Robert Gordon Joseph

Historical overviews of exploitation cinema typically focus on specific historical periods of production, analyzing trends with the benefit of hindsight. These eras include the initial period of exploitation from the 1910s through the 1950s (the “nudie cutie” and “hygiene film” era), the drive-in phase propelled by teen films and Roger Corman’s American International Pictures, or the Blaxploitation cycle of the 1970s. Though broader historical overviews of exploitation cinema exist, they generally end their narratives at the 1990s, if not sooner. The reasons for this are obvious: by the 1990s, traditional theatrical venues for exploitation films – the drive-in and the grindhouse – largely ceased to exist. Exploitation cinema had transitioned into two alternative cinematic spheres. The first of these is the mainstream, in which many exploitation conventions (explicit sexuality, violence, and pulpy storylines) can now be found everywhere from blockbusters to the work of neo-grindhouse revivalists like Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth.[1] The second of these is the realm of straight-to-video, first in the VHS/DVD market and then, as the market for physical media gradually declined, streaming platforms. Mainstream iterations of this tradition receive ample coverage, and the films’ exploitation roots are noted by scholars and critics. However, there has been far less coverage of exploitation’s current existence in the straight-to-video realm. Unless a film or director receives an outsize amount of critical attention or popular notoriety, most non-theatrical exploitation is not covered in scholarship because many scholars do not see it as an active film form. As Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton note, without the traditional theatrical outlets, the trends and characteristics of the films and the market are harder to grasp, putting exploitation cinema into an existential debate.[2]

Rather than relying on the traditional gauges of graphic content (which are now ubiquitous beyond exploitation) or distribution (which is all but gone), subject matter is an alternative method by which this field can be navigated. Specifically, scholars can hone in on the concept of “moral outrage,” and how exploitation films utilize the subject matter of specific controversial issues within society as a launchpad for ripped-from-the-headlines narratives. One particular event that drew the attention of exploitation filmmakers in the home video era was Hurricane Katrina, the aftermath of which produced a variety of films depicting post-Katrina New Orleans as a lawless den of violence and crime. The storm’s depiction in Patrick Marrero’s Trapped in Katrina (2009), an example of “Katrina Exploitation,” stands in stark contrast with Hollywood’s more mainstream depictions of the Katrina aftermath, even among those films and TV shows that adapt some of exploitation cinema’s more superficial characteristics. Trapped in Katrina is a low-budget film with little production value that was independently produced by the filmmakers distributed by bottom-rung production company Maverick Entertainment. The film views Katrina from Marrero’s perspective as a local, while portraying the storm’s aftermath in a visceral, ambiguous manner too uncomfortable for Hollywood.[3] Though marginalized in the corners of the home video/streaming market reserved for exploitation fans and academics, Katrina Exploitation exemplifies how exploitation cinema continues to exist and to be defined by the moral outrage it draws from real-life controversies. Trapped in Katrina, in particular, demonstrates the important role of sleaze as a distinguishing characteristic of exploitation in an era when the traditional gauges of the form have dissipated.

Exploitation: The Cinema of Moral Panic

​

Like the term “exploitation” itself, categorizing the politics of exploitation cinema is fraught. Susan Hayward defines exploitation as “films which are generally low in production values but which target specific audiences through exploiting specific ‘topical’ themes or narratives about specific social groups.”[4] This accommodating definition encompasses a wide variety of filmmaking traditions and movements, including: 1920s hygiene films emerging from the perceived sexual deviances of soldiers and young people; 1930s drug films emerging from the fears of alleged drug habits of racial minorities; 1950s juvenile delinquent films; 1960s biker films; 1970s African-American-centered crime and action (Blaxploitation); and eventually, any low-budget international tradition that critics and fans were willing to hyphenate with a trailing “-ploitation.” The narratives of these films range on a spectrum of the histrionic, from crazed hophead teenagers of Reefer Madness (Louis J. Gasnier, 1936) to the murder-revenge exploits of Pam Grier in Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973). Regardless of the era from which they emerged, however, exploitation films are defined partly by depicting measurably more explicit or controversial sexuality, violence, and subject matter than that of films shown in mainstream theaters. However, given the continually evolving nature of the film industry and audience tastes, defining exploitation exclusively by the level of violence and sexuality leads to a quandary: when mainstream cinema becomes more violent and sexual, exploitation cinema’s runway for boundary-pushing gradually shrinks. Calum Waddel argues in The Style of Sleaze that exploitation died partly because the mimicry of exploitation’s violent and sexual content by mainstream films like Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) and 9 ½ Weeks (Adrien Lyne, 1986) rendered the independent mode of exploitation obsolete.

