The best exploitation films and what makes a canon

Any list of the best exploitation films is assembled downstream of three machines: a censor board, a critics' poll that runs once a decade, and a federal preservation registry that takes in twenty-five films a year. None of them was built by people who like this material. All of them decide what is on the shelf to rank.

Ranking the films against each other is the easy half of the job. The harder half is working out which ones were available to be ranked at all, in which version, and in which country, because on this shelf those three questions have different answers per decade.

The certificate decided the shelf

The British Board of Film Censors refused The Texas Chain Saw Massacre a certificate on 14 March 1975. Its secretary Stephen Murphy objected to the level of terrorisation and to the film's interest in abnormal psychology, and the effect came out of atmosphere rather than explicit detail, which left nothing obvious to remove.

The refusal did not keep it off British screens. The Greater London Council classified it X without cuts for London, in a print that was accidentally missing 28 seconds, and other councils passed it while some banned it outright. Camden Council gave a new print a local 18 in 1998, and the Board passed the film 18 uncut for cinema on 19 March 1999.

A long stretch sits between those two decisions, and for the whole of that stretch whether a British viewer had seen the film depended on which local authority they lived near. A best-of compiled in 1985 and a best-of compiled in 2000 were not choosing from the same set of films.

Prosecution as a distribution channel

I Spit on Your Grave was never submitted for a cinema certificate at all. It reached an 18 in 2001 with 7 minutes 2 seconds removed, then an 18 again in 2010 with 2 minutes 54 seconds removed. The uncut version was refused in 2020, and in 2022 the distributor pre-cut the film on the Board's advice and that version passed 18.

Any ranking that includes it is ranking a moving object. The 2001 cut and the 2010 cut are different films by about four minutes, and the difference is concentrated in the material the argument about the film is about.

The polls were built for another shelf

The 2022 Sight and Sound poll, the eighth since the British Film Institute started running it in 1952, took ballots from more than 1,600 critics, academics, distributors, writers, curators, archivists and programmers, plus 480 filmmakers. Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman took first place in the critics' vote.

That is a serious instrument, and it is the wrong shape for this material. A once-a-decade ballot of ten titles rewards the film everyone has agreed on, which is how a canon consolidates. Exploitation cinema does not produce single agreed objects. It produces cycles: forty near-identical pictures made inside three years by companies chasing the same audience, where the interesting entry is usually the fourth or fifth one, made once the formula was fixed and someone got bored inside it. Ten slots cannot register that. The blaxploitation run is four years long and its best films are arguments about production circumstances as much as about direction.

Preservation is the quiet editor

The Library of Congress names 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry every year, choosing titles that are culturally, historically or aesthetically significant and at least ten years old.

Registry status does not restore anything by itself, but it marks which side of the line a film has crossed, and the same logic runs through the disc labels. A cycle that got scanned is a cycle people argue about. A cycle that did not is a set of titles with runtimes attached and a few stills. Much of what reads as critical consensus about the cannibal films is a consensus about which of them a label paid to restore.

The sorting mechanism under the ranking

A useful list on this shelf carries its version numbers. Naming Ms. 45 means little without saying which print, and the same goes for anything that passed through a censor board twice. Where a film exists in one release and one edit, say so, because that is the rarer case here.

The films that survive this process are the ones that had a rights holder with an interest, a negative in a findable condition, and enough of a reputation to justify the scan. The Warriors, a 1979 Paramount release, had all three.