The Big Picture · Review · Discussion · Top Five · Interview
April 9, 2021/ 100 min/ Sean Fennessey · Adam Nayman
Adam Nayman joins to work out what actually makes a movie cult, using Bad Trip and The Empty Man as test cases, before both make their case with five picks apiece. Then Emma Seligman talks about directing Shiva Baby.
23 films across 6 segments.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
‘Bad Trip’with Adam Nayman
Eric Andre's prank comedy with Lil Rel Howery and Tiffany Haddish, shot with hidden cameras and real bystanders. Nayman calls it closer to Jackass than Borat, since the pranks land on the cast and not on strangers, and praises the credit-stinger reveals that let the marks in on the joke.
‘The Empty Man’with Adam Nayman
David Prior's horror film, shot in 2017-18, shelved by the Fox-Disney merger, then dumped into theaters in October 2020. Adapted from a BOOM! graphic novel Prior largely discarded. Nayman, who interviewed Prior, traces the Fincher DNA (Prior cut Fincher's DVD supplements) and singles out the 20-minute Bhutan prologue and a Wikipedia-clicking sequence as evidence of a smarter movie than its reviews suggested.
What Makes a Movie a Cult Movie?with Adam Nayman
Nayman's example of cult made to order, already nostalgic for 'true' cult back in 1975 and, fifty years later, closer to a classic than an underground object.
The one Nayman wrote a book about: hated in real time with nobody willing to defend it, then reclaimed piece by piece.
Tim Burton's version sands Ed Wood down; Nayman argues the real gateway is watching Wood's own films, not the two-minute Plan 9 clip reel.
Nayman's case study for cult that curdles into 'cult canon': the contradiction of a genre built on being uncanonizable.
Contrasted with Rocky Horror: Rocky Horror's audience participation is with the movie, The Room's is at its expense.
Nayman's example of cult assembled for Twitter screenshots, built deliberately from six movies out of the Danny Peary book.
David Lynch's version. Nayman's line: when Lynch tried to make a Star Wars movie and failed, that's what makes it cult.
Fennessey and Nayman debate whether Tarantino recycling Drunken Master and City on Fire at a $100 million budget is the best or worst case for cult's mainstreaming.
Peter Jackson's homemade debut, which Nayman still shows his students. The same guy later got $190 million to make The Lord of the Rings.
Adam's Five Cult Movies
No. 1: Tod Browning's film, cast with real circus performers. Nayman's pick for 'the great cult movie of them all' because it pulls the audience out of its comfort zone and asks where its sympathies actually lie.
Character actor Timothy Carey wrote, directed, produced, and starred in this one-man cult-leader parable. Carey also turns up unnervingly in Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory.
Maria Montez's island-snake-cult melodrama, a performance Nayman calls great precisely because it would never get an Oscar nomination.
David Robert Mitchell's stoner noir, a pastiche of The Big Lebowski (itself already a pastiche). Nayman calls it, without meaning to, the best Epstein movie.
Ben Wheatley's second feature. Starts as a hitman movie and doesn't end like one. Also the film Nayman thinks The Empty Man most resembles.
Sean's Five Cult Movies
Dario Argento's giallo, which Fennessey first saw at 14 or 15 and says reordered his brain the way Jaws and Star Wars did. He compares the feeling to hearing Nirvana's Bleach for the first time.
Fennessey's nod to the idea that cult can also be mainstream, and a gateway to the rest of Mike Judge's work.
John Carpenter's kung fu riff, which Fennessey says sent him down a rabbit hole of Billy Jack movies and old martial-arts mysticism.
Ken Russell's adaptation of a Paddy Chayefsky script, with a William Hurt performance Fennessey loves. 'Doesn't totally work but also works in my heart.'
Sam Raimi's follow-up. Fennessey invokes Godard's line that it's not blood, it's the color red: gore pitched so far past disgusting it becomes Looney Tunes.
In conversation
Seligman's first feature, expanded from her NYU thesis short, shot for under $250,000 and set almost entirely inside one shiva. She went in aiming for slapstick, then found the anxious, claustrophobic register by watching A Woman Under the Influence, Black Swan, and Uncut Gems. Her composer was the one who told her it was, structurally, a horror score.
Still in development at the time of this interview. Seligman describes it as a teen comedy in the vein of Wet Hot American Summer, about two queer girls who start a fight club to win over the cheerleaders, co-written with Shiva Baby star Rachel Sennett.
Also mentioned raised along the way
Genre precedents for Bad Trip BoratParanormal Activity
The Empty Man's touchstones The ExorcistSorcererThere Will Be BloodSe7enFight ClubThe Social NetworkThe Curious Case of Benjamin ButtonRavenousPulseFeardotCom
Movies that outgrew ‘cult’ The Big LebowskiFerris Bueller's Day OffWet Hot American SummerDeep ImpactStar Wars
The old cult canon EraserheadThis Is Spinal TapHeathersReservoir DogsBlue VelvetThe Wizard of OzCasablancaSuspiriaPlan 9 from Outer SpaceA Field in England
Tarantino's borrowed cult DNA City on FireThe KillingDrunken Master
TIFF screenings that shaped Emma Seligman 127 HoursSpring Breakers
Rom-coms Shiva Baby set out to not resemble Obvious ChildKissing Jessica Stein
Other tonal influences on Shiva Baby The GraduateRachel Getting MarriedAugust: Osage CountyDeath at a Funeral
Her generational cohort Shithouse
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV The Eric Andre ShowWandaVisionThe SopranosBreaking BadThe Wire
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