Global Cult Cinemas

Decolonizing Cult Film Studies

Add to my list

Edited by Iain Robert Smith

Type

Studies

Subject

Genre > B-movies

Keywords

exploitation films, global

Publishing date

2026 (February 19, 2026)

Publisher

Bloomsbury Academic

Collection

Global Exploitation Cinemas

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 280 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-5013-7520-0

User Ratings

(0 vote)

X

Average rating:

0	rating	= We can do without
0	rating	= Good book
0	rating	= Excellent book
0	rating	= Unique / a reference

Your rating: -

Book Presentation:
Global Cult Cinemas calls for a decolonisation of cult film studies.

To date, discourses of cult cinema have predominantly focused upon Anglo-American cinema and its reception in the West. Even when cult scholarship has expanded to include non-English language cinema from regions such as East and Southeast Asia, what nevertheless tends to define these cinemas as cult has been the subcultural fandom for those films in the West. Shifting the focus onto cult film traditions and fandoms beyond the Anglosphere, Global Cult Cinemas makes a decisive intervention in the field by calling for a decolonisation of cult film studies.

This volume therefore interrogates both the coloniality and gendered nature of much cult scholarship and the extent to which an implicit white male perspective needs challenging in an age of decolonising the academy. Our contributors focus their research on circuits of cult film production and reception beyond the predominant Anglophone centres, with particular attention to cult practices across the Global South. Chapters include investigations of specific cult film traditions within countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan, alongside explorations of the politics of indigenous cult filmmaking, the global circulation of cult icons such as El Santo, and the status of auteurs such as Alejandro Jodorowsky in the era of #MeToo. In sum, this collection critiques the Eurocentric assumptions that lie at the heart of much existing cult film scholarship, and offers new ways of theorizing global cult cinemas to work towards the goal of decolonising cult film studies.

About the Author:
Iain Robert Smith is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (2016) and co-editor of the collections Transnational Film Remakes (2017) and Media Across Borders (2016). He co-founded the SCMS Transnational Cinemas SIG and he is currently working on a monograph on cult traditions within Indian cinema.Austin Fisher is Associate Professor of Popular Culture at Bournemouth University, UK, author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (2011), founding co-editor of the “Global Exploitation Cinemas” book series and editor of Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads (2015). He serves on the Editorial Board of the Transnational Cinemas journal, is Co-Chair of the SCMS “Transnational Cinemas” Scholarly Interest Group, and founder of the “Spaghetti Cinema” festival.Dolores Tierney has written extensively on Latin American exploitation and horror cinemas including the co-edited anthologies Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas and Latin America (2009) and The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (2014), and chapters and articles in Cinema Journal (2014), Porn Studies (2019), and Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema (2019).Johnny Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University, UK. He is the author of Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (2015) and founding co-editor of the Global Exploitation Cinemas book series (Bloomsbury).Shruti Narayanswamy's PhD research explores the representation of women in early Bombay cinema. She recently published an article in Transnational Screens on low-budget superhero films produced in Malegaon (2019) and she is currently preparing a post-doc project on the emergence of cult fandom within India and the South Asian diaspora.

Press Reviews:
"Through its ambitious curatorial framework and critical impulse to re-conceptualize transnationalism and decolonization with nuance and rigour, Global Cult Cinemas makes a crucial intervention that contests normative geopolitics of canonization in Anglophone film studies. The contributors' diverse critical rapport with the core concepts of film studies (e.g. authorship, cultural translation, extraction, fandom, genre, Indigeneity, racialization, post-coloniality, and spectatorship) opens new theoretical paradigms to re-locate cult film in and out of the field's canonizing drives. Moving beyond the institutionally driven, critically shallow, and culturalist agendas of decolonization, the editors treat the complexities of knowledge production with great enthusiasm and care." ―Cüneyt Çakirlar, Associate Professor of Film and Visual Culture, Nottingham Trent University, UK, and editor of Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics (2025)

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic