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While the 1970s might have been the golden era of cult classic movies (with the release of three of the most important cult films of all time, El Topo, Pink Flamingos, and Eraserhead), there were also some great cult classics from the previous decade, the 1960s. While there were so many great cult classics of the '60s, it's impossible to list them all here. Nonetheless, some incredible films deserve an honorable mention, such as Barbarella, Blood Feast, The Wizard of Gore, 2,000 Maniacs, Putney Swope, and Peeping Tom. Here is a look at just a few of the best.
Updated June 2023: If you're a fan of cult classics from the '60s, you're in luck. This article has been updated with additional content and entries by Rachel Johnson.
12 A Fistful of Dollars
Sergio Leone directed and Clint Eastwood stars in A Fistful of Dollars, one of the first-ever spaghetti Westerns. It’s a fantastic film with an unforgettable soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, who has scored so many classics. There is a town in Mexico that is controlled by two feuding crime groups. They are both ruthless and corrupt.
Clint Eastwood’s character, who has no name and is not very talkative or social, works for one group, and then the other, switching loyalties and creating quite a body count (and making a lot of money as well), decimating the bad men who run the town in this early twist on the classic Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo. Eastwood's unnamed character has a distinctive look with a poncho and a thin brown cigar. He is as ruthless, if not more so, than the inept gangsters who run the town. Eastwood is perfect in this film, the first in a trilogy.
11 Night of the Living Dead
Night of the Living Dead isn’t the first zombie film, but it is arguably the most incredible and the most important and scary one ever made. More than that, it is one of the best horror movies ever made, and in general, one of the best films ever made. As ghouls rise from the ground, a group of strangers barricaded in a farmhouse fight themselves, fighting more with each other than with their mutual enemy, the zombies.
It’s a great analogy about humankind’s tendency to divide into groups and resort to macho violence, and it is no coincidence the film coincided with the Vietnam War. The lead character is a Black man, just one of the many reasons this film can be considered ahead of its time. There’s a sick girl who is kept in the basement, and she eventually dies and returns as a ghoul, attacking her parents in one of the scariest scenes in the film. The ending is pessimistic, cynical, and sad, and matches the political tone of the film.
10 The Producers
The iconic Mel Brooks made his directorial debut when he helmed the satirical black comedy The Producers, enlisting the talent of Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, and Kenneth Mars to star in the uproarious classic flick. After down-and-out Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Mostel) concocts a grand scheme to reclaim his fortune with the help of his anxious accountant Leo Bloom (Wilder), the plotting duo set out to create the worst stage play ever assembled in order to get rich quickly and scam potential investors. Max and Leo decide to create "Springtime for Hitler," a play that celebrates both Hitler and the Nazis, unsurprisingly causing mass outrage and chaos in the process.
Like its ill-conceived play premise, The Producers sparked quite the controversy upon its release, with many expressing their disdain at the time over the tasteless theme and insensitivity of Brooks. Nonetheless, a great deal of critics and fans enjoyed the daring humor and zany nature of the comedy, with the cherished director adopting his zany approach to filmmaking that fans know and love. Brooks won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and the farce went on to receive far more positive praise retrospectively and has since established itself as an influential cult flick.
9 Shock Corridor
Shock Corridor is a radical film way ahead of its time, dealing with sexual fetishes, incest, racism, mental illness, nuclear war, and a whole host of social issues and problems. It is based somewhat on the case of Nellie Bly, a reporter who was committed to an insane asylum so she could report on the horrible conditions there. Jack is a reporter out to get a Pulitzer Prize and his wife is a risqué burlesque dancer. He gets admitted to a mental hospital where a murder occurred to try and find the culprit. He does this by claiming to have incestuous desires for his sister (who is actually his wife). Once in the institution though, he himself goes insane.
The other patients are all bizarre and represent modern cultural conflicts. One patient was the first Black person to go to an all-white school, where the pressure was too much, and he turns into a Black hating racist who dresses up in KKK garb. The idea of a sane person entering a mental hospital on a false pretense has been used many times, for example in American Horror Stories: Asylum. In one wild (triggering) scene, Jack is gang-raped by a group of nymphomaniac mental patients. They gather around him like zombies feasting on a meal.
8 Carnival of Souls
Carnival of Souls is an eerie, bizarre, dream-like surrealist horror film from director Herk Harvey. The director, unfortunately, only directed one film. The film has a plot similar to an episode of The Twilight Zone, in which a woman in a car repeatedly sees the same hitchhiker, which is an impossibility. At the end of the episode, and at the end of the film, we find out what is really going on. In a like manner, the lead of Carnival of Souls sees the same creep over and over; she can never get ahead of him.
