The best cult classic movies of all time

Alejandro Jodorowsky hijacked the popular western genre in a bid to connect with American audiences – though none of them had seen anything quite like his mind-trip oater in which traditional genre tropes (revenge, gunfights) blur with deep spiritual symbolism (stigmatas, much roaming in the wilderness). The Mexican maverick’s mad vision found plenty of apostles on New York’s midnight movie circuit of the 1970s – especially at the old Elgin Theater in Chelsea, where it screened seven days a week for over a year and got the ball rolling on the whole late-night screening concept. It’s worth noting, too, that it’s one of those rare cult movies to feature an actual cult.

Now sitting at the gaudier end of the Criterion Collection is John Waters’ trash landmark, somehow now 50 years old but still a hand grenade of youthful, anything-goes outrageousness. It introduces drag queen Divine as a criminal called Babs Johnson, aka ‘the filthiest person alive’, and chucks her into a maelstrom of scenarios you absolutely don’t want to sit through with a parent present. Thanks to Waters’ William Castle-like sense of showmanship, Flamingos’s cult status arrived oven-ready on release — audience members were even given ‘Pink Phlegm-ingo’ barf bags at screenings. Hero status on the midnight movie circuit has only sealed the deal. 

Almost from the moment it premiered, this nutty musical horror-comedy established itself as the ne plus ultra cult film. There are no ‘casual’ Rocky Horror fans: the number of people who’ve seen it is relatively low, but everyone who has falls head over stilettos for it. Much of its reputation is tied to raucous midnight screenings at cinemas across the globe for four decades now, but the movie itself is simply too audacious to ignore. As is his wont, Tim Curry throws himself completely into the role of Dr Frank-N-Furter, a crossdressing mad scientist tormenting two young lovers (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon) unfortunate enough to end up marooned at his castle on a wild, rainy night. Sceptics have questioned if it’s actually ‘good’ or merely insane, but it doesn’t really matter. As a beacon for misfits in search of a place to belong, there’s hardly been a brighter guiding light.  

Deciphering literal meaning from any David Lynch project is typically a fool’s errand, but in the case of his debut feature, it’s not terribly hard to interpret his ultimate message: that the idea of fathering a child scares the absolute bejesus out of him. In that way, Lynch’s first film is still his most personal. Of course, this being Lynch, the whole black-and-white ordeal still comes off as a hallucinatory stress dream rather than a clear statement of intent. But surely there are many nervous dads who’ve gazed at their newborn child for the first time and breathed a sigh of relief that it’s not a screeching lizard baby.

A quintessential cult film, in that it seems deliberately designed to appeal to the smallest possible niche, Alex Cox’s punky sci-fi satire isn’t exactly ‘coherent’ but gets elevated to classic status on weirdness alone. Angry young man Emilio Estevez gets recruited into the repossession business by ageing beatnik Harry Dean Stanton, but things get complicated when he picks up a Chevy Malibu with some… thing in the trunk. The movie adheres completely to its own bizarre rhythms and outsider humour, but its anti-establishment message is delivered with such all-around energy, due in no small part to the hardcore punk soundtrack, including a theme song by Iggy Pop, that it’s managed to find a much wider audience over the years than anyone could have guessed.

Why does Emilia Pérez need to exist when the best song about vaginoplasty has already been written? John Cameron Mitchell’s brash glam-rock musical would probably end up banned in red states and think-pieced to hell in the blue ones were it released today, but the movie obliterates just about any criticism you can throw at it through sheer punk energy. Mitchell is the titular Hedwig, a gay singer-songwriter living in communist East Germany, who undergoes a botched sex-change operation in order to escape to the US and chase their rock star dreams. The ‘angry inch’ is, as described in the aforementioned tune, ‘the mound of flesh where my penis used to be/Where my vagina never was’. Problematic? Perhaps. But for queer kids, gender nonconformists and general loud-and-proud weirdos, it’s a movie that still lives close to the heart – among other organs.  

Allow myself an embarrassing confession: for years, I assumed ‘Heathers’ was a John Hughes movie. It is very much not. In fact, it’s a movie that takes a shotgun to the very idea of John Hughes and, more generally, the kind of teen movies that earnestly ask, ‘Why can’t kids just get along?’ Director Michael Lehmann’s answer is, ‘Because some kids deserve to die.’ Winona Ryder and Christian Slater star as a teenage couple who set out to off the mean girls at their Ohio high school, framing the murders as suicides. Needless to say, the movie absolutely could not be made today and could barely exist for mass consumption in 1989. But as a blistering piece of jet-black comic satire, few other movies go quite as hard.

