Exploitation film is a type of film that is promoted by "exploiting" often lurid subject matter. The term exploitation is common in film marketing, used for all types of films to mean promotion or advertising. These films then need something to exploit, such as a big star, special effects, sex, violence, romance, etc. An exploitation film, however, relies heavily on sensationalist advertising, as well as broad overstatements of the issues depicted, regardless of how they relate to the intrinsic quality of the film. Very often, exploitation films are widely considered as being of low quality.[1] Even so, exploitation films sometimes attract critical attention and cult followings.
Exploitation films may feature suggestive or explicit sex, sensational violence, drug use, nudity, freaks, gore, the bizarre, destruction, rebellion, and mayhem. Such films were first seen in their modern form in the early 1920s,[2] but they were popularized in the 1960s and 70s with the general relaxing of censorship and cinematic taboos in the USA and Europe. The Motion Picture Association of America (and the MPPDA before it) cooperated with censorship boards and grassroots organizations in the name of preserving the image of a "clean" Hollywood, but exploitation film distributors operated outside of this circuit and often welcomed controversy as a form of free promotion.[2] Their producers also used sensational elements to attract audiences lost to television. Since the 1990s, this genre has also received attention from academic circles, where it is sometimes called paracinema.
"Exploitation" is very loosely defined, and has more to do with the viewer's perception of the film than with the film's actual content. Titillating material and artistic content can and often do coexist, as demonstrated by the fact that art films that failed to pass the Hays Code were often shown in the same grindhouses as exploitation films. Exploitation films share with acclaimed transgressive European directors such as Derek Jarman, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard a fearlessness toward handling 'disreputable' content. Numerous films recognized as classics contain levels of sex, violence, and shock typically associated with exploitation films, including Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Tod Browning's Freaks, and Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Buñuel's Un chien andalou contains elements of the modern splatter film. It has further been stated that if Carnival of Souls had been made in Europe, that it would be considered an art film, while if Eyes Without a Face had been made in the U.S., it would have been categorized as a low-budget horror film. The art film and exploitation film audiences are both considered to have tastes that reject the mainstream Hollywood offerings.[3]
Exploitation films often exploited events that occurred in the news and were in the short term public consciousness that a major film studio may avoid due to the length of time of producing a major film. For example Child Bride (1938) addressed a problem of older men marrying very young women in the Ozarks. Other issues such as drug use in films like Reefer Madness (1936) attracted an audience that a major film studio would usually avoid to keep their mainstream and respectable reputations. But if the motivations were strong enough, major studios might become involved, as in Warner Bros. 1969 anti-LSD, anti-counterculture film The Big Cube. Sex Madness (1938) portrayed the dangers of venereal disease from premarital sex. The film Mom and Dad (1945), a film about pregnancy and childbirth, was promoted in lurid terms. She Shoulda Said No! (1949) combined the themes of drug use and promiscuous sex. In the early days of film, when exploitation films relied on such sensational subjects as these, they had to present them within the context of a very conservative moral viewpoint in order to avoid censorship, as movies were not at the time considered to enjoy First Amendment protection.[4]
Several war films were made about the Winter War in Finland, the Korean War and the Vietnam War before the major studios showed interest. When Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre Halloween 1938 radio production of The War of the Worlds shocked many Americans and made news, Universal Pictures edited their serial Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars into a short feature called Mars Attacks the World for release in November of that year.
Some Poverty Row lower budget B movies often exploit major studio projects. Their rapid production schedule can take advantage of publicity attached to major studio films. For example, Edward L. Alperson produced William Cameron Menzies' Invaders from Mars in order to beat Paramount Pictures' prestigious production of director George Pal's The War of the Worlds to the cinemas. Pal's The Time Machine was also beaten to the cinemas by Robert Clarke's Edgar G. Ulmer film Beyond the Time Barrier (1960). As a result, many major studios, producers, and stars keep their projects secret.
Grindhouse is an American term for a theatre that mainly showed exploitation films. One theory is the word is named after the defunct burlesque theatres, on 42nd Street, New York, where 'bump n' grind' dancing and striptease used to be on the bill. In the 1960s these theatres were put to new use as venues for exploitation films.
As the drive-in movie theater (an outdoor theater into which the patrons drive and watch the film from their car) began to decline in the 1960s and 1970s, theater owners began to look for ways to bring in patrons. One solution was to book exploitation films. In fact, some producers from the 1950s to the 1980s would make films directly for the drive-in market, the mass product needed for a weekly change led to another theory that the producers would "grind" films out. Many of them were violent action films which some would refer to as 'drive-in' films.
