Exploitation films

An exploitation film is a film that attempts to succeed financially by exploiting current trends, niche genres, or lurid content.

Exploitation films are generally low-quality "B movies". Even so, they sometimes attract critical attention and cult followings. Some of these films, such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), set trends and become historically important.

Exploitation films may feature suggestive or explicit sex, sensational violence, drug use, nudity, freaks, gore, the bizarre, destruction, rebellion, and mayhem. Such films were first seen in their modern form in the early 1920s, but they were popularized in the 60s and 70s with the general relaxing of censorship and cinematic taboos in the U.S. and Europe. The Motion Picture Association of America (and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America before it) cooperated with censorship boards and grassroots organizations in the hope of preserving the image of a "clean" Hollywood, but the distributors of exploitation film operated outside of this circuit and often welcomed controversy as a form of free promotion. Their producers used sensational elements to attract audiences lost to television. Since the 1990s, this genre has also received attention in academic circles, where it is sometimes called paracinema.

"Exploitation" is very loosely defined, and has more to do with the viewer's perception of the film than with the film's actual content. Titillating material and artistic content often coexist, as demonstrated by the fact that art films that failed to pass the Hays Code were often shown in the same grindhouses as exploitation films. Exploitation films share the fearlessness of acclaimed transgressive European directors such as Derek Jarman, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard in handling "disreputable" content. Many films recognized as classics contain levels of sex, violence, and shock typically associated with exploitation films; examples are Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Tod Browning's Freaks, and Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou contains elements of the modern splatter film. It has been suggested that if Carnival of Souls had been made in Europe, it would be considered an art film, while if Eyes Without a Face had been made in the U.S., it would have been categorized as a low-budget horror film. The audiences of art and exploitation film are both considered to have tastes that reject the mainstream Hollywood offerings.

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