From early moonshine movies depicting regional rule breakers, to backwoods survivalist fictions such as Deliverance (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Southern Comfort (1981), The Devil’s Rejects (2005) and beyond, the American countryside and its inhabitants have come to evoke humour, horror and morbid fascination as expressed through a range of cult film genres. In so doing, these narratives draw on wider conceptions of the rural poor that sees the regionally dispossessed as tagged through multiple and derogatory labels that frequently become associated with the term ‘white trash’. Such is the prominence of these rural conceptions that it is possible to argue that white trash imagery has come to dominate film traditions from the early 20th century onwards. Here, the longstanding myth of the rural American ‘hick’ has inspired a wide variety of cinematic cycles from sentimental dramas and ribald comedies to action film franchises and race conflict narratives, with a regular flow of titles being produced between the 1930s and 1960s. Arguably, the most prolific era of white trash cinema emerged in the 1970s. Here, images of debased rurality circulated most widely across a wide variety of cult and ‘exploitation’ film releases. Within this body of work, the rural landscape was recast as a foreboding terrain whose inhabitants exact retribution against the urban ‘outsiders’ for the wider bonds of social exclusion that have been inflicted on the rural dweller. The influence of these 1970s productions has themselves resulted in the further circulation of degenerate, rural white trash tropes across more contemporary sets of film releases.
Beyond America’s fixation with its rural own, Europe has also used cult film imagery to acknowledge regional splits and social divisions. These tensions have fed into a range of representations, myths and stereotypes that extended from eugenic case-study to exploitation cinema. In addition to these territories, other global cultures also frequently construct the rural space as a site of either erotic fulfilment or foreboding in a range of unsettling and iconic genres that warrant further investigation. In order to explore cult cinema’s continued fascination with the rural, this edition of the Cine-Excess journal is devoted to global case-studies that explore classic and contemporary representations of the countryside, outback and its inhabitants, whilst also providing direct commentaries from some of the cult filmmakers responsible for these creations.
Our examination begins with an analysis of the unsettling natural elements implicit within the Australian outback, as discussed in the article ‘Horror Rises Up: Nature’s Revenge in Ozsploitation Cinema’. Here, author Lindsay Hallam considers a range of films released between 1971 and 2008 that all depict the Australian landscape as seeking to overthrow and punish those settlers deemed as colonial and exploitative. Although these productions figure this revenge of nature through a variety of differing animal species, they all retain an incisive commentary on the historical and abusive treatment of Australian landscape by its white settlers. As a result, Hallam employs the term of Ozploitation as ‘eco-horror’ to describe a cycle of cult films that focus on the threatening potential of the Australian outback, and can also be distinguished from more dominant American ‘revenge of nature’ traditions. The nationally specific nature of these outback dramas is then detailed by the author through an analysis of Colin Eggleston’s 1978 film Long Weekend. Here, nature and the outback enact a slow and systematic campaign of revolt against a bickering couple, whose marital malaise is figured through their wanted destruction of the rural space. Although the film configures its eco-horror revenge through a variety of insects, birds and mammals, it is manmade weaponry and modern machinery that finally lead to the couple’s demise. This further underlines Hallam’s view that the Ozploitation eco-cycle offers a cutting critique of the white settler’s attempts to master and dominate the Australian landscape, which ultimately signals that a “history of colonisation is actually one of invasion and exploitation”.
