Webster's New World Dictionary defines the word "cult" on a non-religious level as "a devoted attachment to a person, principal etc.," and, alternatively, "the object of such attachment."

That pretty well defines the essential meaning of "cult films"--movies that elicit fierce devotion from audiences, which can range in size from a few thousand fans up to several million. For our purposes, "cult films" include any pictures whose primary appeal and recognition today derives from the personal reactions of viewers, rather than in any perceived mass audience phenomena. A crowd-pleasing blockbuster of the kind that middle-class, middle-brow audiences embrace, such as Sidney Pollack's Out of Africa is not a cult movie, nor is David Lean's Dr. Zhivago, or Bridge On the River Kwai, and neither are such 1990's hits as Speed, or True Lies, or Terminator 2. But among 1990's pictures, Airheads and Reality Bites are. Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas is not a cult movie, nor is Cape Fear. But Scorsese's After Hours is, as is his King of Comedy.

Some directors made nothing but cult movies. Edward D. Wood, Jr., the subject of Tim Burton's 1994 hit feature film Ed Wood, may have been the ultimate cult film director, a shoestring filmmaker of uncertain ability and marginal (to put it mildly) significance in his own time, whose movies, for all of their ineptitude, have acquired a fairly wide recognition--if not following--over the last three decades of the twentieth century. Except for television showings, which were few and far between and seldom heralded with any fanfare, Edward D. Wood's movies--such as Plan Nine From Outer Space, Bride of the Monster, Jail Bait, and Glen or Glenda --were seldom seen in any auspicious circumstances, or by any large numbers of people. His movies really built their audiences one at a time, the odd, susceptible, sufficiently patient individual suddenly finding themselves spellbound in their presence.

The requirements for cult film status are normally elusive to the larger, mass audience. Indeed, most middle-brow, middle-class moviegoers, confronted with a "cult movie," will normally either reject the film or absorb it with a large degree of puzzlement--for a movie to achieve success and status as a cult film, it is virtually a prerequisite that it not be embraced by a mass audience--with very few exceptions, mass success and cult film status are mutually exclusive. The sad truth is that most cult film successes are financial failures, at least for their original producers and distributors.

That lack of success is one of the components in a movie's history that gives its audience the fierce devotion required to achieve cult movie status. A viewer must first perceive that a film is special in some difficult-to-describe manner, and then be sufficiently stimulated to want people to know about the film--to tell people about it, drag them (or be inclined to drag them) to showings, and generally spread the word.

Cult movies were an underground phenomenon for the first 60 years of this century. The distribution of films was tightly controlled by the studios, and if a movie didn't find an audience fairly quickly, it vanished--even if a lucky few thousand got to see a very unsual movie, if that movie didn't find a large audience quickly, it was effectively buried. There was a relative handful of revival and repertory theaters scattered around the country, mostly in the major cities, that would run older movies drawn from the whole history of the medium, from the silents of the 'teens and 'twenties to the odder film noir dramas of the 1940's and 1950's, but their existence was scarcely acknowledged or known outside of their immediate neighborhoods, even in such cosmopolitan locales as New York City.

Television was the first major outlet and proving ground for cult movies, especially in its early years from 1948 thru 1965. The Hollywood studios regarded television as the enemy, and originally placed a tight lid on the showing of any current actors or older studio-controlled films on television. Programmers, especially on local independently owned stations, were hungry for anything to fill time on the new medium, and this opened the way for several producers and distributors who had never counted for much in mainstream Hollywood. The best example was that of William Boyd, an actor who made his name as the star of 67 low-budget Hopalong Cassidy western films between 1934 and 1948, had bought up his old films, recut them into 1/2 hour and hour-long formats, and sold them to television in 1949, when nobody else was selling large movie packages to tv. Boyd made a fortune from his movies and, thanks to the vacuum created by the studio ban on television, became a major player in the new medium, and he was quickly joined by Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, popular but not terribly influential "B" western actors who became major television producers.

