Articles: exploitation cycle histories
These articles cover exploitation cinema one cycle at a time: where the Italian giallo, cannibal and zombie booms came from, what drove Ozploitation and blaxploitation, and how British censorship turned a shelf of video tapes into a legal panic. Each one links to the films it discusses.
Three kinds of piece: surveys of a whole cycle, deep dives on a single film, and profiles of people. If a term is unfamiliar, the glossary of exploitation subgenres defines it; for somewhere to start watching, try the curated lists or the double feature generator.
- profile · 4 August 2026
Meiko Kaji and the art of not blinking
Toei hired her to headline prison quickies. She built the most-copied performance in Japanese genre cinema out of about forty lines of dialogue.