Exploitation films may adopt the subject matters and stylings of film genres, particularly horror films and documentary films. The subgenres of exploitation films are categorized by which characteristics they utilize. Thematically, exploitation films can also be influenced by other so-called exploitative media, like pulp magazines. Exploitation films often blur genre lines by containing elements of two or more genres at a time. For example, Doris Wishman's Let Me Die A Woman contains both shock documentary and sexploitation elements.
Exploitation films made in the 1930s and 1940s were films that got around the strict censorship and scrutiny of the era despite featuring lurid subject matter by claiming to be educational in nature. They were generally cautionary stories about the alleged dangers of premarital sex and drug use. Examples include Marihuana (1936), Reefer Madness (1938), Sex Madness (1938), Mom and Dad (1945), and She Shoulda Said No! (1949). One exploitation film concerning homosexuality, Children of Loneliness (1937), is now considered a lost film.[5]
In 1953 The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, was the first film about a motorcycle gang. A string of low-budget juvenile delinquent films centered around hot-rods and motorcycles followed in the 1950s. The success of American International Pictures' The Wild Angels in 1966 ignited a trend that continued into the early 1970s. Other biker films include Motorpsycho (1965), Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), The Born Losers (1967), Satan's Sadists (1969), Roger Corman's Naked Angels (1969), Nam's Angels (1970), and C.C. and Company (1970). (See also List of biker films.) As well as David Kebo and Rudi Liden 's Death Valley, 2008 film.
Black exploitation, or "blaxploitation" films, are made with black actors, ostensibly for black audiences, often within a stereotypically African American urban milieu. A prominent theme was African-Americans overcoming the Man through cunning and violence. The progenitor of this subgenre was Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Other examples include Black Caesar, Black Devil Doll, Blacula, Black Shampoo, Boss Nigger, Coffy, Coonskin, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Dolemite, Foxy Brown, Hell Up in Harlem, Live and Let Die, The Mack, Mandingo, Shaft, Sugar Hill, Super Fly, The Thing With Two Heads and Truck Turner. Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown and Scott Sanders' Black Dynamite are modern homages to this genre.
Cannibal films, otherwise known as the cannibal genre, are a collection of graphic, gory movies made in the early 1970s on into the late 1980s, primarily by Italian and Spanish moviemakers. These movies mainly focused on cannibalism by tribes deep in the South American or Asian rain forests, usually perpetrated against Westerners that the tribes hold prisoner. Similar to Mondo films, the main draw of cannibal films was the promise of exotic locales and graphic gore involving any living creatures, human or animal. The best known film of this genre is the controversial 1980 Cannibal Holocaust in which six animals are killed. Others include Cannibal Ferox, Eaten Alive!, The Mountain of the Cannibal God, Last Cannibal World, and the first cannibal film, The Man From Deep River. Famous directors in this genre include Umberto Lenzi, Ruggero Deodato, Jesús Franco, and Joe D'Amato.
Canuxploitation films are Canadian made exploitation films about Canadian culture and/or portrayals of Canadian life[6].The term is believed to have come from the Fall 1999 article Canuxploitation! Goin' Down the Road with the Cannibal Girls that Ate Black Christmas. Your Complete Guide to the Canadian B-Movie that appeared in Broken Pencil magazine.[7] With the funding of the Canadian Film Development Corporation in the 1970s, Canadian film distributors were able to produce their own versions of exploitation films they had imported from other nations. The genre brought forth such respected directors as David Cronenberg and Bob Clark.
Carsploitation films are films featuring many scenes of cars racing and crashing with sports and muscle cars and car wrecks that were popular around the era. The films were mainly produced in the United States and Australia. The quintessential film of this genre is Vanishing Point (1971). Others include Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974), Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), Death Race 2000 (1975), Race with the Devil (1975), Cannonball (1976), Mad Max (1979), The Blues Brothers (1980), Dead End Drive-In (1986) and The Hitcher (1986). Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (2007) is a modern homage to this genre, as well as to slasher films and the films of Russ Meyer. The Fast and the Furious franchises fit into this subgenre as well, as do the French Taxi series.
