Sunday, February 16Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

Sleeper Hits: Or, the Lost Art of The Cult Classic

By Ruby Day — Senior Culture Editor

Cult Classic: noun

“A work of fiction that is extremely popular with a select audience but may or may not be successful at the time of the work’s original publication.”

Some of the best films I’ve ever seen are ‘sleeper hits’. Pieces of media that, on release, weren’t commercially profitable, but have garnered fascination and devotion in successive years. At the heart of a cult classic is unconventionality in its purest form; subcultural, hyper-specific, often anti-establishment concepts brought to life on the big screen. Other key features of the sleeper hit include distinctive aesthetic styles that dedicated fanbases emulate and relate to, original storytelling that can admittedly lead to misinterpretations, and ‘iconic’ characters and dialogue. Often produced on a low budget, the kind-of-tacky charm that many cult classics generate has also become essential. The sleeper hit is a genre of film that fascinates and entertains in ways that polished, overly marketed blockbusters do not. As brave exposures of humanity, their integrity is preserved through commercial obscurity.

And now, I want to know where the cult classic has gone.

The modern film industry seems incapable of fostering an environment that allows such films to exist. I can reel off countless critics in recent years that praise a film for “becoming an instant cult classic”, which, to my mind, is a paradoxical statement. In an industry where independent production companies like A24 are becoming serious players at the box office, the kind of film that once would have taken years to gain any sort of attention are the centres of conversations and Letterboxd reviews. In some ways this is a good thing, the ‘indie film’ is now more likely to be acknowledged for its brilliance where it might have once passed people by.

Maybe I’m an elitist, mourning the loss of some kind of intangible authenticity that comes from belated recognition. There is, however, a sense of the artificial in some of these productions. To put it harshly, they feel like the try-hards of cinema. It is consequently important to distinguish between the phenomenon and the cult classic; current studios are desperate to produce a global spectacle in ways that affect genuine freedom of expression, or “art for art’s sake”.

Yes, many elements of the sleeper hit are present in the indie film scene of today, but a conceptual shift has occurred. Exploration of subversive themes, simply for the sake of it, no longer feels like the heart of these films. Instead, shopping around for the next big thing motivates many production companies into manufacturing a ‘quirky’ film catering to a specific audience that, thanks to the internet, will certainly be reached the first time around. The cult classic of old had unstudied nuance to it. Modern films, on the whole, struggle with balancing a plot that means both everything and nothing at all.

For example, the 1987 horror/parody film and bona fide cult classic, The Lost Boys,has buckets of interpretable material. On the surface, it’s an 80s vampire film full of leather and big hair and sweaty California-ness, and if you want, that’s how it can stay. Or, you could watch it to death as I have, and see the true horror of never growing up, of being stuck in perpetual, freakish adolescence. How getting older can feel an awful lot like changing beyond recognition. You can notice the importance of centralising the people who have always been important to you, for fear of losing them as a consequence of your transforming worldviews. What seems like unbearably worthy and soul-searching content is expressed through a gang of teenage vampires going on killing sprees in the fictional town of Santa Carla. This is what makes The Lost Boys a true cult classic, and what I’m missing from today’s cinemas.

I’m looking for the kind of film you have a hard time distinguishing from dreams. One that no one else seems to remember, but affected you profoundly. A film like Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, with its cast of puppets, the set design choice of ‘more glitter’, and the occasional song from David Bowie in leggings; a film that, on paper, is completely mental and made for no reason other than, ‘why not?’. Yes, outlandish artistic choices may alienate many viewers, but it’s a risk worth taking to create those few genuine connections with specific people.

A common critique of today’s film industry takes issue with the isolation of modern consumer practises, with most new releases watched alone off a streaming service rather than in a communal cinema experience. These ‘instant cult classics’ cater specifically to those lonely viewers en masse, commercialising the unconventional in an attempt to be meaningful instantaneously. This scrubs unconventionality clean of its very definition, which prompts the question of whether the cult classic could ever exist again.

There will be many ways in which I’m wrong—countless films are released almost daily, and I’m sure I’ve never heard of countless more. Perhaps in 20 years’ time, I will look back and be pleasantly surprised at the number of sleeper hits created when I was young. Here’s to hoping that time will tell, and we remember the lost art of the cult classic sooner, rather than later.

Photograph: Noom Peerapong on Unsplash