For the first decade of television's existence, the only movies that could be found on the air were either old westerns and occasional silents, and a growing body of independently financed films from the 1930's thru the 1950's--owned by independent producers and distributors, who had little stake in the studio system and were only too happy to sell them to stations eager to buy them, many of these movies got their first major exposure through television, without facing the competition of major studio releases.

Among the movies that made their reputations and found their audiences during those years were such now highly regarded classics as Lewis Milestone's A Walk In the Sun, Max Ophuls' Letter From An Unknown Woman, Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion, Richard Whorf's Champagne for Caesar, and Rudolph Mate's D.O.A., representing numerous genres and varieties of filmmaking. Most of these films had been failures or, at best, modest successes during their original theatrical runs, and most had long since been sold off by their original makers. Their popularity in the new medium was impossible to ignore, however, even by the major distibutors.

The first important producer to sell his films to television came not from Hollywood, but from England. The Hungarian-born movie mogul Sir Alexander Korda, the founder of London Films, saw television as the future ally of picture making, and as vehicle through which his classic films from the 1930's and 1940's could generate income for new production, and in 1954, he licensed them in a package to a dozen major American television stations. Korda's movies featured major stars, including Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Leslie Howard, and Charles Laughton, in hits such as That Hamilton Woman, The Scarlet Pimpernel, and The Private Life of Henry VIII, and the success of the Korda films--and the money they earned for their producer--caught Hollywood by surprise.

The major breakthrough took place in 1955 when RKO Radio Pictures--which by that time had ceased any major production activity--licensed its library of films to C&C Corporation (best known as maker of a cola drink) for television distribution. Along with such major hits as King Kong, Citizen Kane, Cat People, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the legendary musicals Top Hat and Swing Time, audiences had a chance to discover such forgotten and overlooked B-movies as Curse of the Cat People, The Seventh Victim, and Stranger on the Third Floor. Many dozens of RKO films achieved their first serious recognition from the television showings they received throughout the late 1950's and early 1960's, including such now highly regarded titles as Bringing Up Baby (today regarded as a classic, but a box office bomb that ended Katharine Hepburn's career at RKO in 1939), Sylvia Scarlett (a true cult movie, dismissed as a total failure in its own time, in which Hepburn spends half the picture disguised as a boy), and None But The Lonely Heart (one of Cary Grant's finest dramatic performances).

The RKO deal opened the floodgates, and within three years every major studio had either sold or was prepared to sell their libraries to television. Warner Bros. sold its pre-1948 catalog to United Artists for distribution to television (UA later found unexpected profits by reissuing them to revival theaters, and on home video); Universal Pictures purchased the pre-1948 Paramount library; and 20th Century-Fox had licensed its library of 1940's and 1930's films to National Telefilm Associates for television distribution, which led to a rediscovery of Shirley Temple's 1930's hits, among numerous other titles.

The years 1955 thru 1980 saw a the greatest explosion of interest in vintage films, and their greatest public exposure in history. Those years overlapped the childhood and teenage years of the postwar baby boom--tens of millions of young people grew up with daily access to some of the best (and worst), as well as the most unusual movies in history, all of it free. In essence, viewing television in those years offered the chance for a lifetime's worth of moviegoing, all absolutely free of charge (save for the commercial interruptions), and hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of viewers ended up using television in precisely this way. Television became a de facto film course, and a wellspring of experience into the movies and popular culture of the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's, and 1950's--surely the first time that any generation had such easy or omnipresent access to the language, customs, fashions, or mindset of an earlier generation on a daily basis.

The subsequent explosion of interest in vintage films and their stars, both as popular entertainment and icons--including Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh, John Garfield, Judy Garland, the Little Rascals (curiously enough, the name given to Hal Roach's "Our Gang" comedies in their television incarnation, which completely supplanted the name "Our Gang" between one generation and the next), Laurel and Hardy, and Clark Gable--and as a field of study at the nation's colleges, was no accident. Movie directing, along with other specialties such as screenwriting, became a course of study and professional training at dozens of colleges and universities.

