Exploitation Films - Film Genres

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1. Dartmouth Libraries
2. Research Guides
3. Dartmouth Libraries Guides
4. Film Genres
5. Exploitation films

Search this Guide Search Film Genres This guide highlights library resources for some of the more popular film genres.

• Introduction
• Streaming services
• Action films
• Amateur films
• Animation
  • Stop-motion animation
• Animé
• B movies
• Biographical films
• Blaxploitation films
• Children's films
• Comedies
• Cult films
• Crime films
  • Gangster films
• Detective & mystery films
• Documentary films
• Ethnographic films
• Experimental films
• Exploitation films
• Film noir
• Historical films
• Horror films
  • Slasher films
  • Monsters in motion pictures
  • Body horror
• Independent films
• Indigenous films
• James Bond films
• LGBTQIA+
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• Police films
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• Science fiction
  • Star Trek films
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• Shakespeare on film
• Short films
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• War films
  • Anti-war films
• Vampire films
• Westerns
• Zombie films

Subject Librarian

Lucinda M. Hall Email Me Schedule Appointment Contact: Evans Map Room, Baker-Berry Library Dartmouth College 25 N Main ST Hanover, NH 03755(603) 646-0962 Website Social: LinkedIn Page LibraryThing Page Subjects: Film and Media Studies, Geography, Polar Studies

Finding journal titles and articles

Articles and other writings about experimental films can be found in many publications. Our collection does not include titles which look exclusively at Exploitation films. You can use Film & Television Literature Index,or Academic Search Complete to find articles or use the search box at the top of the page.

• Film & television literature index
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  Call Number: Electronic resource This index covers over 300 journal and magazine titles for film and television reviews, scholarly and critical analysis of cinema and television, and articles of popular interest about film and television. About half the journals and magazines are film periodicals and the other half cover film and television with some regularity. Subject coverage includes film & television theory, preservation & restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews.
• Web of science citation databases by Clarivate
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  • 
  Call Number: Electronic resource The online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.

Keeping up with Film Studies journal literature

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A short definition

A film designed by its producers to ‘exploit’, via clever marketing and promotion, the notoriety of certain sensational current events and trends and/or taboo subjects. The term was coined by Variety in 1946 and originally applied to US cinema. Exploitation films are usually low-budget and calculatedly commercial, venturing into parts of the market neglected by mainstream filmmaking. The term also implies an objective on the part of the producer to ‘exploit’ base audience desires to see more explicit descriptions of sex, violence, or drug abuse than are available in other films and media. ...

[Source: Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). Exploitation film. In A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 2 Mar. 2021

Finding library resources for exploitation films

You can use the subject headings below to start your research.

• exploitation films
• sensationalism in motion pictures
• low budget films
• erotic films
• pornographic films

Introductory reading(s)

