Exploitation Film Explained

What an Exploitation Film is and what it isn’t

What is an exploitation film? Plainly put, an exploitation film is a movie with problems. The problems in question may be social, anthropological, or even the stuff of paranoid urban legend and/or conspiracy theory. Ernest Mathijs writes that “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” (Mathijs 2011). Exploitation films lavish in problems. Indeed, exploitation films are often fraught with many problems all their own: bad lighting, poorly overdubbed sound, low-quality film stock and, of course, total moral depravity. The low production values sync up with the seedy plot-lines and nihilism (to say nothing of the opportunism) that drives exploitation filmmaking.

Exploitation films are not a genre, per se, but rather a product of a type of film production. That said, exploitation films can be divided into a number of subcategories, many of which center upon social issues, current events, sexual fetishes, or deep-seated taboos. These include cannibalism, Nazism, rape/revenge, motorbikes, women-in-prison, and race-hate, among others. Many of the above have been given “-sploitation” as a cutesy suffix (Nazisploitation, Blaxploitation, etc.). All of the above provide directors with ample excuses to depict scenes of sex, violence, and sexual violence, and then to luxuriate in their display. To this end, some exploitation flicks attempt to merge two or more of these sub-sploitations.

The most effective exploitation films grip their audience in two ways: by preying on a mean-spirited desire to see violence, and at the same time playing on vengeful sympathies. Take I Spit on Your Grave, for example. This film focuses on a brutal, protracted rape scene, and then the subsequent murders perpetrated by the victim against her attackers. Exploitation audiences were known to cheer on the assailants during the sexual assault, and then to cheer on the assailed as she took revenge. The best exploitation pictures leave the audience in a mingled state of outrage, exasperation, and satisfaction. Like heavy metal music, the effective exploitation film has a cathartic effect.

Exploitation films should not be confused with “B-Movies.” While B-movies were often just as cheaply made and just as low in quality, they typically don’t deliver the levels of violence, nudity, and nihilism found in exploitation. While exploitation movies often did play in double features (from which “A” and “B” movies draw their naming scheme), and while some were expressly designed as B’s (Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast, for instance), they were just as often the main drawing features at many suburban drive-ins and inner-city “grindhouse” theaters. To be sure, their prurient posters were lures to entice passersby. As such, I Eat Your Skin should not be confused with I Drink Your Blood. While they both have evocative titles, the former is a rather anodyne zombie pic with unconvincing special effects, while the latter is a deranged gore-fest that plays on America’s post-Manson and Vietnam anxieties and uses them as a pretext for showing graphic decapitations, immolations, and dismemberments. (True to exploitation opportunism, however, these two films were paired together on a double-bill due to the resemblance of their titles.) Correspondingly, They Saved Hitler’s Brain is a quirky, harmless B picture that delivers what its title advertises, while Nazi Love Camp 7 is a graphic, picaresque, and nightmarish tour through various sexually-driven atrocities that the director has projected upon the (rightly) indefensible target that is the SS.

Moreover, exploitation films are not porn films. While porno movies were and are definitely exploitative, they differ fairly drastically from exploitation cinema. Firstly, the tone in pornographic films, at least in the 1970s, was typically lighter (problematic gender typecasts aside). Secondly, porno movies were dedicated to the depiction of non-simulated, “hardcore” sex, while exploitation films were generally “softcore,” with most or all sex simulated. “Softcore” should not be taken to mean “soft,” however. To put it gently, exploitation films often depicted gender relations in dark and disturbing terms. Extended depictions of sadomasochism and rape are common fare in exploitation films. Further to that, the association of sex with death was a pivot point for the slasher film, one of the later, comparably mainstream subgenres of exploitation horror. Nonetheless, the porno and exploitation film spheres overlapped. Some actors/performers bridged both worlds, as was the case with R. Bolla, a man who has the singular distinction of appearing in both Cannibal Holocaust and Debbie Does Dallas.

These links with pornography, amorality, and low production values should not lead one to assume that an exploitation movie is necessarily a low quality artistic endeavor. Exploitation films are not confined by Hollywood notions of plotting, pacing, dialogue, and decency. As such, they have considerable latitude for exploring themes, imagery, and issues that could never be incorporated in mainstream cinema, which hopes for nothing more than to appeal to the widest possible audience. Sleepaway Camp, for instance, copies Friday the 13th’s relatively mainstream summer-camp slasher vibe, while at the same time dealing in transgenderism (admittedly heavy-handedly). Similarly, La Bete dives deeply into motifs of bestiality and imbricates animal lust with “normative” human marital sexuality, an exploration that could simply never happen in a Hollywood-backed project. Even the most execrable exploitation can affirm more perceptive truths. Nazi Love Camp 7, for instance, reminds the viewer of the tendency among authoritarian ideologies present and past to iterate their domination through sexualized violence. All told, exploitation movies have potential for realizing an aesthetic integrity and intensity wholly foreign to mainstream films.

With all this being said, the exploitation film is difficult to define. While this type of film is generally agreed to have crystallized in the 50s and 60s and then totally degenerated to grindhouse depravity in the seedy 70s, an argument could be made that exploitation cinema lives on today. Threads of exploitation are sutured into some present-day films. Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, and 3 From Hell are crammed with exploitation tropes. Zombie has even cast women-in-prison legend Sid Haig in the aforementioned offerings. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, meanwhile, teamed up on their own 2007 double-feature homage, aptly titled Grindhouse. Some of the ersatz, over-the-top trailers interlarded within Grindhouse’s exploitation sendups spawned actual movies, none more noteworthy than the Danny Trejo vehicle Machete. While director Rodriguez has labelled the movie “exploitation,” and while Machete delivers in terms of full-on exploitation tropes, it still possesses one thing true exploitation films never had: a budget.

Some true exploitation still trickles through today. While nihilism has declined in contemporary cinema in favor of irony, meta-commentary, referentiality, and political correctness, filmmakers still occasionally draw on abject depravity to entice audiences. Human Centipede stands out as the film most exploitative in spirit — that is, in mean-spiritedness — in recent memory. If nothing else, Human Centipede suggests that some cinematic problems can’t be solved.

Further Reading:

Mathijs, Ernest. “Exploitation Film.” Oxford Bibliographies. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0096.xml