It’s a difficult task to pin down what exactly makes a cult classic. Certain elements are rarely absent: a subculture created purely out of an intense love for the movie in question, high rewatchability and quotability, midnight screenings, nostalgia, and little “winks” to those in the know about other cult gems. It’s an expansive, imperfect formula, but a formula nonetheless—and, like any filmmaking formula, it has attracted the attention of many studio suits and filmmakers over the years, particularly in recent history.
The thing about cult classics that is undeniable and universal is that they’re organic events that take some time to cook. You can’t just make a cult classic; becoming cult is a thing that happens to a movie when niche audiences naturally find things in it that appeal to their unique taste. That hasn’t stopped some people over the years, however, from trying to design a cult classic from the ground up — needless to say, they fell flat. These ten movies were desperate to become cult classics but couldn’t quite crack the formula. They are ranked according to the size of the gap between the movie’s cult ambitions and its failure.
10
‘Detention’ (2011)
Directed by Joseph Kahn
The black comedy slasher Detention was financed largely by its director, Joseph Kahn, and it’s silly not to respect a passion project. Even still, it would also be silly to pretend that Detention is anything more than mediocre. A messy mishmash of the same kinds of genres that tend to appeal to cult classic-loving crowds, it ends up not working quite well within the constraints of any of those genres.
However, some might say that Detention is actually quite an underappreciated horror movie. Kahn’s direction is vibrant and fun, his frenzied execution bringing the film a hard-to-resist charm that makes it hard to hate it altogether. It’s an amusing and sincere attempt at making a modern slasher cult classic, but its scattershot nature makes it fall short.
9
‘John Dies at the End’ (2012)
Directed by David Wong
Based on the comedic Lovecraftian horror novel of the same title, John Dies at the End is depressingly disappointing for a film with such a cool title. Gory, amusing, relying on a zany mixture of genres, and with a cast featuring the likes of Paul Giamatti, Clancy Brown, and Doug Jones, it’s a film that, from top to bottom, was clearly designed to draw in cult crowds.
Some, including respectable publications like Variety and Wired, argued that John Dies at the End was, indeed, destined to become a cult classic. If its obscurity today is any indication, they were probably wrong. It’s simply too gonzo and cheap-feeling to be a mainstream hit, yet not wild enough to be a true cult classic. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too.
8
‘Six-String Samurai’ (1998)
Directed by Lance Mungia
Just from looking at its title and premise, you can tell that Six-String Samurai is a quirky homage to the silly samurai B-pictures of the past. It is, indeed, a pretty amusing samurai film, even if not enough to be a cult classic. It’s an entertaining enough no-budget post-apocalyptic action comedy, but it doesn’t have what it takes to attract the kinds of audiences who could have ensured it had a long afterlife.
Instead, Six-String Samurai is too weird for its own sake, yet very few of its idiosyncrasies are memorable or amusing enough to make anyone crave a midnight screening of it. It wears its influences, from Akira Kurosawa to Mad Max, out on its sleeve with pride, but it doesn’t really do much with those influences. Indeed, Six-String Samurai is probably the worst thing a would-be cult classic could be: derivative.
Six-String Samurai
- Release Date
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September 18, 1998
- Runtime
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91 minutes
- Director
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Lance Mungia
7
‘Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters’ (2013)
Directed by Tommy Wirkola
Fans of cult classics tend to love goofy, campy films that take silly premises and do silly things with them. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is not one such film. Instead, it’s perhaps one of the worst fairy tale movies in recent memory, despite having a star-studded cast led by Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton.
The issue with Witch Hunters is that, in trying to be a goofy cult classic, it doesn’t put in enough effort to excel at being anything it tries to be. As a fantasy movie, it’s lifeless and unimaginative. As a parody, it’s trashy and unfunny. It’s hammy, clichéd, and what’s perhaps most lethal to its cult ambitions: It feels awfully commercial and sanitized. Who the heck wants that from a cult classic?
6
‘It’s Pat’ (1994)
Directed by Adam Bernstein
Throughout the years, there have been plenty of Saturday Night Live sketches that have been turned into feature films. Sometimes, you get a result as exceptional as Wayne’s World or The Blues Brothers, two of the best cult classics of the 20th century. Other times, you get something a lot worse. But in the world of SNL sketches, and maybe even in the world of movies as a whole, it doesn’t get much more atrocious than It’s Pat.
Over the decades, plenty of movies have been so terrible that they became cult classics, but there is such a thing as too terrible to become a cult classic. That’s the category that this painfully unfunny, completely terrible, awfully confused mess falls into. It’s Pat isn’t just too unappealing to create any kind of cult following: It’s such an ugly experience that it’s best enjoyed by absolutely no one. In trying to follow in the footsteps of Wayne’s World and The Blues Brothers, it instead careened into the cliff of oblivion.