• "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": a history of exploitation films, 1919-1959 by Eric Schaefer
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  Call Number: eBook ISBN: 9780822323747 Unashamed nudists, high-flying hopheads, brazen strippers, vicious vice lords, and high school girls who find themselves "in trouble" comprise the population of exploitation films. In the first full-scale history of these low-budget movies of decades past, Eric Schaefer reveals how this pioneering form of "trash film" purveyed the forbidden thrills of explicit sexual behavior, drug use, and vice that the mainstream movie industry could not show. "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!" is a meticulously researched, interdisciplinary study that is informed by a wide range of sources--including both mainstream and industry newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts, personal interviews, and the films themselves. ...
• Forbidden fruit: the golden age of the exploitation film by Felicia Feaster; Bret Wood
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  Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .S284 F43 1999 ISBN: 9781887664240 Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film offers the first thorough examination of the exploitation cinema while capturing the devious spirit of this renegade film movement. Abounding with anecdotes, character sketches and insights, Forbidden Fruit offers vivid depictions of exploitation kings and con-men, detailed readings of the films themselves and the unique stretch of American history that inspired them.
• The midnight grind: a tribute to "exploitation" films of the 70s, 80s, and beyond by Ken Knight
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  Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .S284 K58 2012 ISBN: 9781468547894 The Midnight Grind is a grinding trip back to the nights of yesteryear where "Exploitation" films both shocked and entertained as Hollywood and filmmakers in general loosened censorship with uncut reviews of some of the greatest of these plus decade-themed short stories at the end of each decade's chapter that will keep readers in the proper time-period mind set!
• The Routledge companion to cult cinema by Jamie Sexton; Ernest Mathijs, eds.
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  Call Number: eBook ISBN: 9781138950276 The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema offers an overview of the field of cult cinema - films at the margin of popular culture and art that have received exceptional cultural visibility and status mostly because they break rules, offend, and challenge understandings of achievement (some are so bad they're good, others so good they remain inaccessible). Cult cinema is no longer only comprised of the midnight movie or the extreme genre film. Its range has widened and the issues it broaches have become battlegrounds in cultural debates that typify the first quarter of the twenty-first century. ...
• Scum cinema: America through the eyes of the exploitation film by W. Richard Benash
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  Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .S284 B46 2019 ISBN: 9798639784354 Scum Cinema is a social and cultural journey through the 100-year history of America's most critically derided, culturally reviled, and often misunderstood style of filmmaking - exploitation. From the very first feature-length exploitation film, 1913's Traffic in Souls, to Reefer Madness, Mom and Dad, The Immoral Mr. Teas, Blood Feast, It's Alive, Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, The Toxic Avenger, The Human Centipede, and many other films in between, exploitation films have been alternately called crude, disgusting, trashy, and occasionally brilliant. ...
• The style of sleaze: the American exploitation film, 1959-1977 by Calum Waddell
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  Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .S284 W33 2018 ISBN: 9781474409254 What is an exploitation film? The Style of Sleaze reasons that the aesthetic and thematic approach of the key texts within three distinct exploitation demarcations - blaxploitation, horror and sexploitation - indicate a concurrent evolution of film-making that could be seen as an identifiable cinematic movement. Offering a fresh perspective on studies of marginal cinema, The Style of Sleaze maintains that defining exploitation cinema as a vaguely attributed 'excess' is unhelpful, and instead concludes that this period in American film history produced a number of the most transgressive, and yet morally complex, motion pictures ever made.

Selected book title(s)

• Alternative Europe: eurotrash and exploitation cinema since 1945 by Ernest Mathijs; Xavier Mendik
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  Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .S284 A46 2004 ISBN: 9781903364932 Whether defined by comic excesses, cult horrors, or surreal vampire experimentations, trash and exploitation cinema represents the alternative face of European film. Although extremely popular with post-war audiences, these historically significant traditions of 'Eurotrash' have often been ridiculed or ignored by an established film criticism eager to define 'legitimate' European cinema as either avant-garde or socially realist. Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 investigates these previously under-explored national traditions of film culture, with essays and festival reports uncovering the social and cultural trends and tensions within a wide range of European exploitation movies. ...
• Exploiting East Asian cinemas: genre, circulation, reception by Ken Provencher; Mike Dillon, eds
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  Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .E18 E97 2018 ISBN: 9781501319655 From the 1970s onward, exploitation cinema as a concept has circulated inside and outside of East Asian nations and cultures in terms of aesthetics and marketing. However, crucial questions about how global networks of production and circulation alter the identity of an East Asian film as mainstream or as exploitation have yet to be addressed in a comprehensive way. Exploiting East Asian Cinemas serves as the first authoritative guide to the various ways in which contemporary cinema from and about East Asia has trafficked across the somewhat-elusive line between mainstream and exploitation. ...
• From the arthouse to the grindhouse: highbrow and lowbrow transgression in cinema's first century by John Cline; Robert G. Weiner, eds.
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  Call Number: eBook ISBN: 9780810876545 While there are numerous books on art and exploitation cinema, few attempt to examine both. Covering the first one hundred years of cinematic transgressions, From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse is a collection of essays addressing the overlooked, forgotten, or underanalyzed elements of film history. ...
• Mexploitation cinema: a critical history of Mexican vampire, wrestler, ape-man, and similar films, 1957-1977 by Doyle Greene
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  Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .S284 G74 2005 ISBN: 9780786422012 Thanks in large part to an exploitation film producer and distributor named K. Gordon Murray, a unique collection of horror films from Mexico began to appear on American late-night television and drive-in screens in the 1960s. Ranging from monster movies clearly owing to the heyday of Universal Studios to the lucha libre horror films featuring El Santo and the "Wrestling Women," these low-budget "Mexploitation" films offer plenty of campy fun and still inspire cult devotion, yet they also reward close study in surprising ways. ...
• Perverse titillation: the exploitation cinema of Italy, Spain and France, 1960-1980 by Danny Shipka
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  Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .S284 S55 2011 ISBN: 9780786448883 The exploitation film industry of Italy, Spain and France during the height of its popularity from 1960 to 1980 is the focus of this entertaining history. With subject matter running the gamut from Italian zombies to Spanish werewolves to French lesbian vampires, the shocking and profoundly entertaining motion pictures of the "Eurocult" genre are discussed from the standpoint of the films and the filmmakers, including such internationally celebrated auteurs as Mario Bava, Jess Franco, Jean Rollin and Paul Naschy. The Eurocult phenomenon is also examined in relation to the influences that European culture and environment have had on the world of exploitation cinema. ...

