiary Jessica Harper) and plunked them into the nightmare squaresville town of Denton, USA, to argue (post-matrimonially) about toasters, before being catapulted to diva stardom and crackpot infamy by blind game show host Bert Schnick (played by Australian character actor Barry Humphries AKA Dame Edna).

Less a film, more a kind of fever-dream that happens at you, Shock Treatment was released to a commercial and critical dirge of dis-enthusiasm. Sometimes, box office bombs and critical duds are retroactively redeemed and forgiven as being misjudged or misunderstood at time of release, vindicated and lionized ; other times, you sit back and reassess something that was both commercially and critically lacking and go: fair dos.

The film’s a kenetic mess, and its narrative is borderline incomprehensible; but it has a cracking cast (including British comedian Rik Mayall, who stars as a kind of demented version of the pub extra he plays in An American Werewolf in London), the sets are a terrific fifties kitsch, and the musical numbers are loud and camp and fun, belted to the rafters by an on-point Jessica Harper, stunning as always.

2. Nightbreed (1990)

Horror meastro Clive Barker’s follow up to the Hallraiser series Nightbreed was originally conceived as a trilogy, but after the one-two punch of studio interference and tepid reviews / box office floppage, the series was abandoned; and what’s left is a muddled also-ran that canters precariously between gnarly 80s slasher film and a monster of the week episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – an amalgam that when rendered to text, doesn’t sound too bad at all.

Nightbreed follows confused every-man Aaron Boone as he sweats his way through tenabrious LA sheets with fever dreams of mutilated bodies, and the hidden demon world of Median, whilst under the malignant care of Doctor Decker, played with smoldering dour by body horror mage David Cronenberg (in a role that surely must have influenced Scarecrow in Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight series), in a film that pits the kind of self-to-them-self demonic pariahs of Median against all manner of ignoble and authoritative beasts of the human realm

You get the sense that the whole thing just didn’t manage to get the whole way to being fully realized, and came about in the time before the existence of the longer form of the ten-twenty part narrative series. (Maybe some show-runner somewhere will see potential in it and commission a series?)

Still though, it’s dumb, bloody 80s fun, with a whopping creepoid of a villain. There also exist three cuts of the film, so if you’re into it, you can go digging.

3. Cruising (1980)

What would happen if you took the burgeoning S&M scene of late 70s New York and injected it with the narrative plot of a softcore video nasty? … Cruising is what.

William Friedkin’s adaptation of 1970’s Cruising was a three-fold cultural flop when released in 1980: the LGBT community thought it’s message homophobic, and that it stigmatized the queer experience; the critics had an apolitical bee in their bonnet about narrative ambiguity and that it differed from the Gerald Walker novel; and the final cultural blow was received in the form of a dreaded raspberry – when it picked up two nominations in the 1st Annual Golden Raspberry Awards (or Razzie) for Worst Film and Worst Director respectively. The film did okay money, but the people weren’t too hot for it; people have warmed to it over the years, but it’s still a bit of a weird one.

The film stars (a pre hoo-ah) Al Pacino as NYPD officer Steve Burns, who goes undercover in the West Village leather bar scene in search of a killer who is picking up patrons for ostensible trysts before offing them. Pacino stalks the clubs in search of the killer, gazing ambiguously upon scenes of bondage and homoeroticsm, over a culturally disparate but narratively understandable frenetic punk soundtrack.

4. Society (1989)

Society takes for its premise the late-adolescent notion that the modern world is a vapid, class-obsessed, paranoid nightmare (where even your own family seem complicit) and carries that premise to its nauseating conclusion. It’s an ugly film (in content and aesthetic) that kinda just sits there creeping you out until it leaves you feeling deeply sick, over-thinking everything in that good horror movie way: perfect for normalizing the hollow existential despair of compound hangovers or comedowns.

Set in the always suspicious Beverly Hills of the 1980s, it stars Baywatch’s Billy Worlock as a wealthy pubescent who begins to suspect that his family (and everyone around him) is part of the same sick and horny incest cult. It’s the first time directorial effort of producer Brian Yuzna (The Re-Animator, From Beyond), with special effects by famed effects guru Screaming Mad George, who creates within one of the most gnarly body horror finales ever put to film.

