Cult Film: A film of any stripe that, while ignored or buried by the general market and/or critical Establishment, is kept alive, or resurrected, thanks to the devotion of a particular section of the audience--often responding to the very elements, extremes, or eccentricities that saw the films "fail" (commercially) in the first place.  --Damien Love

Classical exploitation films can be described as "as a marginal cinema operating "in the shadow of Hollywood" from the 1920s through the 1950s, dedicated to "dealing with topics that censorship bodies and the organized industry's self-regulatory mechanisms prohibited"   
["Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959.  Eric Schaefer. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999]

Lurking in the cinematic ooze somewhere well below the surface of the cleanly Hollywood boxoffice mainstream are the movies your mother told you not to watch (or had no idea your were watching in the first place).  The history of sound movies is filled with such thrown-together potboilers and sleazy oddities, films filled with lurid sex, vice, the seamy underbelly of modern life--all offered up for the price of admission.  Viewed in the right light, such films often have a addictive vitality and campy humor all their own--quintessential cinematic guilty pleasures.  Looked at in another light, they provide strange and often fascinating insights into the fantasies, fetishes, and taboos of the eras in which they were cobbled together.

MRC continues to collect a representative sampling of these midnight movies:  check out the videography at: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/cultfilms.html

A bibliography of books and articles about cult films and exploitation films is posted at:  http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/cultbib.html