Cult Film Atmospheres : Audiences, exhibitors, and live cinema spaces

Cult film events like The Bad Film Festival (Gothenburg, 2019 and 2023-2025) and The B-Film Club (Malmö) offer unique atmospheres to audiences. In the two Swedish cities of Malmö and Gothenburg, exhibitors run regular festivals and standalone screenings of cult films such as The Room, Birdemic, Miami Connection, and others where an effervescent atmosphere is generated, often featuring audience participatory actions such as talkbacks, shouting out jokes, or dancing as part of the live screening events. This contravenes the commonplace norm of watching movies in the cinema where a degree of decorum and propriety are typically emphasized. With this as a backdrop, this thesis highlights the intertwining roles of cult film audiences, exhibitors, and the material cinema space as generative factors of the cult film atmosphere. By utilizing the overarching concepts of media engagement (Dahlgren and Hill, 2023), collective effervescence (Tutenges, 2023), and atmosphere (Böhme, 2017; Tawa, 2022), it strives to argue for why and how media atmospheres matter especially in relation to audience engagement. It acknowledges that there is an element of liveness through an intense form of engagement as constituted by ambiance, mood, and ultimately atmosphere. The thesis accomplishes this through an empirical qualitative multimethod approach where audiences and cinema figureheads are interviewed, and coupled with in-person observations at specific cult film screenings, in addition to a complementary aesthetic analysis of certain films and examination of cinema website blurbs. As such, this thesis contribute insights into how audiences and exhibitors are perceiving cult films, namely how they are defining them based on individuals’ aesthetic appraisal, the perceived failures, and the replayability aspect of the films. It enriches the understanding on how identities from both audiences and exhibitors play a crucial role in the eventual generation of the atmosphere. The thesis then emphasizes the importance of examining the co-existence of ambiance and mood as integral constitutive elements, in which both are required to be present if an atmosphere is to be felt. Finally, the idea of the cult film effervescence is elucidated as a key contribution of the thesis, which is argued to be the primary characteristic of the cult film atmosphere and has the potential to facilitate audiences in forging uncanny bonds and a sense of community with others in the theatre. At its crux, the thesis advances academic research on how we can examine media as atmospheres as experienced by those who are bodily present within a specific space.