An alternative approach to defining exploitation is via distribution. The defining characteristics of exploitation’s first distribution channels are outlined by Eric Schafer in his history of the first exploitation cycle from the 1910s to the 1950s. Shafer argues that its modes of distribution – festive, out-of-the-mainstream affairs that embraced the carnivalesque –  were where exploitation cinema took on a radical political identity.[5] These included the state-by-state roadshow exhibition of pioneering exploitation films like Reefer Madness and Mom and Dad (William Beaudine, 1945). Though post-1950s modes of distribution were separate from this carnival-barker tradition, exploitation cinema maintained a separate mode of theatrical distribution into the 1970s and early 1980s through the drive-ins of the Midwest and South and the dilapidated “grindhouse” theaters of the major coastal cities. However, these theaters faded as spaces for mainstream exhibition as grindhouses were gradually closed due to urban renewal projects and competition from home video. Meanwhile, the shrinking number of drive-ins were overtaken by the mainstream studios, which began releasing what Yannis Tzioumakis calls “glossy exploitation films,” such as The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). These films were marketed with the same tactics as exploitation (sensationalist advertising, saturated booking) and exhibited some of the formal and narrative conventions associated with the form (sexuality, violence, and violent juvenile content).[6] With these theatrical spaces closed off, the remaining exploitation cinema transitioned to home video, first on VHS, then on DVD, and ultimately streaming. Exploitation cinema still has distinct spaces of distribution in the home video market, including the horror/gore streaming platform Shudder and specialty distributors like the American Genre Film Archive, Troma Entertainment, and Arrow Films. However, the fact that nearly every form of cinema can be consumed in the same manner as exploitation cinema today, combined with the endless overlaps with other cinematic forms (John Waters’ films being rereleased in the highbrow Criterion Collection), makes distribution a complicated lens by which to define modern exploitation.

This could explain why the theatre closures and exploitation’s pivot to home video is a convenient endpoint for existing exploitation histories, if they make it that far.[7] The few studies that consider home video distribution of exploitation view the films as a medium of nostalgia for bygone theatrical communities, or they highlight the importance of home media as a vessel of film history.[8] However, one thread that can be drawn through the history of exploitation cinema, from the moral hygiene films of the late 1910s to Katrina Exploitation in the late 2000s, is Schaefer’s explanation of the moral panic that fuels exploitation cinema:

Exploitation films generally followed when discourse on a given issue or problem reached a convulsive
state. The white slave scare around 1913 served as the spark for a series of films and…the pattern was
repeated with venereal disease pictures in the late teens, nudist films in the early 1930s, antidope movies
during the marijuana scare in the mid-1930s, vice ring pictures following Lucky Luciano’s racketeering
conviction in 1936, the postwar hygiene films, more narcotic movies in the early 1950s, and so on.[9]

While Schafer’s definition does not apply to every film defined as exploitation, it does apply to films made after Schaefer’s “traditional” period of exploitation from the 1910s to the 1950s. The later eras of exploitation include: biker films, which fed on the panic surrounding the rise of one-percenter motorcycle gangs in the 1960s; Blaxploitation, which drew partly from the anxieties about the decline of African-American neighborhoods and the rise of narcotics in the 1970s; and the Red Scare films of the 1980s, which were augmented by the rise in political tensions at the end of the Cold War. Though versions of these films were distributed by both mainstream studios and out-of-mainstream distribution networks, their focus on the moral panic of their given eras place them under the exploitation banner.[10] Today’s straight-to-video exploitation draws from similar modern anxieties, including: the increased exposure of police brutality by camera phones reflected in Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler, 2018); the alt-right armed militias of The Standoff at Sparrow Creek (Henry Dunham, 2018); and the endless onslaught of school shootings confronted in the upcoming Run Hide Fight (Kyle Rankin, 2020).[11]

