Exploitation films of the 1970s, the boom and the bust

Exploitation films of the 1970s ran on a ratings category anyone could self-apply, a drive-in circuit that needed two fresh features a week, and regional distributors who booked a picture city by city before a review could catch up with it.

The volume is what needs explaining. American independents put out more cheap features in that decade than at any point since the studio B-picture died, and none of it was a taste shift. Four commercial machines lined up at once. The classification system opened a category the majors would not touch. The exhibition circuit had screens it could not fill. Tax money went looking for somewhere to sit. And the audiences that showed up for the results were audiences the studios had stopped writing for.

The X that anyone could apply

In November 1968 the Motion Picture Association scrapped the Production Code and replaced it with a voluntary rating: G, M, R and X. The association trademarked the first three and left X alone, which meant a producer could stamp a print X without ever submitting it to anybody. That single administrative gap is the door the whole decade walked through.

It stayed respectable for about eighteen months. Midnight Cowboy went out X and won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in April 1970. M was renamed GP in 1970 and PG in 1972, and as the middle of the scale got softer the X end got harder. By 1972 Deep Throat was playing hardtop cinemas in Manhattan and being reported on in the news pages. Melvin Van Peebles had already worked out what the letter was for, advertising Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971 as rated X by an all-white jury.

Where the films played

Drive-ins changed their programme weekly and ran double bills, so a distributor who could deliver two features and a trailer got the booking over one who could deliver a masterpiece. That arithmetic is the reason the films exist. American International Pictures had been feeding the circuit since 1954, Roger Corman left it to start New World Pictures in 1970, and Crown International and a dozen regional outfits sold territory by territory on the states-rights model, which put the print where the audience was and skipped the national campaign.

Four-walling did the rest. A distributor rented the cinema outright, bought a week of local television spots, took every dollar at the box office and moved the print to the next town before word of mouth turned. Universal took the same pattern national with Jaws in 1975, which is the moment the majors noticed the method worked on their own product too.

Money arrived from outside the industry as well. Canada raised its capital cost allowance to 100 percent for certified features in 1974, and the tax shelter that opened produced a run of horror pictures shot in Ontario and Quebec, Shivers in 1975 and Rabid in 1977 among them. In Italy the export market did the same job: films were shot cheap, dubbed into four languages and sold as packages at the Milan market to buyers who were shopping for a genre and a running time rather than a director.

The cycles and how fast they burned

Nothing ran for long. Blaxploitation opened with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and Shaft in 1971, peaked through Super Fly in 1972 and Coffy, Black Caesar and Cleopatra Jones in 1973, and was finished as a booking category by about 1975, with the NAACP and CORE picketing the films from 1972 onward.

Martial arts moved faster still. King Boxer reached American screens in 1973, Warner released Enter the Dragon the same year, and Bruce Lee died on 20 July 1973, which produced an entire imitation industry built around actors renamed to sound like him. The Italian cycles worked on the same clock. Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970 set off five years of giallo; Milano calibro 9 in 1972 set off the poliziotteschi; Umberto Lenzi's Man from Deep River, also 1972, is where the cannibal films start; and Zombi 2 in 1979 exists because Dawn of the Dead had been recut and released in Italy as Zombi the year before.

The Philippines supplied the women-in-prison run, with The Big Doll House and Women in Cages both shot there in 1971 for New World. Rape-revenge came out of The Last House on the Left in 1972 and hardened into I Spit on Your Grave in 1978. The stalker picture that swallowed the next decade was assembled in public between Black Christmas in 1974 and Halloween in 1978. And the midnight slot in city repertory houses turned into its own distribution channel, El Topo at the Elgin from 1970, Pink Flamingos from 1972, The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Waverly from 1976.

The traffic went both ways. Taxi Driver, financed and released as a studio picture, took the Palme d'or at the Festival de Cannes in 1976, playing In Competition with a vigilante plot and a squib count that would have looked at home on a double bill.

Two days from submission to refusal

Britain is where the paperwork survives, because the films had to be classified before they could open. The British Board of Film Classification took The Texas Chain Saw Massacre formally on 12 March 1975 and refused it a certificate on 14 March, two days later. The Greater London Council then passed it X uncut for London, so the film played the capital while other councils banned it, and the Board did not pass it 18 uncut for cinemas until 19 March 1999.

Consistency was never the point of the system, and the record shows it. The Exorcist went in early in 1974 and came out with an X and no cuts at all, the Board's secretary Stephen Murphy noting that some people would dislike it and that this was not sufficient reason to refuse certification. Halloween was passed X with no cuts in 1978, classified 18 for video in 1986 and reclassified 15 in 2018 for strong threat, violence and nudity. Pink Flamingos never went near the Board in the seventies at all and reached British audiences through members-only cinema clubs, which sat outside the licensing regime; it was first classified on 31 December 1990, at 18 with 3 minutes 4 seconds removed.

The end of the double bill

Two things finished the economics. Jaws in 1975 and Star Wars in 1977 taught the majors saturation booking and wide release, and once a studio picture opened everywhere at once on a shark or a monster premise, the drive-in second feature had nothing left to sell that the multiplex was not already selling bigger. At the same time the land under the drive-ins got more valuable than the screens on it.

The videocassette finished the job by removing the theatre from the transaction. Caligula shows the hinge: Customs and Excise seized it on arrival in Britain in April 1980, and the Board then took out over eight minutes for legal reasons and another three for category reasons, more than 50 separate cuts in all, before granting an X. That fight was still about a cinema print. Within four years the argument had moved to the shelf in the corner shop, and the Video Recordings Act 1984, chapter 39, received Royal Assent on 12 July 1984 and put every tape under mandatory classification.

I Spit on Your Grave is the clean case. Made in 1978, it was never submitted for a British cinema certificate, so it never played as a seventies exploitation picture in Britain at all. It found its audience on tape, became a prosecution target in the process, and when the Board finally classified it 18 in 2001 the version that passed was seven minutes and two seconds shorter than the one the tape trade had been circulating.