In the 1970s, a brand of revisionist, non-traditional samurai film rose to some popularity in Japan; the subgenre became known as chambara, an onomatopoeia describing the clash of swords. Chambara's origins can be traced as far back as Akira Kurosawa, whose films featured moral grayness and exaggerated violence, but the genre is mostly associated with 1970s samurai manga by Kazuo Koike, on whose work many later films would be based. Chambara features few of the stoic, formal sensibilities of earlier jidaigeki films—the new chambara featured revenge-driven antihero protagonists, nudity, sex scenes, swordplay and blood. Well-known chambara films include Hanzo the Razor, Lady Snowblood, Lone Wolf and Cub, Sex and Fury and Shogun Assassin. Modern Japanese films such as Azumi and anime such as Shigurui continue the chambara tradition, and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill series is a prominent American tribute to the genre, along with Ninja Assassin. Other films such as The Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police contain elements of chambara, combining it with body horror.
Eco-terror films, also called "nature-run-amok" or "natural horror" films or "eco-horror" films, focus on an animal or group of animals that are far larger and more aggressive than is usual for its species, terrorizing humans within a particular locale whilst a group of other humans attempt to hunt it down. This genre began in the 1950s, when concern over atomic testing led to the popularity of movies about giant monsters. These were typically either giant prehistoric creatures awakened by atomic blasts, or ordinary animals mutated by radiation.[8] These films included Godzilla, Them!, and Tarantula. The trend was revived in the 1970s as awareness of pollution increased, with corporate greed and military irresponsibility being blamed for destruction of the environment.[9] Night of the Lepus, Frogs, and Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster are examples of these movies. After the massive success of Steven Spielberg's 1975 Jaws, a number of highly similar films (sometimes regarded as outright rip-offs) were produced in hopes of cashing in on its success. These included Alligator, Cujo, Day of the Animals, Great White, Grizzly, Humanoids from the Deep, Monster Shark, Orca, The Pack, Piranha, Prophecy, Razorback, Blood Feast (Night of 1,000 Cats), Tentacles, and Tintorera. Roger Corman was a major producer of these films in both decades. The genre has experienced a revival in recent years, with films such as Mulberry Street and Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter reflecting concerns over global warming and overpopulation.[10][11]
The Sci-fi (now known as SyFy) Channel is a massive producer of such films with their original movies often consisting of nothing more than, "Giant _____ attacks!" Examples include Sharktopus and Dinoshark.
Giallo films are Italian-made slasher films that focus both on the cruel deaths committed by the killers and the subsequent search of detectives for the said killers. They are named for the Italian word for yellow, "Giallo", the color of which was the background of the pulp novels these movies were initially adapted from or inspired by. The progenitor of this genre was La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much). Other examples of Giallo films include 4 mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet), Profondo Rosso (Deep Red), Il gatto a nove code (The Cat o' Nine Tails), L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage), La coda dello scorpione (The Case of the Scorpion's Tail), La tarantola dal ventre nero (Black Belly of the Tarantula), Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh/Blade of the Ripper), Sei donne per l'assassino (Blood and Black Lace) and Tenebrae. Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and Mario Bava were the most proficient directors of this genre.
In Italy, when you bring a script to a producer, the first question he asks is not “what is your film like?” but “what film is your film like?’’ That’s the way it is, we can only make Zombie 2, never Zombie 1. — Luigi Cozzi[12]
Mockbusters, sometimes called "remakesploitation films", are copycat movies that attempt to cash in on the advertising of heavily promoted major-studio films. Production company The Asylum, who prefers to call them "tie-ins", is a prominent producer of these films.[13] These have historically been associated with Italian cinema, which has been quick to latch on to such trends as Westerns, James Bond movies, and zombie films.[12] They have long been a staple of directors such as Jim Wynorski (The Bare Wench Project, and the Cliffhanger imitation Sub Zero) who make movies for the direct-to-video market.[14] These are beginning to attract attention from major Hollywood studios, who served The Asylum with a cease and desist order in an attempt to prevent them from releasing The Day the Earth Stopped to video stores in advance of the release of The Day the Earth Stood Still to theaters.[15]
Though the term has gone as far back as the fifties (with The Monster of Piedras Blancas as a clear derivative of Creature From The Black Lagoon), it didn't become popular until the seventies with Starcrash, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam and Süpermen dönüyor with the latter two using unauthorized excerpts of John Williams score as well as scenes from Star Wars among others.
Mondo films, often called shockumentaries, are quasi-documentary films that focus on sensationalized topics, such as exotic customs from around the world or gruesome death footage. Similar to shock exploitation, the goal of Mondo films is shocking the audience in dealing with taboo subject material. The first and best-known mondo film is Mondo Cane (A Dog's World). Others include Shocking Asia and the Faces of Death series.