Of course, exploitation is not the exclusive purview of films focusing on relevant, controversial topics. One such topical issue is the reemergence of overt White supremacy in the cultural sphere in recent years, as demonstrated by the pro-Confederate march on Charlottesville that culminated in a deadly attack on counter-protesters by a White supremacist. This ongoing phenomenon is addressed by Robin Bissell’s The Best of Enemies (2019) and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2017), films representing the narrative traditions of mainstream Hollywood and American Independent Cinema, respectively. Both received traditional theatrical releases and confronted the contemporaneous resurgence of White nationalism through historical analogues. The Best of Enemies attempts this intercession through the story of Klansmen and Black activists feuding over the integration of Durham City Schools, while BlacKkKlansman follows a Black police officer who collaborates with a White Jewish officer to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs. The Best of Enemies resolves this conflict by the film’s lead Klansman, C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell), befriending and ultimately adopting the pro-busing stance of the lead activist, Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson). This outcome follows the standard narrative format of Classical Hollywood by using a resolution to “transcend the social conflict represented in the film, often by displacing it onto the individual.”[12] BlaKkKlansman’s narrative is less uplifting and conventional: the infiltration successfully disrupts a planned bombing, but the main character, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), is torn throughout the film between his desire for Black social and political uplift and his belief in the importance of the police in American society, a dissonance that is not resolved by the film’s end. BlacKkKlansman embodies the American Independent Cinema tradition through both the indie film convention of an “ambivalent protagonist” and a lack of narrative resolution – the film ends with the image of a burning cross outside of Stallworth’s apartment building, followed by a montage of the Charlottesville attack and President Trump’s infamous “very fine people on both sides” speech – eschewing the typical Hollywood “happy ending” in favor of a direct challenge to the audience’s politics.[13]

What ultimately separates The Standoff at Sparrow Creek from The Best of Enemies or BlackKklansman is the presence of sleaze in the narrative. Unlike the narrative conventions of mainstream Hollywood and independent cinema, sleaze is less tangible. In his introduction to Sleaze Artists, Jeffrey Sconce describes sleaze as “less a definable historical genre than an ineffable quality – a tone that is a function of attitude as much as content.”[14] Sconce argues that sleaze is not simply a specific amount of gore, violence, or explicit sexuality, but instead “requires judging, if only in one’s imagination, that there is something ‘improper’ or ‘untoward’ about a given text.”[15] Indeed, The Standoff at Sparrow Creek is a relatively restrained film, with little of the on-screen violence traditionally associated with what one might call a sleazy action film. However, in an era in which there are few remaining content boundaries for films to push, definitions of exploitation are better shifted to how subject matter is thematically approached, rather than the amount of blood or nudity on-screen. Therefore, the conceptualization of sleaze is better centered on attempts at narratives that draw upon moral panic in a manner that lacks a clear moral center for the audience to embrace.

It is this mode of sleaze that is apparent from the first ten minutes of Sparrow Creek. Alerted to distant gunfire and police radio chatter, members of a White nationalist militia in Michigan assemble at an isolated warehouse in reaction to the news of an armed gunman having murdered dozens of police officers at an officer’s funeral. The militiamen become increasingly suspicious of each other as they start to believe that one of them is responsible for the attack. The feeling of impropriety is enhanced by the moral quandary that writer/director Henry Dunham puts the viewer in: rather than the conventional binaries of good and evil (Civil Rights activists and Klansmen) operating within Best of Enemies, or the complicated dynamics of Stallworth’s experiences as a Black policeman in a White world in BlacKkKlansman, Sparrow Creek drops the viewer directly into the perspective of White supremacists openly considering whether they should join a burgeoning uprising against law enforcement apparently spreading across the country. Though an alternative perspective is presented by an undercover police officer that has infiltrated the militia, the police are just as brutally violent as the militiamen, providing the viewer with no moral compass or audience surrogate. Though relatively restrained in its graphic content, the film’s feeling of sleaze emanates through Dunham’s disinterest in conventional morality in cinema.

