The Cult Experience: Audiences, Spaces, and Performance

My research aims to critically analyze the cultural processes of media texts attaining a cult status in relation to their physical space of circulation. This project specifically looks at both media audiences and the role of cult film exhibitors (i.e. movie theater programme managers/schedulers, organizers, marketing staff, promoters), and their relational dynamics with the media space. It examines their perceptions on how they are able to define, appropriate, and ascribe meaning to cult texts and space, but also how these spaces contribute to the individual comprehension of texts as cult based on their taste and knowledge. The study strives to investigate whether such cult media spaces shape and nurture audiences' sense of belongings, identities, and practices. This could prove to be one of the avenues for certain texts to attain cult status.