Somehow, critics saw an over-the-top melodrama about Las Vegas sex workers directed by Paul Verhoeven and nobody stopped to think that maybe this thing is meant to be ridiculous. Derided to a degree typically reserved for puppy murderers, Showgirls has come to be embraced as a camp classic, a status it probably always deserved. C’mon, watch the thrashing, flopping, shouting poolside sex scene between Kyle MacLachlan and Elizabeth Berkeley – or just listen to Gina Gershon deliver any of her lines – and tell me with a straight face that everyone involved isn’t in on the joke.  

It’s a send-up of 1980s teen sex comedies, developed by members of a cultishly beloved ’90s sketch troupe, that introduced many of the faces that would come to define comedy in the 2000s – and also Bradley Cooper. When it first came out, though, the only people who cared were fans of MTV’s The State, whose David Wain and Michael Showalter co-wrote the script. Given the early-career appearances from the likes of Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rudd and the aforementioned Bradley Cooper, its stock has since risen; it was even revived on Netflix as a pair of limited series in 2015 and 2017. But while its brand of absurdist humour has gone more mainstream in the intervening years, its gleeful silliness remains a cut above, and it’s still a secret handshake of sorts among comedy nerds – if you get it, then you must really get it.  

There’s doing more with less, and then there’s Clerks. Of all the movies that launched the indie film revolution in the early ’90s, nothing looked cheaper: it’s basically Kevin Smith pointing a camera at a group of not-particularly-seasoned actors hanging out at a New Jersey convenience store and shooting the shit about movies, comic books and their going-nowhere lives. And yet it may have ended up the most influential of them all. Sure, the more ambitious filmmakers to follow wanted to be Quentin Tarantino, but read conversations about pop culture on Reddit and Twitter, and it sure seems like the whole entertainment landscape has become the Quick Stop, populated by millions of Dantes and Randals. Hey, that’s still some kind of legacy.

Even in the ’70s, Walter Hill’s hyper-stylised depiction of gang warfare seemed more silly than gritty. (Who the hell would be afraid of the Baseball Furies, anyway?) But the movie gets a lot of its juice now as a time capsule of a less sanitary New York – Hill shot in some genuinely scuzzy locales, most notably the subway – and from its proto-video game plotting, following a crew of toughs wrongfully accused of assassinating a major gang leader travelling through the night from the Bronx to Coney Island and fending off rival factions along the way.

After decades of glowing endorsements by big-name filmmakers, Bruce Robinson’s semi-biographical slice of early ’70s life for two boozy, jobbing actors in Camden should be on the cusp of going mainstream. Only, its vinegary worldview, fun-to-quote dialogue (‘I feel like a pig shat in my head!’) and extreme cultural specificity seem to keep it preserved in its own cult bubble – there to be discovered by new generations of Withnail-ers. 

It’s not often mentioned among the best John Carpenter films, probably due to its relative lack of satirical edge or cynicism about humanity, but damn if isn’t among his most fun. Starring Kurt Russell in full slick-talking action hero mode, the movie travels through the San Francisco underworld - literally - as cool-dude trucker Jack Burton (Russell) is conscripted into rescuing his buddy’s wife from a gang of mystical bandits. It’s Carpenter doing his take on Indiana Jones and The Goonies, basically. What’s not to love? 

One of the tentpoles of the ’90s indie film boom, Robert Rodriguez’s debut film showed just how far the right director can stretch a $7000 budget – which Rodriguez allegedly scraped together by offering himself up for clinical drug trials in his hometown of Austin, Texas. The plot of El Mariachi is pure western pulp: a drifter with a guitar case blows into a small town, where he’s mistaken for a hitman by the local criminal element. While that synopsis might not strike anyone as terribly original, the filmmaking gives off such hot, thrilling energy that it practically singes the edges of the screen.  

Bruce Campbell cornered the market on the splatstick genre in the first two Evil Dead movies, but it’s the less-praised, bigger-budget third sequel where he became the B-movie Bogart cult film fans worship today: mowing down a horde of medieval skeleton warriors, chomping down on every one-liner and doing battle with an army of murderous, pint-sized versions of himself. The film mostly abandoned the horror of its predecessors to cram in more physical humour, but Campbell makes it work. Hail to the king, baby.