Nazi exploitation films, also called "Nazisploitation" films, or "Il Sadiconazista", focus on Nazis torturing prisoners at death camps and brothels during World War II. The tortures inflicted are often of a sexual nature; and the prisoners, who are often female, are nude. The progenitor of this subgenre was Love Camp 7 (1969). The quintessential film of the genre which launched its popularity and its typical tropes was Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974); about the buxom, nymphomaniacal dominatrix Ilsa torturing prisoners in a Stalag. Others include Fräulein Devil (Captive Women 4/Elsa: Fraulein SS/Fraulein Kitty), La Bestia in Calore (SS Hell Camp/SS Experiment Part 2/The Beast in Heat/Horrifying Experiments of the S.S. Last Days), L'ultima orgia del III Reich (Gestapo's Last Orgy/Last Orgy of The Third Reich/Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler), Salon Kitty and SS Experiment Camp. A lot of nazisploitation film were influenced by art films like Pier Paolo Pasolini's infamous Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom) and Liliana Cavani's Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter) .
Nudist films originated in the 1930s as films that skirted the Hays Code restrictions on nudity by purportedly depicting the nudist lifestyle. They existed through the late 1950s, when the New York State Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Excelsior Pictures vs. New York Board of Regents that onscreen nudity is not obscene. This opened the door for more open depictions of nudity, starting with Russ Meyer's 1959 The Immoral Mr. Teas, which has been credited as the first film which unapologetically placed its exploitation elements at the forefront instead of pretending to carry a moral or educational message. This development paved the way for the more explicit exploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s and obsoleted the nudist genre, which is ironic, as the nudist film Garden of Eden was the subject of the court case. After this, the nudist genre split into subgenres such as the "nudie-cutie", which featured nudity, but did not contain touching; and the "roughie", which included nudity and violent, antisocial behavior.[16]
Nudist films were marked by self-contradictory qualities. They presented themselves as educational films, but exploited their subject matter by placing their main focus on the nudist camps' most beautiful female residents, while denying the existence of such exploitation. They depicted a lifestyle unbound by the restrictions of clothing, yet this depiction was restricted by the requirement that genitals not be shown. Still, there was a subversive element to these, as the nudist camps inherently rejected modern society and its values regarding the human body.[17] These films frequently involve a criticism of the class system, equating body shame with the upper class, and nudism with social equality. One scene in The Unashamed makes a point about the artificiality of clothing and its related values through a mocking portrayal of a group of nude artists who paint fully clothed subjects.[18]
Ozploitation, or Australian sub-genre films, broadly covers horror, erotic or crime films of the 1970s and 1980s. Reforms to Australia's film classification systems in 1971 led to a number of such comparatively low-budget, privately funded films being produced, assisted by tax exemptions and targeting export markets. Often an internationally recognised actor (but of waning notability) would be hired to play a lead role. While laconic characters and desert scenes feature in many Ozploitation films, the term has been used to apply for a variety of Australian films of the era that relied on shocking or titilating their audiences. Some of the better known Ozploitation films include Mad Max, Alvin Purple, Patrick and Turkey Shoot; a documentary covering the genre was Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!.[19] Such films address themes concerning Australian society, particularly in respect of masculinity (especially the Ocker male), male attitudes towards women, attitudes towards and treatment of Indigenous Australians, violence, alcohol, and environmental exploitation and destruction. They are also typically given rural or outback settings which emphasise the Australian landscape and environment as an almost spiritually malign force which alienates white Australians and frustrates both their personal ambitions and activities and their attempts to subdue it.
Films in which a woman is raped, left for dead, recovers and then subsequently exacts a typically graphic, gory revenge against the person/persons who raped her. By far the most famous film of this genre is I Spit on Your Grave (also called Day of the Woman). It is not unusual for the main character in these films to be a successful, independent woman from the city, who is attacked by a man from the country.[20] The genre has more recently drawn praise from feminists such as Carol J. Clover, whose 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film examines the implications of its reversals of traditional film gender roles. These can be seen as an offshoot of the vigilante film, with the victim's transformation into avenger as the key scene. Author Jacinda Read and others believe that rape/revenge should be categorized as a narrative structure rather than a true subgenre, because its plot can be found in films of many different genres; including thrillers (Ms. 45), dramas (Lipstick), westerns (Hannie Caulder),[21] and art films (Memento).[22] One of the genre's most significant examples, The Last House on the Left, was an uncredited remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, recast as a horror film featuring extreme violence.[23] Deliverance, in which the rape is perpetrated on a man, has been credited as the originator of the genre.[24] Clover, who restricts her definition of the genre to movies in which a woman is raped and gains her own revenge, praises rape/revenge exploitation films for the way in which their protagonists fight their abuse directly, rather than preserve the status quo by depending on an unresponsive legal system as in major-studio rape/revenge movies such as The Accused.[25]
Sex exploitation, or "sexploitation" films, are similar to softcore pornography, in that the film serves largely as a vehicle for showing scenes involving nude or semi-nude women. While many films contain vivid sex scenes, sexploitation shows these scenes more graphically than mainstream films, often overextending the sequences or showing full frontal nudity. Russ Meyer's body of work is probably the best known example; with his best known films being Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Supervixens. Other well-known sexploitation films include the Emmanuelle series, Showgirls and Caligula. Caligula is unique among sexploitation films and exploitation films in general in that it features high budget and eminent actors (Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren).