Although Hallam’s article seeks to disentangle the Australian ‘revenge of nature’ narrative from its American counterpart, Sarah Pogoda’s submission actually considers the close connections between Tobe Hooper’s American release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and more recent European renditions of regional debasement that followed. Writing in the article ‘Germany is not Texas. Finding Reunified Germany in the Rural: Christoph Schlingensief’s The German Chain Saw Massacre’, Paogoda considers Schlingensief’s film in light of wider tensions surrounding region and nationhood, whilst also offering a comparative analysis of the visual elements across both texts. The author begins by considering the production, marketing and academic reception of the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, noting how the film’s release saw it became indelibly linked with both national tensions occurring in the 1970s, as well as regional aberrations relating to its Texan locality. It is a similar national/regional focus that the author finds as underpinning Christoph Schlingensief’s release, which can be viewed as a direct response to the country’s national reunification in 1990. Indeed, The German Chain Saw Massacre even focuses on an ill-fated East German group who are waylaid and killed by a cannibalistic family from the Western region whist they journey across the newly reintegrated nation. By dwelling on a recently aligned culture that exposes the horrors previously concealed within its isolated territories, Schlingensief reveals his cynicism towards the ideological structures beliefs that underlie such processes of German nationalism. This leads Pogoda to a concluding analysis of the ways in Schlingensief’s film distinguishes its spaces of regional depravity from Tobe Hooper’s American template. Specifically, by relocating its horrors from the countryside to Germany’s industrial zones, the film implies that the nation’s centres of socio-economic productivity are actually sites of oppression, exploitation and insatiable consumption.
While Pagoda’s analysis draws attention to the ways in which the white trash monster comes to symbolise wider issues of national unification, it is the pseudo-scientific principles underpinning the construction of this feared figure that concerns Shellie McMurdo’s contribution. Writing in the article ‘We Are Never Going in the Woods Again: The Horror of the Underclass White Monster in American and British Horror’, McMurdo examines cross-cultural constructions of rural aberration against the pervasive influence of the eugenics movement that flourished in both Britain and America. In an incisive opening section, McMurdo outlines how 19th century fears around the unabated growth of the poor and dispossessed fed the development of the movement, whose reach extended into the 20th century to encompass ‘progressive’ educational and social reform measures around birth control and parenting techniques alongside more direct state interventions that included UK legislation aimed at segmenting the intellectually inferior from its social elite. While these statutory acts aided the development of a white trash typology (defined by distinct physiological traits, kinship values, genetic patterns and moral codes), it also enforced the myth that these marginal groups could be easily segmented from the more mainstream and intellectually developed urban dweller. While these marked socio-economic distinctions remain central to conflicts frequently played out in backwoods American horror titles, McMurdo applies them to a British cult film: Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008). The author contextualises the film’s representation of a violent white trash subculture terrorising a middle class couple against wider media panics surrounding feral gangs circulating in the UK at the time of its release. Such press reporting (which traded on the non-human, animalistic tendencies of these wayward youth groups, as well as their defective family/parenting structures) confirms the continuation of eugenics frames of interpretation across more contemporary cultural phenomena. For McMurdo, Eden Lake provides “a visual checklist, a pedigree chart similar to those used by the eugenicists.” The film not only functions to separate its feral white trash aggressors from their potential middle class victims but also reveals eugenics belief structures as evident across British cult film imagery.
Whereas McMurdo provides new insight in to British variants of the white trash myth, Jon Towlson profiles an American director whose films offer significant representations of this feared figure. Writing in the article ‘Bad S**t, Killer Worms and Deadly Dawns: The Cult Cinema and Rural Excess of Jeff Lieberman’, the author argues that while Lieberman’s output is often dwarfed by horror auteurs such as George A. Romero and Wes Craven, his work retains the subversive use of genre imagery and cutting social commentary often attributed to those other filmmakers. To substantiate this interpretation, Towlson provides a consideration of three of Lieberman’s most iconic titles: Squirm (1976), Blue Sunshine (1978) and Just Before Dawn (1981), arguing that these titles advance genre constructions of rural communities and seventies subcultures alike. As Lieberman’s first feature film, Squirm provided a reboot to the revenge of nature horror cycle popular during the decade, through its focus on earthworms made monstrous by a felled electricity pylon. Despite the film’s visceral reputation, for Towlson it is the aspects of place and location that reveal a more nuanced understanding of its core concerns. By shifting Squirm from its original intended New England setting to that of Georgia, the narrative underscores conflicts between rural and urban communities as its key thematic consideration. Here, the outbreak of the earthworms killing spree coincides with the arrival of an urban outsider, keen to exploit antiquities contained within the rural locale. These actions, as well as his participation in a romance that further disrupts the social fabric of the community, establishing a set of city/country conflicts that Lieberman would later explore in Just Before Dawn. Often deemed as Lieberman’s lost release due its conflicted production and release history, Just Before Dawn eschews the dominant characteristics of the slasher trend to focus more on the stark inequalities between urban and rural communities that the film depicts. While the film’s dispossessed rural killers remain “stereotypically portrayed as impoverished, primitive, inbred and morally degenerate”, they are very much matched by an unappealing group of urban dwellers defined by their obsessions with consumption and materiality, thus reinforcing a set of moral ambiguities that can be seen to pervade the film and Lieberman’s wider output.
To compliment Jon Towlson’s submission, we are also delighted to publish an interview with Jeff Lieberman that was especially prepared for the current edition of the Cine-Excess journal. In the article ‘Out of the Blue (Sunshine): An Interview with Director Jeff Lieberman’, the filmmaker responds to the interpretations outlined in Towson’s article, alongside wider critical accounts of his work. Lieberman begins by discussing how his creative talents were influenced by his formative training at film school in New York, as well as considering on how this early work fits with wider trends in 1970s exploitation cinema production. As well as responding to the continued fascination with the rural images that dominate many of his most iconic narratives, Lieberman also considers how these white trash interpretations can actually obscure the gendered focus that he feels underpins films such as Just Before Dawn. Alongside a forthright dialogue surrounding political interpretations of his films, Lieberman concludes the interview by contextualising his first feature film Squirm in light of the current vogue for seventies horror remakes.
In our second submission dedicated to representations of the Australian outback, Renee Middlemost considers two 1980s cult releases that reconstitute the landscape from a symbol of national security to a site of terror. Writing in the article ‘A Monster of our Very Own: Razorback, The Marsupials and the Australian Outback’, Middlemost notes that despite their central focus on rural space Razorback (Russell Mulcahy, 1984) and Howling III: The Marsupials (Philippe Mora, 1987) represent two prominent examples that have largely been excluded from critical debates around national cinema. The author links the marginality of these releases to their reliance on the controversial 10BA system of tax subsidies offered to film investors during the 1980s. Although this government fund facilitated a rapid increase in productions throughout the decade, the generic nature of the films it created, as well as their reliance on international casting led to them frequently being dismissed as inauthentic constructions of Australian culture and identity. Despite such critical reservations, Middlemost goes on to provide a convincing analysis of how both films utilize this marginal status to demonstrate a “double transgression” which employs imagery of monstrous untamed animals and the figure of the disruptive outsider to comment upon the settlers’ inability to contain and master the Australian lands they colonised. In Razorback this double transgression motif fuses the story of a grieving grandfather seeking vengeance against the wild boar that killed a young relative with an American activist seeking to document the inhumane treatment of the nation’s animals. Although this disruptive outsider also falls victim to the untamed outback creature, her demise is as a direct result of the persecution and molestation endured at the hands of plant workers responsible for the mistreatment of animals she is seeking to expose. Thus, the double transgression device functions in the narrative to undercut constructions of civility and savagery within an Australian context. This feature is further explored through Middlemost’s analysis of Howling III: The Marsupials, which even more explicitly links the untamed rural space and the disruptive outsider to longstanding tensions within the Australian condition. Here, white anthropological investigations into lycanthropy coalesce with the plight of a young heroine who seeks refuse from an abusive set of rural bonds through a relationship with an American filmmaker. Events that subsequently unfold not only reveal the true nature of the heroine’s untamed powers, but also foreground the power of ritualistic belief structures often ignored by the film’s empowered white protagonists. If these themes confirm how Australian cult film releases utilise the imagery of the untamed outback to provide unsettling commentaries on the nation’s past, then these strategies remain central to Middlemost’s revaluation of such film titles, which concludes by evaluating the role of contemporary festivals and exhibition platforms as additional circuits through which to review these texts.