Not that every film that ran on television was, or should have been highly regarded. The typical MGM title of this era on television might've been some awkward 1930 transitional talkie, rather than The Wizard of Oz, but that was part of the beauty of the period--one got to see the bad with the good, the mistakes with the masterpieces, and the hoary old museum pieces (in the best and worst sense) alongside the vibrant, timeless classics. And all of it was paid for by the makers and sellers of detergents, spaghetti, automobiles, and toys, with no investment by the viewer except their time. The only negative element in all of this activity was that the movies were usually shown in 16mm prints, rather than mastered from proper, high quality 35mm source materials, and that stations were usually rather cavalier in their cutting of the movies to fit into specific time-slots, but this was a relatively small price to pay for the free mass access to this history and entertainment.

It was in this environment, from 1955 on, that the cult movie as we understand it was born. The fact that local television stations frequently repeated showings of movies on a daily or weekly basis only made the environment more accomodating. The television showcase "Million Dollar Movie," originated on RKO-owned stations like New York's WOR-TV, was a massive success from the late 1950's onward, and a key element in its success was the fact that it would feature the same movie eight or nine times each week (once each night and twice a day on Saturdays and Sundays)--whether it was a movie like John Ford's The Searchers (which was a major success, but didn't become a pop-culture icon or recognized as an especially important movie until the mid-1960's) or Roger Corman's Attack of the Crab Monsters, the fact that these pictures were shown up to nine times in one week allowed them to build an audience very rapidly, especially among younger viewers, who saw nothing intrinsically absurd in watching a movie that they liked a half-dozen time in one week.

The directors and producers who benefitted from this explosion of movies on television were an incredibly varied lot: John Ford, Howard Hawks, Michael Powell, James Whale, Michael Curtiz, Lewis Milestone, Val Lewton, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tourneur, Roger Corman, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Edward D. Wood, Jr. were only a handful of the hundreds of filmmakers whose work was rediscovered and ingrained in the viewing consciousness. Even a pop-culture icon such as The Wizard of Oz only found its audience, and its recognition, through television exposure--widely considered a failure, even within the confines of MGM, on its original release in 1939, the musical fantasy began working its way into the consciousness of Americans through network television showings beginning in the 1950's, and the subsequent arrival of color television as a mass-viewing format only enhanced the Technicolor movie's appeal.

Cult movies break down into numerous categories. On the most easily understood and widely accepted levels, there are the "classics"--these include Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, The Maltese Falcon, King Kong, and Citizen Kane. These movies are all massively popular today, but achieved that popularity with the help of a hard core of viewers who embraced them and, as viewers (and, occasionally, budding film writers themselves) began integrating bits of their dialogue and plots into their own communications.

By the mid-1960's, the number and variety of films available on television had grown to saturation proportions, and the golden age of movie viewing was already waning. One of the frustrations of that pre-cable age was the profusion of films that were being shown only in tiny television markets out of the range of most viewers--stations in the major cities tended to show the most important and expensive pictures in any given category, and the most interesting pictures frequently turned up on smaller stations outside of those cities.

But the diversity was dazzling, and the opportunity for discovery snd exposure still unique--no group of people in any generation ever had as much, or as easy access to a single category of art and entertainment as the viewer who came of age between 1955 and 1980. In the early years, the experience was more random and based on pure chance, and later on the television stations themselves began playing off of the appeal of these older films--one station in Washington, D.C., for example, often tried such creative programming as running both RKO-produced mid-1940's adaptations of Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely, The Falcon Takes Over and Murder My Sweet, on the same night, or programming all three versions of The Maltese Falcon together. An early television package called "Shock Theater," featuring the "off-brand" secondary horror pictures from Universal, such as The Werewolf of London, gave a new generation a quick education in and appreciation for horror movies, and was succeeded by programs such as Creature Features out of WNEW-TV in New York, and, in later years, more sophisticated showcases like The Lenny Clarke Late Show out of WSBK-TV in Boston, featuring future network comedy star Lenny Clarke.