A kind of young-adult take on ‘90s slacker workplace comedies, Empire Records falls into the same category as Can’t Hardly Wait, SLC Punk and other millennial ensemble films dismissed by older critics but later embraced by a devoted cult who happened to be in high school at the time. Its plot, about an indie record store attempting to stave off a corporate takeover, is really just a framework for its pretty young cast - including pre-Jerry Maguire Renee Zellweger and Liv Tyler in her first major role - to work through various early-twentysomething problems over the course of 24 hours.

Depending on how joyless you are, Vampire’s Kiss is either where Nicolas Cage’s early career started to flag or where he started to become Nicolas Goddamn Cage. Ignored upon arrival, this dark comedy, in which Cage plays an asshole yuppie convinced he’s turning into a vampire, is now seen as the template for every insane, over-the-top performance he’s given since. Honestly, though, it might actually be his most insane and over-the-top acting job ever. Certainly, it’s the only one in which he eats a live cockroach. 

Peter Jackson called his first movie Bad Taste, but no film will leave you feeling like you just ate something you shouldn’t have more than his delirious followup, which cranks the gore and general ickiness to 11. A diseased ‘Sumatran rat monkey’ unleashes a zombie plague on a New Zealand suburb, and it’s left to a socially awkward bachelor to save the town by turning damn near the entire village into a pile of bloody, gelatinous mush, one lawnmower massacre at a time. 

Critics in 2001 had absolutely no idea what was going on with this live-action, pop-punk adaptation of the ’70s cartoon show about an all-female rock band, dismissing it as broad, garish and irritatingly loud, and thus completely missing out on the whole point. In later years, it’s been reclaimed as a high-fructose sendup of the millennial celebrity machine, and the rare music movie whose original soundtrack absolutely rips. 

Ripped straight from a teenage headbanger’s wet dreams, this animated sci-fi anthology, inspired by the graphic art magazine of the same name, truly has it all: buxom warrior women, ultraviolence and an appropriately hard-rocking soundtrack. It’s a movie that knows its audience and panders directly to them, with the attendant juvenalia. But if you can get past some of the more troglodytic elements, the animation - hand-drawn by an international coterie of artists - is truly eye-popping, even beyond the, y’know, boobs and stuff.

This Vespa-driving, Dexamyl-chugging, parka-wearing spin on a rock opera by The Who is catnip for Brits of a certain age. It’s another reminder that a half-forgotten milieu – here, Brighton and London’s Mod subculture of the 1960s – is always a rich source of cult classics (see also: Clerks, Hedwig and the Angry Inch). You don’t need to understand the politics of the Mods vs Rockers clashes of the time to get a kick out of its earnest brand of cool.

Indie godhead Jim Jarmusch has dabbled in enough genres that picking his most ‘quintessential’ film for a list like this one isn’t entirely possible, but this slow-motion existential Western might just be his best. Johnny Depp plays a mortally wounded accountant named William Blake on the run from bounty hunters who gets taken in by a Native American (Gary Farmer) who refuses to believe he’s not the poet William Blake.  Shot in ghostly monochrome, it’s a movie to be hypnotised by rather than understood – a sense helped by Neil Young’s guitar-heavy, partially improvised score.

Coming off an Oscar win for her sweet-and-snarky Juno script, critics were baffled when screenwriter Diablo Cody followed up with a movie starring Megan Fox as a high-school hot girl turned demonically possessed boy-eater. In the decade since, post-#MeToo, the film has been reappraised as a, ahem, biting feminist satire that rips the throat out of the straight-male-centric horror genre. Fox gets to show something as an actor for once, and she and Amanda Seyfried are well-matched as odd-couple besties whose friendship is tested by the former’s newfound passion for massacring jocks. 2024’s Lisa Frankenstein, also written by Cody, is said to be set in the same universe, though audiences once again stayed away – maybe give it another ten years.

A time capsule of the plastic-fantastic go-go ‘60s, this ultra-campy sci-fi comic book adaptation made two great contributions to modern society: the band name Duran Duran, taken from the missing scientist whose disappearance drives the action, and Jane Fonda as a space cop in a plastic leotard and thigh-high boots. It looks dollar-store cheap - and its juvenile sex jokes are even cheaper - but that lack of authenticity has helped it endure as maybe cinema’s truest evocation of the term ‘camp classic.’  