While Middlemost concludes her analysis by considering how festivals enhance the cult status of outback horror films, is the rural exhibition practices and viewing patterns that occupy Ekky Imanjaya’s submission. Writing in the article ‘Entertaining the Villagers: Rural Audiences, Travelling Cinema, and Exploitation Movies in Indonesia’, Imanjaya provides a case-study of the travelling cinema (or layar tancap) circuit that became popular in Indonesia during the authoritarian ‘New Order’ era. Here, mobile film screenings for rural based audiences functioned as a direct challenge to the military and political orthodoxy that dominated between 1966 and 1998. The types of production that circulated in these rural contexts alternated between what Imanjaya terms as the “Legend genre” (which recycled popular myths into spectacular action/supernatural narratives) and the Kumpeni genre (that offered more historically specific renditions of the colonial conflicts suffered under Dutch rule). The adaptation of real life trauma for populist entertainment is further confirmed by the additional “Japanese Period Genre” that the author identifies as reflecting Indonesia’s period of wartime occupation, with more internationally oriented productions (combining horror and sexploitation traits) also being marketed to rural audiences through the layar tancap platform. Imanjaya does concede that wider classifications of these Indonesian pulp cinema texts as ‘cult’ did not begin to circulate until the early 2000s, when a range of film titles were marketed to international audiences on the basis of their ‘exotic’ mysticism, generic hybridity and balletic scenes of violence. However, despite differences in content and classification, the author offers a convincing consideration of layar tancap as an Indonesian rendition of midnight movie phenomenon that helped popularise cult material in other global regions. Indeed, the grindhouse exhibition comparison appears confirmed by official Indonesian definitions of layar tancap as a “second class” product that was consumed outside standard cinema venues: “usually the location was an outdoor arena such as a football field.” Although there is evidence of layar tancap screening sessions being exploited by the military regime for propagandist purposes, Imanjaya concludes that these ideological processes remained negotiated and resisted by rural audiences, who favoured the subversive mixture of uncensored film titles that were consumed in a subcultural viewing environment that this form of mobile cinema afforded. As a result, layar tancap and their rural audiences reveal such Indonesian film viewing patterns as a site of cultural conflict between authoritarian state bodies and Indonesia’s resistant regional cinemagoers.
Completing this edition of the journal are reviews of the Tim Burton conference held at the University of Wolverhampton, alongside a dialogue surrounding around the recent Cultographies volume on I Spit on Your Grave, conducted between its author David Maguire and Professor Martin Barker. Accompanying the review of Maguire’s volume we are delighted to host additional interviews with Jamie Bernadette and Maria Olsen, two lead performers from the 2019 release I Spit on Your Grave Déjà Vu. Here, Bernadette and Olsen further reflect on some of the issues raised in David Maguire’s book, while both also discuss the continued fascination of the white trash monster to the I Spit on Your Grave franchise.
Beyond America’s fixation with its rural own, Europe has also used cult film imagery to acknowledge regional splits and social divisions. These tensions have fed into a range of representations, myths and stereotypes that extended from eugenic case-study to exploitation cinema. In addition to these territories, other global cultures also frequently construct the rural space as a site of either erotic fulfilment or foreboding in a range of unsettling and iconic genres that warrant further investigation. In order to explore cult cinema’s continued fascination with the rural, this edition of the Cine-Excess journal is devoted to global case-studies that explore classic and contemporary representations of the countryside, outback and its inhabitants, whilst also providing direct commentaries from some of the cult filmmakers responsible for these creations.
Our examination begins with an analysis of the unsettling natural elements implicit within the Australian outback, as discussed in the article ‘Horror Rises Up: Nature’s Revenge in Ozsploitation Cinema’. Here, author Lindsay Hallam considers a range of films released between 1971 and 2008 that all depict the Australian landscape as seeking to overthrow and punish those settlers deemed as colonial and exploitative. Although these productions figure this revenge of nature through a variety of differing animal species, they all retain an incisive commentary on the historical and abusive treatment of Australian landscape by its white settlers. As a result, Hallam employs the term of Ozploitation as ‘eco-horror’ to describe a cycle of cult films that focus on the threatening potential of the Australian outback, and can also be distinguished from more dominant American ‘revenge of nature’ traditions. The nationally specific nature of these outback dramas is then detailed by the author through an analysis of Colin Eggleston’s 1978 film Long Weekend. Here, nature and the outback enact a slow and systematic campaign of revolt against a bickering couple, whose marital malaise is figured through their wanted destruction of the rural space. Although the film configures its eco-horror revenge through a variety of insects, birds and mammals, it is manmade weaponry and modern machinery that finally lead to the couple’s demise. This further underlines Hallam’s view that the Ozploitation eco-cycle offers a cutting critique of the white settler’s attempts to master and dominate the Australian landscape, which ultimately signals that a “history of colonisation is actually one of invasion and exploitation”.
