That these movies have often been exhibited in similar venues-grindhouses, drive-ins and today direct-to-DVD-reinforces their commonality. The arguments for considering the exploitation film as a genre are, then, mainly pragmatic: fans and critics often speak of the “exploitation film” as if to designate a specific genre.
Evidently, these can mainly be put down to the mode of production. 2 Semantic characteristics include excessive images of sex and violence, bad acting, poor cinematography and sound syntactic characteristics include taboo themes, and flat characters or basic character arcs. 1 This is, no doubt, because these movies do, as a group, share common semantic, syntactic and pragmatic elements that, for Rick Altman, make up the “complex situation” that is a film genre (Altman, 84). The exploitation film is not a genre, and yet it is often described as such. “Easy” because they have long targetted what has since become the largest demographic group of moviegoers: the 15-25 age group (Thompson and Bordwell, 310, 666). “Easy” because they offer audiences what they can’t get elsewhere: sex, violence and taboo topics. “Easy” because they are almost always genre films relying on time-tried formulas (horror, thillers, biker movies, surfer movies, women-in-prison films, martial arts, subgenres like gore, rape-revenge, slashers, nazisploitation, etc.). Exploitation films are made cheap for easy profit. 2 The semantic refers to “linguistic meaning, i.e., the meaning in the dictionary, the syntactic to “ (.)ġWhat is exploitation cinema? Exploitation cinema is not a genre it is an industry with a specific mode of production.1 For instance, one fan’s blog speaks of “he exploitation genre” (See accessed on ).
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