With just a jump to the left of mainstream cinema, you will find a place where a light burns for films ridiculous and rare, subversive and strange. These are the films the box office forgot, cemented in ardent admirers’ memories. Here is a cinema of bikers and beaches, booze and B-movies, reefers and revenge, psychotic tomatoes and trippy visuals, heavy-metal morons and mavericks, freaks and geeks, artists and Asian extremists, camp classics and carnivalesque carnage, road warriors and rock stars. Like-minded armies mobilise in their support, sharing a taste for the deliciously odd and completing each other's assiduously memorised quotes.
Such is the polymorphous jamboree of cult cinema, where questions of definition crave attention. What makes a cult film? When did the designation take root, and who sowed the seeds? And does modern film culture – where instant-access streaming can leave us feeling like slaves