Although Hallam’s article seeks to disentangle the Australian ‘revenge of nature’ narrative from its American counterpart, Sarah Pogoda’s submission actually considers the close connections between Tobe Hooper’s American release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and more recent European renditions of regional debasement that followed. Writing in the article ‘Germany is not Texas. Finding Reunified Germany in the Rural: Christoph Schlingensief’s The German Chain Saw Massacre’, Paogoda considers Schlingensief’s film in light of wider tensions surrounding region and nationhood, whilst also offering a comparative analysis of the visual elements across both texts. The author begins by considering the production, marketing and academic reception of the The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, noting how the film’s release saw it became indelibly linked with both national tensions occurring in the 1970s, as well as regional aberrations relating to its Texan locality. It is a similar national/regional focus that the author finds as underpinning Christoph Schlingensief’s release, which can be viewed as a direct response to the country’s national reunification in 1990. Indeed, The German Chain Saw Massacre even focuses on an ill-fated East German group who are waylaid and killed by a cannibalistic family from the Western region whist they journey across the newly reintegrated nation. By dwelling on a recently aligned culture that exposes the horrors previously concealed within its isolated territories, Schlingensief reveals his cynicism towards the ideological structures beliefs that underlie such processes of German nationalism. This leads Pogoda to a concluding analysis of the ways in Schlingensief’s film distinguishes its spaces of regional depravity from Tobe Hooper’s American template. Specifically, by relocating its horrors from the countryside to Germany’s industrial zones, the film implies that the nation’s centres of socio-economic productivity are actually sites of oppression, exploitation and insatiable consumption.
While Pagoda’s analysis draws attention to the ways in which the white trash monster comes to symbolise wider issues of national unification, it is the pseudo-scientific principles underpinning the construction of this feared figure that concerns Shellie McMurdo’s contribution. Writing in the article ‘We Are Never Going in the Woods Again: The Horror of the Underclass White Monster in American and British Horror’, McMurdo examines cross-cultural constructions of rural aberration against the pervasive influence of the eugenics movement that flourished in both Britain and America. In an incisive opening section, McMurdo outlines how 19th century fears around the unabated growth of the poor and dispossessed fed the development of the movement, whose reach extended into the 20th century to encompass ‘progressive’ educational and social reform measures around birth control and parenting techniques alongside more direct state interventions that included UK legislation aimed at segmenting the intellectually inferior from its social elite. While these statutory acts aided the development of a white trash typology (defined by distinct physiological traits, kinship values, genetic patterns and moral codes), it also enforced the myth that these marginal groups could be easily segmented from the more mainstream and intellectually developed urban dweller. While these marked socio-economic distinctions remain central to conflicts frequently played out in backwoods American horror titles, McMurdo applies them to a British cult film: Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008). The author contextualises the film’s representation of a violent white trash subculture terrorising a middle class couple against wider media panics surrounding feral gangs circulating in the UK at the time of its release. Such press reporting (which traded on the non-human, animalistic tendencies of these wayward youth groups, as well as their defective family/parenting structures) confirms the continuation of eugenics frames of interpretation across more contemporary cultural phenomena. For McMurdo, Eden Lake provides “a visual checklist, a pedigree chart similar to those used by the eugenicists.” The film not only functions to separate its feral white trash aggressors from their potential middle class victims but also reveals eugenics belief structures as evident across British cult film imagery.