Amid all of this activity on television, the youth of America couldn't help but become movie conscious in ways that their parents scarcely understood. Revival and repertory theaters had always existed in the major cities, catering to audiences of older filmgoers who were happy to rewatch the pictures of their youth, and a small fringe audience of movie buffs, whose ranks were often augmented by gay filmgoers only too happy to embrace musicals in general and the work of Judy Garland in particular. None of this was big business, however, until the late 1960's, when college students began embracing Humphrey Bogart and Groucho Marx as heroes, and began absorbing all of the history around their work. By the early 1970's, most of the major studios were beginning to earn small but significant amounts of money in theatrical rentals of their older titles, and several--most notably United Artists which, in addition to many vintage UA titles, owned the pre-1948 Warner Bros. catalog, which included the classic films of Bogart, Bette Davis, and James Cagney--had set up divisions to service this market.

Filmgoing among college students exploded during the Vietnam era, and some major discoveries and rediscoveries were made during this period. In 1968, a low-budget black-and-white film made by a Pittsburgh-based director began showing up at smaller theaters and in midnight shows in some major cities. When it was reviewed at all by critics, the movie was usually panned for its supposed gore and violence, and its alleged crudeness. But word soon began to spread among the students that this movie was not anything they were used to, was worth seeing just for the grossness of its action, and even had a social message and some good acting. Night of the Living Dead (originally called Night of Anubis), directed by George Romero and written by Romero and John Russo, ended up making millions of dollars in midnight shows, the first movie to tap into that previously minor market.

Moreover, it opened up a whole field of gorier-than-thou horror pictures that became objects of cult fixation, including Blood Feast by Herschel Gordon Lewis, which was almost a burlesque of its genre. Lewis went on to become the king of the this horror sub-genre, and Romero's Night of the Living Dead even achieved critical respectability as its subtleties became evident amid the cruder efforts that emerged in its wake--alternative/underground critics wrote the breakthrough articles that led to the movie's and Romero's emergence into "respectability."

During the same era, college students were busy rediscovering older exploitation films and embracing them for their "camp" value, meaning their bad acting and grotesquely drawn characters--the biggest hit in this vein was Reefer Madness, a 1930's exploitation movie about the dangers of marijuana that made a fortune playing the campus and repertory theater circuit, often paired with that late 1960's drug classic Yellow Submarine. The success of such pictures on the revival circuit added a new, more daring clientele to the mix of customers at revival and repertory film theaters. Modern filmmakers, recognizing this new audience for the grotesque and unusual in movies, began benefitting from its presence--Robert Downey's Putney Swope and Greaser's Palace, and Harry Hurwitz's The Projectionist were three pictures that found their audience among this newly defined cult film scene at the end of the 1960's and the advent of the 1970's. Later in the decade, Neal Israel and David Swirnoff's Tunnelvision, and John Landis's Kentucky Fried Movie became cult classics in the comedy field.

The majority of cult movies since the 1960's fit into a category that critic/scholar Michael Weldon has defined as "psychotronic"--the exact definition of the word, which he appropriated from a Chicago-made thriller called The Psychotronic Man, is elusive, mostly defining films that interest Weldon, but include low-budget monster movies and chillers, slasher films, biker movies, exploitation pictures, Kung-Fu movies, and virtually every other "orphaned" film category that thee major studios aren't proud of.

In the years since, other major cult movies that have achieved widespread recognition include David Lynch's Eraserhead, Wes Craven's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, and the entire output of Edward D. Wood, Jr., including Plan 9 From Outer Space, Glen or Glenda, and Bride of the Monster. And occasionally, movies by major directors and studios that fail to find their audiences instead have become cult movie classics: Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy, starring Robert DeNiro and Jerry Lewis, is a cult movie classic, as is his thriller After Hours, starring Griffin Dunne, each having failed to find mainstream audiences.

Home video has been a boon to cult movie enthusiasts, allowing for the release of titles that don't have a natural audience on television. And where the movie is old and unclaimed by a major distributor, companies such as Sinister Cinema (who advertise liberally in cult movie journals such as Filmfax and Baby Boomer Collectibles) can provide them. And a handful, such as Edward D. Wood's films and Kentucky Fried Movie, have even made the jump to the high-tech format of laser video disc.