We're Not So Different, You and I

The internet has shrunk the cult film gap

There were a handful of movies I used to watch as a kid that, in the years that would follow, began to seem like artifacts from an alternate reality. They seemed to be small bits of shrapnel lodged into my past from a world where movies like TROLL 2, THE MONSTER SQUAD, or ROVER DANGERFIELD might have not just existed, but prospered.

These films were movies I’d watch religiously as a kid, smoothing out the wrinkles of my brain with repeat viewings as I simultaneously wore down the integrity of the VHS tapes I’d rent from the local video store. And yet friends from high school or college had no idea what I was talking about when I tried to describe these movies. I might as well have been describing my own dreams - there was zero recognition.

Was my taste in films that unique that I alone sat alone in the knowledge of these movies? And then came the Internet came along to deliver a resounding “no.” The internet, by providing an easy source of information about just about anything on this planet - seriously, Google which animal has a corkscrew penis, has single-handily proven I am just another boring cookie-cutter couch potato, weened on the same teat of the premium cable film programming as every other indoor kid in my age bracket.

We are all the children of HBO.

It doesn’t matter how “obscure” you think your favorite childhood movie is, there’s a small group of others out there who are just as obsessed with that as you are, if not more so. I may have the vague memories of watching THE CHEROKEE KID on television, somebody else got the damn tattoo.

I’ve worked as a film programmer for thirteen years. This job has taught me one thing - every movie has its dedicated fanbase. Every. Single. Film. Granted, some fanbases are smaller than others, but there is always somebody out there who likes a movie more than you do. I’ve programmed movies that I was sure were true deep cuts of an adolescence spent scruffling at the bottom of the cinema food trough only to watch as a theater sold out with audience members eager to quote along with their personal childhood movie BFF. People on the internet love to pound their chest and promote themselves as the expert on this movie or that (“Let me write the liner notes to the eventual boutique Blu-ray home video release!”) but in reality we are all echos of the same childhood spent watching the same movies over and over and over again.

We are the children of Blockbuster.

Thirteen years as a film programmer have allowed me to see weird and exciting trends emerge. I watched as attendance at screenings of THE BIG LEBOWSKI shrunk year after year as the age demo for this once sure-fire cult movie hit aged into the world of inescapable responsibilities. Meanwhile, stuff like DROP DEAD FRED or Stephen Sommers’ THE MUMMY burst through the scene of rep houses like the Kool-Aid Man. I predict we will see a resurgance in attendees for BIG LEBOWSKI screenings over the next few years as the children drug along to the movie by their parents start to earn their own disposable income.

We are the children of Entertainment Weekly.

I’m very curious what today’s generation, raised on streaming and an almost non-existent home video market, is going to be nostalgic for. Will future theater programmers have to dig through the dusty archives of streamers like Indiana Jones in order to find the abandoned .MOV files for long-forgotten direct-to-Netflix movies? Or will they just compile two hours of choice TikTok vids from decades past? Will nostalgia end up eating its tail as the window between a movie’s release and its rediscovery as a “cult classic” shrinks and shrinks until movies are heralded as comfort blanket cinema before they’re even released?

Children of the ‘80s and ‘90s shared similar tastes in movies because we were all forced to watch the same few dozen television channels and forage through the same corporately curated video store aisles. When we look at the future tastes of a generation that has been splintered into atoms by the power of choice (how do today’s kids even decide what they’re going to watch when everything is available at their fingertips?) - I truly worry about my profession’s longevity. Is it too late to apply to law school?

Mainstream rep film programming is run on the back of nostalgia - it’s all about getting people to pay money to see something on the big screen that they once saw on a smaller screen as a younger person. Well, that’s the concept at its most baseless and souless. It’s also about recognizing a community and trying to latch onto a sense of something bigger than yourself - either the film itself or what the film represents to the audience. But it’s mostly about preying on our wistfully memories of a childhood long gone.

How will mainstream rep film programming work in the decades to come, though? We can only keep feeding audiences the same movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s for so long. What will establish itself as the new cannon? The new new cannon?

I’m excited to find out when I attend a rep screening of THE BEEKEEPER in 2054.