Whereas McMurdo provides new insight in to British variants of the white trash myth, Jon Towlson profiles an American director whose films offer significant representations of this feared figure. Writing in the article ‘Bad S**t, Killer Worms and Deadly Dawns: The Cult Cinema and Rural Excess of Jeff Lieberman’, the author argues that while Lieberman’s output is often dwarfed by horror auteurs such as George A. Romero and Wes Craven, his work retains the subversive use of genre imagery and cutting social commentary often attributed to those other filmmakers. To substantiate this interpretation, Towlson provides a consideration of three of Lieberman’s most iconic titles: Squirm (1976), Blue Sunshine (1978) and Just Before Dawn (1981), arguing that these titles advance genre constructions of rural communities and seventies subcultures alike. As Lieberman’s first feature film, Squirm provided a reboot to the revenge of nature horror cycle popular during the decade, through its focus on earthworms made monstrous by a felled electricity pylon. Despite the film’s visceral reputation, for Towlson it is the aspects of place and location that reveal a more nuanced understanding of its core concerns. By shifting Squirm from its original intended New England setting to that of Georgia, the narrative underscores conflicts between rural and urban communities as its key thematic consideration. Here, the outbreak of the earthworms killing spree coincides with the arrival of an urban outsider, keen to exploit antiquities contained within the rural locale. These actions, as well as his participation in a romance that further disrupts the social fabric of the community, establishing a set of city/country conflicts that Lieberman would later explore in Just Before Dawn. Often deemed as Lieberman’s lost release due its conflicted production and release history, Just Before Dawn eschews the dominant characteristics of the slasher trend to focus more on the stark inequalities between urban and rural communities that the film depicts. While the film’s dispossessed rural killers remain “stereotypically portrayed as impoverished, primitive, inbred and morally degenerate”, they are very much matched by an unappealing group of urban dwellers defined by their obsessions with consumption and materiality, thus reinforcing a set of moral ambiguities that can be seen to pervade the film and Lieberman’s wider output.
To compliment Jon Towlson’s submission, we are also delighted to publish an interview with Jeff Lieberman that was especially prepared for the current edition of the Cine-Excess journal. In the article ‘Out of the Blue (Sunshine): An Interview with Director Jeff Lieberman’, the filmmaker responds to the interpretations outlined in Towson’s article, alongside wider critical accounts of his work. Lieberman begins by discussing how his creative talents were influenced by his formative training at film school in New York, as well as considering on how this early work fits with wider trends in 1970s exploitation cinema production. As well as responding to the continued fascination with the rural images that dominate many of his most iconic narratives, Lieberman also considers how these white trash interpretations can actually obscure the gendered focus that he feels underpins films such as Just Before Dawn. Alongside a forthright dialogue surrounding political interpretations of his films, Lieberman concludes the interview by contextualising his first feature film Squirm in light of the current vogue for seventies horror remakes.
