Bubba Ho-tep and the Seriously Silly Cult Film
Bubba Ho-tep and the Seriously Silly Cult Film
This chapter uses Don Coscarelli's the science fiction (sf)/horror mash-up Bubba Ho-tep (2002) to propose that sf, fantasy, and indeed cult films of all stripes are both literal and figurative ‘strange attractors’, that is, they literally attract due to their strangeness. Not only is the cult film retroactively constituted as such based on fan response, but more particularly because it produces and regulates the turbulence, eddies, and whirlpools of a kind of chaotic desire that marks the cult — a desire that, in going ‘beyond all reason’, manifests itself both on the level of conscious intellectualization and on the level of affect, that is, the experience of feeling or emotion. What one loves in the cult film is something more than the film — it is the idea of the film as well as the affect produced by the film, the ‘visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion’.
Keywords: cult films, cult cinema, science fiction, Don Coscarelli, Bubba Ho-tep, strange attractors, fantasy
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