Gothic, out-there and just a tonne of fun, Brian De Palma’s rock musical could be Rocky Horror’s bizarro twin sibling. They’re both tongue-in-cheek romps full of oddball characters and timeless tunes, here written by the film’s star, Paul Williams. But Phantom adds a maximalist approach to plotting, too, in its mash-up of ‘Faust’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’. It was all too much for sniffy critics when it came out and cinemagoers stayed away. But in the spirit of all cult classics, a different, more lasting kind of success followed that crashing box-office failure – the kind measured in big-name fans (Edgar Wright, Guillermo del Toro and Daft Punk among them) and fan festivals. An entire Phantom-worshipping town in Winnipeg has gathered for a Phantompalooza since 2004, even earning it a starring role in a documentary called Phantom of Winnipeg.

Melvin Van Peebles’ landmark thriller kickstarted the Blaxploitation movement in a flurry of jump cuts, mad bursts of sex and violence, and fuzzy sound design. It remains a movie that gives absolutely zero fucks as it socks it to The Man - although its opening sex scene is confrontational in all the wrong ways - and its cult status has only been deepened by the wealth of homages, riffs and spoofs that have followed. It made a motza when it came out and its urgency hasn’t dimmed in 50 years of screenings, and it’s beloved of fleapit frequenters and Criterion collectors alike. 

Werner Herzog’s half-remake, half-spinoff has Nicolas Cage, a bunch of random iguanas and, of course, Werner Herzog, yet it’s still not as outré as Abel Ferrara’s original. Harvey Keitel goes over-the-top (and full frontal) playing New York’s most amoral cop – which is saying something – a completely hollow being who subsists only on sex, drugs and gambling. You will absolutely need a shower afterwards.

A sort of Mexican-American Boyz n the Hood, Taylor Hackford’s epic traces the lives of three East LA gang members whose paths diverge and reconnect over the course of a decade. It’s a richly detailed, if melodramatic, portrait of poverty, prison and familial bonds. Reviews were initially mixed, but the movie’s long been embraced by young Chicano audiences who see pieces of themselves and their own families in the characters, if not their precise story. 

Did Richard Linklater’s debut define a generation or give birth to it? Even now, it’s hard to determine whether his depiction of Gen X as disenfranchised bohemians was a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Linklater’s term, ‘slacker’ would go on to define disaffected twentysomethings of the era.) In any case, the movie exists today as a compelling snapshot of the era, whose meandering, plotless structure – it’s essentially a series of vignettes involving kids from Linklater’s hometown of Austin, Texas – encapsulates the tone of the period better than any single snippet of dialogue. It’s also considered one of the sparks – if not the spark – that ignited the indie film revolution of the ’90s. Linklater has since made far more popular films, of course, but none more important.

It’s popular to say that Tod Browning’s career-destroying, pre-Code horror film was ‘ahead of its time,’ but it’s also hard to imagine it being made today. After all, a movie that spends a lot of its runtime gawking at people with physical disabilities probably wouldn’t go over well with modern audiences. Browning famously cast actual circus performers to depict a group of vengeful sideshow oddities, including Siamese twins, a limbless man and a ‘pinhead’. In the director’s defence, though, he allows them much more humanity than other filmmakers would have at the time - and in the end, the true monsters aren’t the ‘freaks’ but the gold-digging normie who manoeuvres into their ranks.

The only way to efficiently summarise this bonkers piece of sci-fi phantasmagoria is to say, ‘Cocaine’s a hell of a drug.’ Peter Weller assumes the title role of a kung-fu fighting, astro-travelling rock star neurophysicist (or something) who ends up in the crosshairs of a lunatic inventor played by John Lithgow. But that’s not even the half of it. Containing a jumble of wigged-out ideas that were either too complex for mainstream consumption or just completely insane, the movie predictably failed at the box office but found its audience on home video, where people could safely indulge in whatever they needed to trick themselves into understanding it.

Exploitation extraordinaire Russ Meyer outdid himself with this violently horny teenage fantasy about busty go-go dancers driving sports cars around the California desert and killing hapless men in their spare time. Dismissed as sexist trash even in the Mad Men era, it’s now celebrated as sexist trash that’s far too gleefully outrageous – not to mention stylish and just plain cool – to ever find truly offensive.

