This study gives attention to the fan production surrounding European cult cinema, low budget exploitation films often in the horror genre, that engage a high level of cultural commitment and investment from its fans. It addresses wider issues of debate relating to why people are fans and whether they are anything more than obsessive in their consumption of media. The academic study of fandom is relatively a new area, the formative year being 1992 when studies such as Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers, Lisa Lewis’ The Adoring Audience and Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women approached fandom as a cultural activity. Studies such as these celebrate fandom and focus on fan production as a symbolic activity rather than an economic activity. Academics have only recently have academics recognised the commitment, time and effort that fans invest when producing artefacts. I explore the ways European cult cinema fandom might be understood as an alternative economy of fan production by looking at how fans produce artefacts and commodities. It uses a method of data collection, which includes ethnographic observation and interviews, focused on public offline and online fan activities, and my own personal experiences as autoethnography. The collected data is interrogated using a theoretical framework that incorporates ideas from cultural studies and political economy: using the concept of an ‘alternative economy’ of European cult cinema fan production. The purpose being to interpret an object of fandom as a production of meaning, physical artefacts and commodities, therefore understanding fandom as both cultural and economic production. I argue that, in this alternative economy, fans are ‘creative’ workers, using digital technologies to produce artefacts that are exchanged as gifts or commodities; this practice relating to repertoires of professionalism. I find that fans are not just producing artefacts and commodities relating to European cult cinema, but that through these processes they are culturally and economically making what has become known as European cult cinema.

The thesis describes a range of discourse on language in cinema as they have emerged in film reception, production and exhibition contexts in Europe, and assesses their implications for the critical construction of European cinema. The thesis argues that the ‘problem’ of language is constituted in a number of pervasive but seldom acknowledged discourses which have circumscribed the ways in which the category ‘European cinema’ is understood. The primary sources utilised in the research, which date from the 1920s to the present day, are film magazines and journals, trade journals, policy documents and interviews. The thesis pays particular attention to the exhibition and reception cultures surrounding ‘foreign-language films’ in Britain. It takes a historical approach in addressing the cineaste attitudes promoted in the magazines Close-Up and Sight and Sound, and reflects upon the reaction against the film appreciation tradition communicated by the journal Screen. The thesis also explores the positioning of European cinema at film festivals and contemplates the translation issues therein, including the contemporary correspondence between the practice of subtitling and rhetoric on the ‘original version’ and the culturally ‘authentic’ film. It examines how language is implicated in the argument for a ‘cultural exception’, which was used in defence of European film industries during the 1993 GATT negotiations, and considers how filmmakers in Denmark have attempted in their production activities to test the parameters of this discourse on exceptionality by producing Dogma ’95 and English-language ‘cross-over’ films. The thesis finally looks at the relationship between Scottish cinema exhibitors and the European Commission, organisations which are institutionally linked through the Europa Cinemas network, and suggests that a similar ethics of consumption is articulated by each with respect to European cinema. The thesis argues that while the status of European cinema as foreign-language cinema is rarely addressed, its framing as such nonetheless impinges significantly upon the ways in which European films are consumed.