If you ever had the nagging suspicion that you missed that one day of school where everyone conglomerated in the gym to be taught secret life lessons before having a massive orgy, I’d suggest skipping this one, as it will leave this suspicion in no way abated.

5. Out 1 (1971)

Long before the ubiquitous prestige of the modern miniseries, before Kieślowski’s Dekalog, Tarr’s Satantago, and Shoah, there was Out 1 (1971): filmmaker and Cahier du Cinema alumnus Jacque Rivette’s thirteen hour paranoiac art happening opus – one of the many end-level-boss-challenges facing those driven by fevered visions of
reigning cinematic geek supreme.

Set in the Pynchonesque world of multi-character cross-arching kismet and coincidence, Out 1 ambles loosely between various groups of post-uprising Paris of the early Seventies – two theoretically differing theatre troops rehearsing different plays from the same Grecian playwright; and a young philosophical grifter (played by 400 Blows star Jean-Pierre Léaud) who believes he’s unearthed the hidden messages of a secret society.

Divided into ten feature length episodes, the film is a scriptless study of collective actions eternal tussle with the ever vascillating wants of the modern individual; rendered through a long drawn out organic verite style collaboration of the philosophical artists of the 1970s French cinematic tradition. Of its time, but thought provoking and – if you can avoid the unfortunate lean towards seeing within the films the parody accounts that followed – a worthwhile affair.

There are many reasons why films of merit might wind up being overlooked in a great filmmaker’s back catalogue: the success of previous films might end up over shadowing the release of subsequent ones; distribution struggles may prevent larger audiences from discovering and connecting with a work; and some films just don’t lock with the wider cultural landscape of the time, and while-away undiscovered, left for future generations to dig out and champion.

Some of us look to our cinematic past to find hidden gems we perhaps undervalued upon time of release, films we missed or had never known existed; whilst those of us born too late use lists and internet forums to trace the lines of cinema towards its roots, finding hidden treasures, and films deserving of re-evaluation as we do.

With that in mind, here is a by no means exceptional list of awesome movies by great directors you’ve probably never seen. If you’ve seen some / all of them, I can only apologize. I don’t spend enough time with other people to know what is in the common knowledge.

I hope there’s something in here for most of you.

1. Hamlet Goes Business – Aki Kaurismaki

A film perfectly encapsulated by the pun in its title, this 1987 black comedy by finnish quasi-moralist Aki Kaurismaki takes the Shakespearean tragedy and forges out of it a kind of deadpan lampoon, full of dreary capitalistic bores enmeshed in Scandinavian melodrama, headed up by an uber-moronic and comically self-satisfying Hamlet (played with absolute relish by actor and now Finnish member of parliament Pirkka-Pekka Petelius).

The Bard wrenched and plunked into modern day Finland, the film follows Hamlet’s attempt to succeed in the rubber duck business following his father’s untimely death, gliding about navigating cut-throat business partners, his scheming mother, the boorish board, and contemptible proles who labour under the chimera of just wanting to be happy.

Shot in rich black and white, and reminiscent of Bergman and the American noirs of the forties, Kaurismaski’s characters go about their scheming machinations in deadly earnest, curled upper lip, smug-dumb as an emoji; but much like the filmmaker himself, however seriously it’s all presented, you can’t help but feel it’s all just a massive anarcho piss-take.

Rubber ducks, cured ham, and nihilism: oh my!

2. The Marquise of O – Eric Rohmer

A complex comedy of manners, by Cahiers du Cinéma’s paterfamilias and master of the moral character study, Eric Rohmer, set at the turn of the nineteen century, based on the German novella of the same name, concerning the ‘forced seduction’ of a widowed daughter of a general charged with guarding a town citadel during the Napoleonic Wars. Rohmer takes his modern moral framework and drops it atop a period drama, and as usual, the humour comes from characters actions belaying their moral ramblings.