5
‘Planet Terror’ (2007)
Directed by Robert Rodriguez
Plenty of filmmakers are known primarily as directors of cult classics. Quentin Tarantino is an example, and Robert Rodriguez is very much another. As such, the duo came together to create the 2007 double bill Grindhouse, comprised of Tarantino’s Death Proof and Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, both of them homages to the different exploitation movie genres of the ’70s.
While Death Proof has had a decent degree of success in becoming a cult classic among diehard Tarantino fans, Planet Terror isn’t really talked about these days.
Paying homage to cult classics is, very logically, often a good tactic to make a cult classic yourself, but in intentionally trying to direct a cult classic, it’s remarkably easy to fly too close to the sun. While Death Proof has had a decent (though not particularly remarkable) degree of success in becoming a cult classic among diehard Tarantino fans, Planet Terror isn’t really talked about these days. It’s a fun throwback, but its elements feel far too artificially put together for a cult reception to organically occur.
4
‘Movie 43’ (2013)
Directed by Elizabeth Banks, Steven Brill, Steve Carr, Rusty Cundieff, James Duffy, Griffin Dunne, Peter Farrelly, Patrik Forsberg, Will Graham, James Gunn, Brett Ratner, and Jonathan van Tulleken
The ’70s cult classic The Kentucky Fried Movie is a phenomenal sketch film. Really, its biggest sin is having been the inspiration for Movie 43, an anthology comedy that’s easily and by far one of the worst films of the 21st century thus far. People who think that films can’t cause physical pain ought to think again. Watching Movie 43 is such an astonishingly unfunny experience that it nearly manages the feat.
It’s offensive, juvenile, crass, and genuinely has zero jokes that are worthy of so much as a chuckle. It is, quite simply, one of the worst comedy movies ever made, and not in a way that could ever hope to garner any semblance of a cult following of any sort, in spite of its biggest efforts. Some cult classic fans do tend to love vulgar humor, but there is such a thing as taking it too far. Movie 43 does so with glee.
3
‘Snakes on a Plane’ (2006)
Directed by David R. Ellis
They’re snakes, and they’re on a plane. Such is the simplicity of the premise of Snakes on a Plane, and for those expecting a film that is, first and foremost, about snakes on a plane, it’s a perfectly satisfying B-picture with Samuel L. Jackson clearly having a good time in the lead role. For a while, the film seemed to be shaping up to become one of the most iconic cult classics of the 2000s, but it then suddenly disappeared from the cultural zeitgeist.
It’s definitely a so-bad-it’s-good gem, but a cult following it certainly doesn’t have. Often, the best kind of camp is camp that’s accidental. When there’s a degree of enjoyable clumsiness and incompetence in a film, it’s endearing; but when those qualities are absent and camp instead feels very much thrown into the movie by design, it gets old quickly. That’s very likely what happened to Snakes on a Plane, which is living proof that specifically setting out to make a cult classic rarely—if ever—works out as intended.
2
‘Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire’ (2023) and ‘Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver’ (2024)
Directed by Zack Snyder
Following his exit from the DCEU, Zack Snyder decided to take an old idea of his for a Star Wars film, which was rejected, and turn it into a new thing. The result? The massively underwhelming, terribly dull Rebel Moon series, which is very unlikely to ever go past being a duology. The films look great, but they aren’t any good, and critics and audiences were able to agree on that.
The thing about Snyder is that he’s the rare kind of filmmaker who has a cult following all of his own, but even the director’s diehard fans weren’t able to defend the two Rebel Moon disasters. Today, they’re little more than sad, forgotten memories in Netflix’s catalog. Whereas other Snyder movies, from his DCEU films to Sucker Punch, can be argued to be modern cult classics, these two sci-fi messes were dead on arrival.
1
‘Morbius’ (2022)
Directed by Daniel Espinosa
It’s quite likely that there are more Morbius memes on the Internet than there are people in the world who actually watched the film. It (or, rather, mocking it) is a pillar of 2020s pop culture. The only problem? It’s a real chore to sit through, even for diehard Marvel fans. When it first came out in theaters, it bombed hard at the box office. Then came the memes. Sony thought that they were a sign that they had a cult classic in the making on their hands, so they released the film in theaters one more time. It bombed again.
Perhaps Morbius wasn’t specifically lab-designed to be a cult classic from the get-go, but it’s the fact that Sony was so hilariously desperate to turn it into one post-release that makes it such an entertaining case. As it stands today, cult classics aren’t made, but rather transformed with the passage of time. It’s a beautiful phenomenon that has provided audiences with some of the most iconic films of all time, but if you specifically set out to make a cult classic, chances are that it’ll fall flat on its face. Case in point: Morbius, the most noteworthy cult classic that never was.