In our second submission dedicated to representations of the Australian outback, Renee Middlemost considers two 1980s cult releases that reconstitute the landscape from a symbol of national security to a site of terror. Writing in the article ‘A Monster of our Very Own: Razorback, The Marsupials and the Australian Outback’, Middlemost notes that despite their central focus on rural space Razorback (Russell Mulcahy, 1984) and Howling III: The Marsupials (Philippe Mora, 1987) represent two prominent examples that have largely been excluded from critical debates around national cinema. The author links the marginality of these releases to their reliance on the controversial 10BA system of tax subsidies offered to film investors during the 1980s. Although this government fund facilitated a rapid increase in productions throughout the decade, the generic nature of the films it created, as well as their reliance on international casting led to them frequently being dismissed as inauthentic constructions of Australian culture and identity. Despite such critical reservations, Middlemost goes on to provide a convincing analysis of how both films utilize this marginal status to demonstrate a “double transgression” which employs imagery of monstrous untamed animals and the figure of the disruptive outsider to comment upon the settlers’ inability to contain and master the Australian lands they colonised. In Razorback this double transgression motif fuses the story of a grieving grandfather seeking vengeance against the wild boar that killed a young relative with an American activist seeking to document the inhumane treatment of the nation’s animals. Although this disruptive outsider also falls victim to the untamed outback creature, her demise is as a direct result of the persecution and molestation endured at the hands of plant workers responsible for the mistreatment of animals she is seeking to expose. Thus, the double transgression device functions in the narrative to undercut constructions of civility and savagery within an Australian context. This feature is further explored through Middlemost’s analysis of Howling III: The Marsupials, which even more explicitly links the untamed rural space and the disruptive outsider to longstanding tensions within the Australian condition. Here, white anthropological investigations into lycanthropy coalesce with the plight of a young heroine who seeks refuse from an abusive set of rural bonds through a relationship with an American filmmaker. Events that subsequently unfold not only reveal the true nature of the heroine’s untamed powers, but also foreground the power of ritualistic belief structures often ignored by the film’s empowered white protagonists. If these themes confirm how Australian cult film releases utilise the imagery of the untamed outback to provide unsettling commentaries on the nation’s past, then these strategies remain central to Middlemost’s revaluation of such film titles, which concludes by evaluating the role of contemporary festivals and exhibition platforms as additional circuits through which to review these texts.
While Middlemost concludes her analysis by considering how festivals enhance the cult status of outback horror films, is the rural exhibition practices and viewing patterns that occupy Ekky Imanjaya’s submission. Writing in the article ‘Entertaining the Villagers: Rural Audiences, Travelling Cinema, and Exploitation Movies in Indonesia’, Imanjaya provides a case-study of the travelling cinema (or layar tancap) circuit that became popular in Indonesia during the authoritarian ‘New Order’ era. Here, mobile film screenings for rural based audiences functioned as a direct challenge to the military and political orthodoxy that dominated between 1966 and 1998. The types of production that circulated in these rural contexts alternated between what Imanjaya terms as the “Legend genre” (which recycled popular myths into spectacular action/supernatural narratives) and the Kumpeni genre (that offered more historically specific renditions of the colonial conflicts suffered under Dutch rule). The adaptation of real life trauma for populist entertainment is further confirmed by the additional “Japanese Period Genre” that the author identifies as reflecting Indonesia’s period of wartime occupation, with more internationally oriented productions (combining horror and sexploitation traits) also being marketed to rural audiences through the layar tancap platform. Imanjaya does concede that wider classifications of these Indonesian pulp cinema texts as ‘cult’ did not begin to circulate until the early 2000s, when a range of film titles were marketed to international audiences on the basis of their ‘exotic’ mysticism, generic hybridity and balletic scenes of violence. However, despite differences in content and classification, the author offers a convincing consideration of layar tancap as an Indonesian rendition of midnight movie phenomenon that helped popularise cult material in other global regions. Indeed, the grindhouse exhibition comparison appears confirmed by official Indonesian definitions of layar tancap as a “second class” product that was consumed outside standard cinema venues: “usually the location was an outdoor arena such as a football field.” Although there is evidence of layar tancap screening sessions being exploited by the military regime for propagandist purposes, Imanjaya concludes that these ideological processes remained negotiated and resisted by rural audiences, who favoured the subversive mixture of uncensored film titles that were consumed in a subcultural viewing environment that this form of mobile cinema afforded. As a result, layar tancap and their rural audiences reveal such Indonesian film viewing patterns as a site of cultural conflict between authoritarian state bodies and Indonesia’s resistant regional cinemagoers.
Completing this edition of the journal are reviews of the Tim Burton conference held at the University of Wolverhampton, alongside a dialogue surrounding around the recent Cultographies volume on I Spit on Your Grave, conducted between its author David Maguire and Professor Martin Barker. Accompanying the review of Maguire’s volume we are delighted to host additional interviews with Jamie Bernadette and Maria Olsen, two lead performers from the 2019 release I Spit on Your Grave Déjà Vu. Here, Bernadette and Olsen further reflect on some of the issues raised in David Maguire’s book, while both also discuss the continued fascination of the white trash monster to the I Spit on Your Grave franchise.