50 New Cult Classic Films Released This Century
What defines a “cult classic” film? Unfortunately, there is no coherent, comprehensive, widely accepted definition that can be used to classify a film as undeniably cult or undeniably not. Everything is too slippery.
It’s easy to look at a film’s box office performance and gauge its financial success (well, pre-COVID-19, anyway), but figuring out just how big and how passionate a film’s fan base is years after its release is a lot harder, and more so. figure out the point at which a film’s cult appeal transcends its niche and becomes mainstream. For me, the more important demarcator of a cult film is the passion of its followers, which is not necessarily the same thing. Box office receipts are a more complex metric; some would define “cult” in such a way that the film had to come out of nowhere and create nothing, which seems too limiting. But in general, a cult film should be cultivating, not demonstrative.
Measuring the cult appeal of Eraserhead , Rocky Horror , or Darkstar is relatively easy; after decades of watching these films, opinions are relatively settled. The list of defining cult films from the recent past needs a bit more flexibility, but there are a few undeniable criteria: films that were scrapped on initial release but survived an unexpected afterlife, slowly gaining fans because they were ahead of their time, the layers displayed were few noticed at first. and sometimes because of their undeniable (often unintentional) camp value. These 50 new cult classics fall into one or more of these categories and are all worth re-watching.