Four years into running Cultpix, a global streaming service for obscure films, I’ve learned that the most creative inspiration often comes from the most unexpected places
When I stood on stage at the Creativity Conference London, held under the umbrella of the Raindance Film Festival London (see what I did there?), I made what might have seemed like a provocative claim: that modern filmmakers are stealing from all the wrong places. Take The Substance – it’s not a bad film, but it’s painfully obvious in its influences. A dash of Cronenberg body horror here, some Lynchian weirdness there, topped off with Stanley Kubrick-style framing. It’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who learned their craft studying the Sight and Sound canon.
But here’s the thing – you can do so much better.
The Pandemic Epiphany
During lockdown, my Swedish business partner Rickard Gramfors and I launched what became a 1,800-film streaming platform dedicated to cult and exploitation cinema called Cultpix (we recently also launched the Something Weird Channel). We’d been distributing obscure Swedish films on VHS and DVD for twenty years as Klubb Super 8, so streaming felt like the natural next step. How hard could it be? (Spoiler: quite hard, but that’s another story.)
What this journey taught me was profound respect for the sheer creativity lurking in low-budget, forgotten corners of cinema. These aren’t films that get retrospectives at the BFI or essays in Cahiers du Cinéma. They’re the grindhouse survivors, the drive-in double features, the films that were made fast, cheap, and with absolutely nothing to lose.
And that freedom – that’s where the real innovation happens.
Beyond Blaxploitation: A Rich Genre Panopticon
When we talk about exploitation films, most people think of the obvious categories – blaxploitation and sexploitation. But the rabbit hole goes much deeper. There’s hicksploitation, hillbillysploitation, drugsploitation, even shrewsploitation (yes, that’s a real thing – watch Ray Kellogg’s 1959 sci-fi/horror “The Killer Shrews”). Horror and sci-fi genre films sit alongside women-in-prison films, biker films, early LGBTQIA+ cinema, and gore films that pushed boundaries long before anyone had heard of the BBFC.
Think of these like like Häagen-Dazs ice cream – there are more flavours than you’ll ever try, and they won’t all appeal to you. But somewhere in that vast selection is exactly what you didn’t know you were looking for.
The Roger Corman School of Excellence
Here’s a question I posed to that conference audience: what do Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Dennish Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Ron Howard have in common? Other than winning boatloads of Oscars and earning billions at the box office? They all cut their teeth with Roger Corman, the Pope of Pop, the King of B-movies.
These aren’t the films that headline their retrospectives. Boxcar Bertha doesn’t feature prominently on Scorsese’s greatest hits reel. Cameron probably doesn’t mention Piranha II much in interviews. Demme isn’t remembered for writing the screenplay to Black Mama, White Mama. But these experiences taught them something film school couldn’t: how to tell compelling stories on impossible budgets (as in low) whilst grabbing audiences by the throat.
Corman’s genius wasn’t just in making films quickly and cheaply – it was in understanding that constraints breed creativity. When you can’t afford elaborate sets or famous actors, you’d better have a damn good story and the visual flair to sell it. Heck, sometimes you even have the poster ready before you shoot a single foot of film.
The Ed Wood Advantage
They were all directors who went on to become famous. That’s not the case for all exploitation film directors. Let me tell you about Edward D. Wood Jr. – not Tim Burton’s eponymous caricature film, played however lovingly by Johnny Depp, but the actual filmmaker. Yes, he made Plan 9 from Outer Space, but here’s what’s more interesting: he also wrote the screenplay for The Bride and the Beast, a film you probably never heard of. Here is the plot summary from Wikipedia.
“Dan Fuller, a big game hunter, is forced to kill his pet gorilla when it attempts to rape his new bride Laura. The woman starts to experience strange urgings following the encounter, and submits to hypnosis under the care of a psychiatrist. She reveals to her shocked husband that she was actually a gorilla in a previous life. Slowly she reverts to her former bestial self, and winds up eloping into the jungle with a male ape, with her cuckolded husband staring helplessly after them.”
I put it to you that this is a film crying out for an A24 remake. Preferably directed by Yorgos Lanthimos with Emma Stone as Laura, the Bride of the Gorilla.
Wood understood something that modern filmmakers often miss: originality doesn’t come from perfecting familiar formulas. It comes from fearlessly pursuing ideas that seem completely mad. His 1953 film Glen or Glenda? offered a surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of cross-dressing at a time when such topics were absolutely taboo. It wasn’t technically perfect, but it was authentically his. Making a trans-themed film these days isn’t so much daring as often just bandwagon jumping. But would anyone be brave enough to dare a re-make of Dorish Wishman’s Indecent Desires (1968), which more than half a century later still retains its ability to shock and outrage.
Picasso’s Practical Advice
“Good artists copy, but great artists steal” – Pablo Picasso’s wisdom holds true for cinema as much as painting. The question isn’t whether to steal, but where to steal from.
If everyone’s copying from the same prestigious sources, you end up with the visual equivalent of a hall of mirrors. But raid the exploitation vaults? That’s where you’ll find techniques, narratives, and visual approaches that haven’t been strip-mined by film school graduates.
Consider the opening credits alone, of which I gave three examples in my talk. A Hollywood blockbuster might spend millions on a sleek title sequence. A European arthouse film might opt for stark minimalism. But an exploitation film? It’ll hook you with pure audacity – promising thrills, chills, and experiences you can’t get anywhere else.
There’s a reason director David F. Friedman has a Hitchcock-style cameo as Carnival Barker in his pre-Cronenberg ‘body horror’ exploitation classic She Freak (1967), because he’d been a real life carnival barker with traveling shows and he knew how to pull people in with a compelling intro:
“Ladies and gentlemen, you’re about to behold a sight so strange, so horrifying, so utterly monstrous, that I urge you who are easily frightened or upset, who suffer from nervous disorders, weak hearts, or queasy stomachs, who experience nightmares, and any children under the age of 16, to forgo witnessing this exhibit.”
Well of course everyone paid to come and see what was in the tent.
The Call to Creative Arms
This isn’t about being deliberately obscure or proving how hip you are by namedropping forgotten celluloid gems. It’s about expanding your creative vocabulary beyond the obvious. When every independent film festival is packed with Kubrick homages and Lynch pastiche, the filmmaker who draws from truly unexpected sources will stand out.
The grindhouse era wasn’t about prestige – it was about survival. Films had to work immediately or they’d disappear forever. That created an environment where creativity flourished precisely because convention was irrelevant.
So next time you’re stuck for inspiration, skip the Criterion Collection and forget the Top 100 lists of Sight & Sound or the New York Times. Dive into the depths of drive-in cinema, exploitation double features, and the beautifully mad world of films that were made by people who had absolutely nothing to lose. Stream films from the likes of David F. Friedman, Herschel Gordon Lewis, Joe Sarno and Doris Wishman; a whole new world will open up to you.
Trust me – you’ll find gold in the grindhouse. Streaming now on Cultpix and the Something Weird Channel.
Patrick von Sychowski runs Cultpix and the Something Weird Channel, the global streaming service specialising in cult and exploitation cinema. He clearly watches far too many obscure films for his own good.