I knew sooner or later I was going to have to address this, now is as good a time as any.

My personal definition of “Cult Cinema” should not be considered the One and Only True Definition or anything like that. Cinema is an art form, and art is subjective. Nevertheless, I think there are some rules and guidelines that should be followed to keep this community distinct from other movie discussion forums since the fandom here tends to be distinct from other fandoms.

I should also say that, as a moderator, I will make it my effort to keep this place clear of entries that clearly don’t qualify as Cult Cinema . In return, I want to make this the first rule of the community:

RULE ONE: No arguments over whether or not a movie is considered “Cult Cinema”. I’m cool with almost any other types of comments (outside of anything brazenly offensive) but I don’t want to this to become one of those places where every single entry has someone commenting “Um this is not actually cult cinema.” I've seen it in action elsewhere and I just don't have the patience for it. Ugh.

So, what makes it “Cult Cinema”, then?

RULE TWO: No entries about movies that are less than ten years old.

There’s no exact rule to determine how old a movie has to be before it could be considered “Cult Cinema” but a movie does need to exist for at least a period of time to find an audience, and ten years is a good enough rule of thumb for now.

Plus I don’t want this community to become a place for promoting new films, there are better places for that: !movies@piefed.social or !movies@lemmy.world or if it’s a horror movie, maybe !horror@lemmy.ca or maybe !badmovies@lemmy.world if it’s something with a crazy low budget that you found on Tubi or wherever.

Please no attempts at predicting what may or may not eventually become a cult movie, it just looks like you’re part of a PR team or something.

RULE THREE: No entries about movies that are obviously mainstream.

Yeah, I know, it’s hard to determine what does or not constitute “Mainstream” as well, the lines tend to be blurry. A movie might get heavily promoted but then it bombs at the box office and gets generally forgotten. Does that make it mainstream or “cult”? Sort of, I guess. A movie might do poorly at the box office but then reach mainstream levels of popularity in retrospect. Did it lose it’s “cult” status, or does its origin as one mean that it stays “Cult Cinema” forever? I don’t know.

And in that spirit, I will try to keep the idea or definition of "Cult Cinema" as loose as I can reasonably be expected to. As long as it doesn't appear that the poster might have ulterior motives (like trying to promote a new movie), there's a good chance I'll let it slide unless it feels like someone is pointlessly testing boundaries.

But for purposes of this community, the point is to provide a space for talking about movies that aren’t already part of popular discussion. So if a movie is part of a massively successful franchise, it probably already has a place in the Fediverse; and if it doesn’t, you can make one.

And, for old movies that are still fairly well known and popular, maybe check out !classicfilms@lemmy.world instead.

Generally, I see this space as a place for other fans of this sort of thing to basically say "Hey, have you heard of this one?" And some of those fans have been doing this for decades and have seen a million weird movies, and some of them are new and have never seen anything that wasn't mainstream before, and probably a majority of them fall somewhere in between those two extremes. The whole idea is for anyone checking this community out to possibly find some cool movies they'd never heard of before, to enjoy for themselves.