Calum Waddel argues that exploitation’s bottom line was traditionally to “make money based on showing things that Hollywood simply could not provide.”[16] Waddel focuses on the 1970s, what he considers the last era of exploitation, with sexploitation, exploitation horror, and Blaxploitation respectively showing the hardcore sex, gory excess, and radical Black empowerment that even the mainstream copycats of these exploitation forms could not offer. With the exception a handful of indie films like The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo, 2003), hardcore sex remains the purview of the porn industry. However, conventions related to horror and Blaxploitation have either permeated the mainstream or reemerged in what would become modern American Independent Cinema, and their theatrical distributors and venues are nearly all shuttered. Rather than see this as the end of exploitation, it is important to consider what exploitation might continue to show on-screen that Hollywood, be it the mainstream studios or the indie sector, cannot or will not. Though far from exclusive to all modes of exploitation, the following is a viable method of identifying ongoing trends of exploitation cinema in the home video era:

1. centered around a topical controversy

2. framed without a clear moral center, and

3. released primarily (though not exclusively) straight-to-video

Rather than focusing on particular distributors, stars, or directors, this paradigm allows exploitation cinema to be analyzed in relation to a particular moral panic in the national conversation. One such conversation that emerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina demonstrates how exploitation cinema represented the aftermath of the hurricane in a manner out of reach to mainstream Hollywood or indie cinema.

Like most exploitation cinema, the films I label “Katrina Exploitation” are situated on the margins of the industry. These films’ existence on the margins connects them to the history of exploitation and to the continued niche appeal of these types of films outside of the studio system. Most significant is the moral panic these films draw from, evoking an ongoing historical trend that began with the 1910s hygiene films and continues in the form of any film exploiting anxieties connected to real-life phenomena to titillate and sell tickets. While exploitation films not explicitly centered around moral panics existed within these eras, orienting the term around this original conception of exploitation as the cinema of moral panic opens up the analysis towards understanding what fears and anxieties that Katrina Exploitation evokes. Katrina Exploitation centered largely on anxieties about race and criminality that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the levees breaking.

“If anyone rioted, it was the media”: Post-Katrina Narratives of Criminality[17]

Almost immediately following the breaking of the levees, rumors of widespread violence and criminality seeped into the national news coverage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. In his overview of the media coverage of Hurricane Katrina, Bernie Cook demonstrates that 24 hours had not passed from the initial reports of flooding in the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East when CNN’s Aaron Brown began demonizing Katrina residents and framing footage of African-American boys and men running across the floodwaters carrying shopping bags as evidence of “looting and lawlessness.”[18] The tone of this coverage, which would extend to coverage of Katrina by NBC and Fox News, blamed New Orleanians for their own plight, emphasized their status as criminals rather than victims of governmental neglect, and embraced the reactionary perspective of law enforcement through embedded reporting. Throughout this news coverage, trends of victim-blaming and demonization emerged. Media outlets asked why residents did not evacuate, rather than asking why the local or state governments did not provide an evacuation plan. They bemoaned the supposed widespread looting, rather than bemoaning the governmental failure to provide life-sustaining supplies. They wondered aloud how NOPD and the National Guard could re-take control of the city, rather than interrogating how law enforcement let the situation deteriorate to begin with.

News coverage of Hurricane Katrina was too widespread to be characterized entirely along these lines. Then and now, local outlets like The Times-Picayune and the New Orleans AM radio station WWL were praised for their coverage of the hurricane and the flooding.[19] Additionally, individual reporters from national stations were recognized for going above and beyond the line of duty in their coverage of the storm. Released in 2006, one year after the storm, The Great Deluge was one of the first histories of Katrina. In it, then-Tulane historian Douglas Brinkley praises Katrina news coverage (“They had some details wrong but, more important, they got the urgency exactly right”), and he singles out for praise Brian Williams, who was fighting dysentery while reporting in the city on the conditions of the storm.[20] However, with the benefit of time, there has been more scrutiny of national media coverage of the storm and its aftermath. For example, Williams’ on-air reporting has since been criticized, including his dubious claim that there were dead bodies in the mostly-untouched French Quarter.[21] Cook also describes Williams’ TV journalist performance as “producing ‘authenticity’ through manufactured proximity,” such as appearing to be within the eye of the storm while retiring to a hotel room after his segment was filmed.[22] These criticisms have been especially pronounced after the revelation that Williams fabricated a helicopter attack he claimed to experience in Iraq in 2003.[23] Though not every journalist reporting on Katrina came under the level of scrutiny faced by Williams, he represents a larger trend of self-assessment the news media undertook in regards to its Katrina coverage.

​