Other library resource(s)

• Exploitation film from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Ernest Mathjs
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  Call Number: Electronic resource ISBN: 9780199791286 Exploitation film is a type of cinema, often cheaply produced, that is designed to create a fast profit by referring to, or exploiting, contemporary cultural anxieties. Examples include films about drug use, nudity and striptease, sexual deviance, rebellious youths or gangs, violence in society, xenophobia, and fear of terrorism or alien invasions. Ostensibly, exploitation films claim to warn viewers about the consequences of these problems, but in most cases their style, narrative, and inferences celebrate (or “exploit”) the problem as much as critiquing it. ...
• Pornography from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Damon Young
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  Call Number: Electronic resource ISBN: 9780199791286 Although not often included in standard histories of cinema, moving-image pornography has existed for as long as cinema itself, and in the early 21st century it accounts for a considerable percentage of global film and media production and consumption (for estimates, see Studies of the Industry). The earliest attempts to account for the generic specificities of moving-image pornography took the form of enthusiasts’ accounts appearing in the 1970s—the decade in which the mainstream success of films like Deep Throat (1972) marked the emergence of hard-core moving-image pornography as a public (and no longer only a private) mode or genre. ...
• Sex and buttered popcorn: the story of the Hollywood exploiters by Sam Harrison
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  Call Number: Jones Media DVD #18553 ISBN: 9781557392213 Host Ned Beatty explores the history of American exploitation films with clips and interviews.

Selected film title(s)

Find more exploitation films in the library's online catalog.

• The cocaine fiends by William O'Connor
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  Call Number: Jones Media DVD #10288 A drug dealer on the run from the law meets an innocent young girl and her brother, and turns them into "cocaine fiends." A lurid depiction of the horrors of cocaine use.
• Desire under the palms by Joseph W. Sarno
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  Call Number: Jones Media DVD #22689 As a sideline, a bored suburban wife writes articles for women's magazines. When a friend shows her an explicit men's magazine, she attempts to write erotic material. However, she finds that a lot more first-hand research is required.
• The girl, the body, and the pill by Herschell Gordon Lewis
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  Call Number: Jones Media DVD #20514 A suburban high school teacher is fired from her job for teaching sex education. But she continues to give private sessions at her home to her former students, leading to rumors and complications around town.
• Henry Paris collection by Radley Metzger
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  Call Number: Jones Media DVD #21955 Private afternoons of Pamela Mann -- Naked came the stranger -- Opening of Misty Beethoven -- Barbara Broadcast -- Maraschino cherry.
• Not quite Hollywood: the wild, untold story of Ozploitation! by Mark Hartley
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  Call Number: Jones Media DVD #18534 Experience the wild and wonderful untold story of 'Ozploitation' films as you take a journey through the Australian genre cinema of the late '70s and '80s - the years when Australia got into gear and blew the world away with what they had to offer.
• Sins of Rachel by Richard Fontaine
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  Call Number: Jones Media DVD #21158 Albert Rose is "an aggressive, athletic, normal American male"--Until he straps on his first brassiere! Blackmailed by kinky dominatrix Dominita, Albert is held at her Florida hideaway and forced to join other gender-benders after he enters "The Transformation Room" and becomes a She-Man named Rose. ...
• The wild women of Wongo by James L. Wolcott
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  Call Number: Streaming video On the island of Wongo, a tribe of beautiful women, whose men are hairy and brutish, discover a tribe of handsome men on the other side. Unfortunately, the island is also home to a horde of lonely ape men who are planning to take the women as mates.

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