Joan Hawkins, Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High art
The sacralization of culture was an invented phenomenon. There was a time when opera could exist simultaneously as a popular and an elite art form, a time when American audiences might hear a soliloquy from Hamlet and a popular song in the course of one evening’s entertainment at a local venue.
As certain cultural products picked up elite status, they also acquired a certain restrictive class inflection.
cataloguing lists two versions of the film, inadvertently gives the catalogue a curiously academic or scholarly air, which links Sinister Cinema to more upscale serious video companies.
Tag art films as films which require a different reading strategy, also tag certain B movies as films which can be openly appreciated on pure aesthetic grounds.
In addition to these, there is an interesting array of films which, put quite simply, are difficult to categorize. Films with high production values, European art-film cachet, and enough sex and violence to thrill all but the most jaded horror fan
Freaks nearly caused a riot when Dwain Esper showed it to a North Carolina drive-in audience under the sensational title Forbidden Love. Led by the title and advertising to expect a softcore treatment of “love” between “a beautiful woman and a midget,” the crowd had no patience with a movie which Raymond Durgnat later compared to the European art films of Buñuel.” Esper managed to pacify the drive-in patrons by showing them a black-and-white nudist colony one-reeler that he had tucked in the trunk of his car, a film that ap- parently came much closer to satisfying their expectations than did Browning’s creepy classic.* Interestingly enough, Freaks was revived 30 years later as an “art film” and did very well, attracting favorable reviews by Raymond Durgnat and John Thomas, and captivat- ing such notable patrons as Emile de Antonio and Diane Arbus.” By 1967, David J. Skal notes, the film “had made it to the Museum of Modern Art” (21).
Avant-garde cinema is just as divergent in scope and quality as horror cinema. The European art film is so diverse that it is generally not represented as a genre at all.