Shock exploitation films, or "shock films" or "shocksploitation films"; contain various shocking elements such as extremely realistic graphic violence, graphic rape depictions, simulated bestiality and depictions of incest. Examples of shock films include Antichrist, Angst, Assault on Precinct 13, August Underground's Mordum, Baise-moi, Blood Sucking Freaks, Combat Shock, I Drink Your Blood, Fight for Your Life,Seven Servants, Hostel, House of 1000 Corpses, I Spit on Your Grave, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and its sequels, Irréversible, Last House on Dead End Street, The Last House on the Left, Men Behind the Sun, Nekromantik, Pink Flamingos, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom), SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, Snuff, Strange Days, Ta Paidia tou Diavolou (Island of Death), Thriller - en grym film (Thriller: A Cruel Picture) and Vase de Noces (Wedding Trough/One Man and his Pig/The Pig Fucking Movie), and many of the films of Paul Verhoeven, Ruggero Deodato, Takashi Miike, and Gaspar Noé.
Slasher films focus on a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner. The victims are often teenagers or young adults. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is often credited as creating the basic premise of the genre. It truly emerged as a genre during the 1970s with Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974 and John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), which is usually credited with starting the genre, most specifically with masked villains, groups of weak teenagers with one strong, hero female, isolated or stranded in precarious locations or situations, and either the protagonists or antagonists experiencing warped family lives or values. Then the slasher genre peaked again in the 1980s with other well-known films like A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Anthropophagus Beast, Black Christmas, Child's Play, The Driller Killer. After The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the early 1970s the 1980s saw very similar slasher films being produced using TCSM and Halloween's basic format. Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, Prom Night, The Funhouse, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Sleepaway Camp, and The Toolbox Murders many of which also used elements found in the 1974 original slasher Black Christmas. The genre experienced a mainstream revival in the 1990s with the success of Scream, which both mocked and paid homage to traditional slasher conventions. Slasher films often prove phenomenally popular and spawn numerous sequels, prequels and remakes that continue to the present day. Adam Green's Hatchet and Ryan Nicholson's Gutterballs bill themselves as throwbacks to the slasher films of the 1980s.
Spaghetti Western is a nickname for the Italian-made Western films that emerged in the mid-1960s. They were considerably more violent and amoral than typical Hollywood westerns (some films have body counts of over 200 people killed) and often eschewed (some say "demythologized") the conventions of earlier Westerns. Examples include Death Rides a Horse, Django, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Navajo Joe, The Grand Duel, The Great Silence, For a Few Dollars More, The Big Gundown, and A Fistful of Dollars.
A splatter film or gore film is a type of horror film that deliberately focuses on graphic portrayals of gore and violence. As a distinct genre, the splatter film began in the 1960s with the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman, whose most famous films (and quintessential examples of the genre) include Blood Feast (1963), Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964), Color Me Blood Red (1965), The Gruesome Twosome (1967) and The Wizard of Gore (1970). Some later splatter films, such as Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series, along with Peter Jackson's Bad Taste and Dead Alive (also called Braindead) featured such excessive, unrealistic, over-the-top gore that they crossed the line from horror to comedy.
Women in prison films emerged in the early seventies and remain a popular subgenre to this day. They are primarily voyeuristic sexual fantasies about prison life that rely on heavy quantities of nudity, lesbianism, sexual assault, humiliation, sadism, and rebellion among captive women. Movies include Roger Corman's Women in Cages and The Big Doll House, Bamboo House of Dolls, Barbed Wire Dolls by Jesus Franco, Women's Prison Massacre by Bruno Mattei, Reform School Girls by Tom DeSimone, and Caged Heat by Jonathan Demme.
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