This week’s class focused on the idea of Exploitation Cinema and we used the film Dawn of The Dead as a vehicle to aide our discussion of this concept. Exploitation Cinema or an Exploitation Film is any film or cinematic piece that exploits a current trend that is present in society at the time. Exploitation films tend to exploit the trends and ideas of Sex (Sexploitation Cinema, Violence (Slasher Films), and romance.

Exploitation Films tend to explore the more taboo topics that are found to be circulating around society at the time and are quite often low budget films. In order to aid our understanding of Exploitation Cinema, we were shown a couple of sequences of Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) which falls under the ‘Sexploitation’ category. This film, like many of Meyer’s films, focusses on the voluptuous qualities of women, using low angles to accentuate their breasts and endowing them with amazonian like stature.

Many exploitation films such as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and Suspiria (1977) were only shown in ‘Adult’ or ‘Grindhouse’ cinemas, which specialise in exhibiting exploitation films as they usually had strict age restrictions.