Exploitation film
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- Bibliography: Cult Movie Stars (1991), Incredibly Strange Films (1986) and Immoral Tales (1994).
- "They can keep their Bressons and their Cocteaus. The cinematic, modern marvelous is popular, and the best and most exciting films are, beginning with Méliès and Fantômas, the films shown in local fleapits, films which seem to have no place in the history of cinema." --Adonis Kyrou (1923 - 1985)
- "Classical exploitation films were disreputable when they were originally released, and the mainstream industry went to great lengths to stamp them out. Histories of the motion picture medium passed them by. Their current position is as part of the “bad film” cult." --"Bold! Daring! Shocking! True: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 (1999) - Eric Schaefer, page 9
- "Often, of course, the films fail to live up to the expectations of the audience and the lurid promise of the trailers and garish posters that seduced them into the cinemas. But then, as memories of the actual film fade and its lingering images merge in the filmgoers' minds with other films and with their initial expectations, they recreate a new film in their imagination--far closer to the ideal of their unrealized expectations." --Tohill and Tombs in Immoral Tales
- "I beg you, learn to see `bad' films; they are sometimes sublime". -- Ado Kyrou, Le Surrealisme au cinema, 276.
Exploitation film is a loosely defined term to describe a film genre that typically sacrifices the traditional notions of artistic merit for a more sensationalistic display, often featuring excessive sex, violence, gore and drug usage. Such films have existed since the earliest days of moviemaking, but they were popularized in the 1970s with the general relaxing of cinematic taboos in the U.S. and Europe. Since the 1990s, this genre has also received attention from academic circles, where it is sometimes called paracinema.
The word "exploitation" itself is an old show business term for publicizing shows and motion pictures. "Exploitation films" are those whose success relied not on the quality of their content, but on the ability of audiences to be drawn in by the advertising of the film (for example, a common device used by the more notorious exploitation films is to advertise the banning of a film in a certain country).
See also
- Aestheticization of violence
- B movie
- Cult film
- Directors associated with exploitation film
- Video nasty
- Midnight movie