Vincent Gallo is nothing if not indulgent, a quality that’s earned him both a legion of detractors and a fervent cult following. One thing both sides can likely agree on is that his best movie is still his first as writer-director. That’s not to say Buffalo 66 is easy to like, though. Casting himself as an ex-con who forces a young girl (Christina Ricci) to masquerade as his wife to fool his parents, Gallo is just about as unlikable a protagonist you’ll find in any work of fiction. And the film’s surreal flourishes confuse more often than they impress. But when the movie works, it’s works wonders, and no scene is more wonderful than Ricci’s dreamy bowling alley tap dance, soundtracked by King Crimson.

Widely regarded as the first true hip-hop film, Wild Style’s value is more as a historical artefact than a feature film - but given that rap’s early years are woefully under-documented, that value is significant. Shot on location in the South Bronx, with many trailblazers, including Fab Five Freddy, playing fictionalised versions of themselves, director Charlie Ahearn captures a local culture right at the brink of exploding into an international phenomenon. Its story, about a young graffiti artist (Lee Quinones) breaking through to New York’s downtown art scene, is threadbare. But the documentary-style footage of pioneering breakdancers, rappers and DJs bursts with an unfakeable energy. 

Suspiria, Italian maestro Dario Argento’s most well-known film, is one of those movies that may have once been considered a ‘cult classic’ but has reached enough mainstream saturation that it’s now simply a ‘classic’. But Tenebrae remains both underseen and underpraised. A mix of murder mystery, thriller and the grisly giallo horror Argento is best known for, the film involves an American crime writer whose novels appear to have inspired a real-life serial killer. It eschews the candy-coloured fantasia of Suspiria but still involves some gruesome yet artful murder scenes – which is how it ended up on the UK infamous ‘video nasty’ list in the ’80s.

Hype Williams directed some of the most stunning music videos of the 1990s, and he approached his feature debut with a similar mindset, down to casting hip-hop icons Nas and DMX to star as a pair of successful criminals contemplating going straight. (Method Man and Tionne ‘T-Boz’ Watkins of TLC also appear.) Also like most music videos, coherent storytelling takes a backseat to visual panache, but Williams’ colour-saturated palette and sleek setpieces – most notably a shootout beneath the backlights of a nightclub, soundtracked by Soul II Soul’s sublime R&B hit ‘Back to Life’ – achieve a level of mesmeric energy singular in the crop of post-Pulp Fiction crime flicks.

Before Airplane! and The Naked Gun made them comedy gods, the team of Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker unleashed this anarchic sketch collection. Directed by John Landis, it essentially acts as a sizzle reel for their soon-to-be sanctified brand of brilliantly stupid genius, machine-gunning sex jokes, cornball puns and movie parodies against the wall to see what sticks. Not everything does – that’s the nature of sketch comedy – but stuff like the blaxploitation send-up ‘Cleopatra Schwartz’ and the faux-educational film ‘Zinc Oxide’ land like gut-punches before zooming on to the next gag.  

A slew of big names, including Federico Fellini, George Lucas and Nicholas Roeg, were attached to adapt Alex Raymond’s 1930s sci-fi serial for the big screen before English director Michael Hodges (Get Carter) finally made it happen, and thank the cinema gods for that. Really, who’d want a ‘prestige’ version of Flash Gordon? Like Barbarella a decade before, the movie has survived in public imagination due to its deliberately inauthentic set design, knowingly corny dialog and subpar acting - and, of course, Queen’s awesomely ridiculous theme song.     

Absolute Beginners is a cult film in the same way that Pop-Tarts are a cult snack: not good in the traditional sense, but containing a sugary hit that keeps devotees coming back for more. In fairness, nothing about Julien Temple’s music-video-esque snapshot of London life in the late ’50s was traditional. Chaos attended it every step of the way, and it flopped hard at the time. But it won a following, helped by that secret weapon of any cult classic: a killer soundtrack, spearheaded by David Bowie’s ace title track. Even Martin Scorsese is reputed to be a fan.

Eric Idle and SNL creator Lorne Michaels co-produced this Hard Day’s Night pisstake that did for Beatlemania what This Is Spinal Tap did for heavy metal. A ratings failure when it premiered on US television, it’s since become a secret handshake among hardcore comedy aficionados. (Good luck finding it streaming anywhere other than YouTube, though.) It’s not exactly a subtle parody – there’s a whole bit about one of the members allegedly dying and being replaced by a stand-in – but the silliness of tunes like ‘Yellow Submarine Sandwich’ and ‘I Am the Waitress’ hit the same area of the funny bone that makes Weird Al immortally hilarious.