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Originally Posted by atari 2600
Before Rocky Horror, 2001 and The Harder They Come provided the basis of The Midnight Cult Movie...but yehr, RH Picture Show was the first to elicit audience participation to the degee it did. Next will come the posts about shit John Waters dabbling in pressing people's buttons, I know.
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Yeah, but 2001 and (especially) The Harder They Come were picked up and sold as cults by distributors. I can't think of an example of any film prior to RHPS that was made with the sole intention of having a cult audience. Maybe John Carpenter's
Dark Star (1974), maybe.
I think it's fair to say that a film like John Water's Pink Flamingos probably did bring
something to the table, but its hard to really determine what. Certainly his 'shock value' aesthetic borrowed heavily from the American Underground film of the 1960s and the exploitation cinema of the time. Thinking about it, it's hard to think of John Waters as any more than some kind of synthesis of Warhol, Jack Smith and H. G. Lewis. I do like John Waters, but its hard for me to think of him as really revolutionising anything, or being ahead of his time. The only thing I might say is that he made producing films like Couch, Flaming Creatures and Blood Feast economically viable in a way that they'd never really been before.
One that I would add though is
Deep Throat (1972), which managed (albeit briefly) to make hardcore pornography acceptable to a wider 'respectable' audience than had ever been the case before.