If the blockbuster movie was born in the 1970s, then the 90s was the decade it became fully realised, with the advent of CGI powering a string of glossy disaster movies and action flicks. Dinosaurs, aliens, asteroids, Titanic and Will Smith changed the medium for good. With an increasingly expensive mainstream – bigger hits, needing bigger budgets – the lower budget cult movie was allowed to flourish outside it.
But, what defines a 90s cult movie? It’s a broad church, and there are huge smashes of previous decades that would probably have felt like cult movies if they’d come out in the 90s. “Cult” doesn’t mean wilfully obscure or impenetrably arthouse. But they were, at the least, films that swam outside the blockbuster world; films happy to find their own audience rather than tap into the general blob of ever more amusement-park-ride-like commercial cinema.