Starring Wim Wenders favourite Bruno Gantz as the ‘heroic’ Count F, and armed to the hilt with joyous characters full of love and depth, trying their best to reason through life’s strange peculiarities and vicissitudes, you find yourself utterly absorbed and full of warmth and joy the way the morally dubious (and worryingly popular) force seduction theme is dealt with.

Complex moral content aside, the cast are great, the film looks gorgeous, and if you’ve only ever dipped your toe in the waters of Rohmer, I suggest hiking your britches, pinching your nose and catapulting off the dock, as his films possess a richness of character only usually found in good literature.

3. Images – Robert Altman

God bless New Hollywood! The upheaval of a bloated and moribund studio system in the late 60s giving way to the independent productions that saw huge commercial successes, allowed certain filmmakers of the time carte blanche to run about making anything of their fancy (to varying degrees of success).

No one was more successful in this regard than Robert Altman, who seemed more often than not to have done exactly what he wanted, whilst having a number of huge successes, as well as coming out of the era having actually added to the form itself.

Images (1972) feels like a precursor to 77’s 3 Women, whilst both films seem heavily influenced by Bergman’s Persona: they are films heavily involved with the internal state of the filmmakers themselves; the characters within almost figments of the filmmakers own internal workings. It is of interest to note that all three films have for the leads casts of woman.

The film was co-scripted by its star Susannah York, who plays a children’s author whose sanity comes into question after she receives a disturbing phone call and journeys to her isolated country home in Ireland. The home itself perfectly designed to optimise Altman’s trademark zooms, and with a score by a burgeoning John Williams, the film tingles with skitso dread.

4. Stroszek – Werner Herzog

Herzog came upon the East German street performer Bruno Schleinstein whilst casting for 1974’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: a celebrated Nineteen century foundling who’d purportedly spent the first seventeen years of his life in self isolation. The filmmaker was so taken with Scheleinstein’s performance (as well as feeling guilt for offering Klaus Kinski a role that was promised to Scheleinstein) that he wrote Strosezek as a sort of benevolence recompense – taking as plot points parts of the actual Bruno’s biography.

Strosezek follows recently released street performer and sot Bruno Strosezek as he navigates post-incarceration, befriending a downtrodden prostitute and journeying to America. The film plays out as an existential road movie, with Bruno braving the harsh Berlin winter, migrating to Wisconsin and setting into a period of capitalistic idyll, before being subjected to a ‘spiritual kicking’ and heading off out again into an endless nowhere.

With a script written in four days, it has a looseness and spontaneity that coupled with Herzog’s deftness for guerilla filmmaking feels kinetic and vital. It’s dark, and sad, whilst also being extremely funny – and Herzog delights in using Schleinstein’s unique delivery and physical performance to bring about pathos and humour in equal measure.

5. Pocketful of Miracles – Frank Capra

Aficionado of grin-and-bare it individualism and professed ‘lefty’ of the American studio system, Frank Capra holds a number of top spots in best of lists across the cinematic spectrum, with staunch classics like It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. But smash hits aside, he’s also held in high regard, as an auteur of vision, as well as being respected and being a fiercely independent director working within the Hollywood studio system of the fifties.

With a penchant for heavy improvisation (often going into scenes without dialogue, just knowing were he needed to get to and what feeling his actors should have / what the audience was to take away from the scene; shooting a master, then picking up from there) although his films don’t always hold together, and often boarder on the mawkish, they’re more often than not full of warmth, colourful characters, sumptuous, and are grandiose in sentiment.

The 1961 Technicolor comedy Pocketful of Miracles stars Bettie Davis as a sort of female Fagin, presiding over a group of eclectic beggars in 1930s New York. After duping Glenn Ford into believing the apple she is flogging possesses some superstitional powers (stay with me), the film blooms into a kinetic, light-hearted romp, featuring a colourful array of characters, including a stand out performance by Columbo (and Cassavates collaborator) Peter Falk, who plays a gangster charged with helping Bettie Davises Annie dope her estranged daughter into thinking she is a woman of means.

Catch it in the right mood – if you’ve done to death Christmas viewings of It’s a Wonderful Life, then Pocketful of Miracles might do well to see you through the season. It’s also a pretty good Sunday film to watch, cotching with a duvet.