At the beginning of the film, she gets into a car accident where her car plunges into water. In one unforgettable scene, she goes deaf, and the film is silent for around twenty minutes — all very surreal and terrifying. In another scene, no one is able to hear her, as if she has become mute (or dead). She plays dark dirge-like music for a church bathing the film in haunting sounds. Numerous directors have cited this film as an influence.
7 The Wild Bunch
The Wild Bunch is a huge influence on many modern filmmakers, from Quentin Tarantino to John Woo. It’s a revisionist Western from Sam Peckinpah that contains outrageous violence. People are shot in slow motion as they ride their horses and their bodies go flying violently to the ground, blood everywhere, in a film that displayed epic and balletic violence long before any others. A group of six men is determined to commit one last crime and then give up their ways, pursued by a bounty hunter. This film and Bonnie and Clyde are frequently cited as bringing more explicit violence to the screen.
6 Point Blank
Revered as both a cinematic masterpiece and rightfully dubbed "the perfect thriller in both form and vision," John Boorman's crime film Point Blank stars Oscar-winner Lee Marvin as a calculating criminal who sets out to get revenge on the man who left him for dead and stole a large sum of money. The taut and gripping thriller touts a fractured timeline that leaves audiences wondering what is real and what isn't by the end of the picture, and Marvin delivers a compelling and dimensional performance as the vengeance-seeking crook.
Point Blank was lauded for its stylistic approach to storytelling and film noir elements, and was influential due to its use of pops of monochromatic color that helped give the events a "sort of unreality." Many critics were blown away by its experimental approach to the revenge trope and were impressed by Marvin and Boorman's visual achievements and imagination, both of which helped make the movie a massive cinematic achievement that is still significant to this day.
5 Spider Baby
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Jack Hill’s Spider Baby was Lon Chaney Jr.’s last film and features a young Sid Haig (now known for playing Captain Spaulding in the Rob Zombie Firefly Family films, such as House of 1,000 Corpses). It is an odd and sad story, which is fitting as Chaney never appeared in another film. Spider Baby is about a bizarre and dysfunctional family, with members who suffer from a rare genetic syndrome that causes them to become more childlike once they hit their teenage years. The devolution is both mental and physical.
Lon Chaney, Jr. takes care of their kids and drives them around. One of the daughters is known as Spider Baby for her obsession with bugs and spiders, which includes eating them, as well as setting up spiderweb-like traps that are capable of killing people. When a lawyer turns up, things go downhill as people realize that there is something seriously wrong with the family. Fitting the definition of cult classics, Spider Baby did poorly at the time of release and only after years did it achieve cult status. The characters, the action, and the plot are all bonkers, and the amazing performances make this strange film realistic and depressing.
4 Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Russ Meyer’s over-the-top film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, about three tough-as-nails women who go around terrorizing people is an outrageous and at times campy experience. Meyer was most famous for his obsession with big-bosomed women and the ladies in this film are both buxom and terrifying, a gang of ruthless criminals who kill and maim for fun and for kicks. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! has intense fight scenes between a man and a woman where the woman ends up destroying the man, which is still rare today. In fact, in one fight, Tura Santana (as Varla, the leader) beats a drag racer to death.
Then the trio of women kidnaps his girlfriend and travels to the estate of a rich elderly pervert to get his money. The old man has sinister intentions regarding the hostage, who begs the old man’s son for help escaping his horny pervert father and the trio of psychopathic vixens. Meyer’s film has cult classic written all over it as the movie becomes more and more bizarre and violent. Varla is one of the most amazing female characters ever seen in a film. This is a true exploitation film in every possible way and is mandatory viewing for those who love cult films, especially the sleazy kind. If you like seeing big women beat men to death and have a great time doing so, this is the film for you.
3 2001: A Space Odyssey
Many people call 2001: A Space Odyssey the ultimate cult film, and some consider it one of the best Stanley Kubrick films. It has a legendary opening sequence with monkeys who learn to fight when some alien power plants an obelisk before them. Much later in the film the obelisk is seen on the moon. The plot involves a manned space flight that is under the command of HAL 9000, a computer with artificial intelligence who is mad for power and attempts to kill Keir Dullea’s character.
HAL is scary, monitoring everything, even reading lips when the men talk quietly about what to do, and so he is a “Big Brother” figure who sees all and controls all and eventually declares war on the humans in the craft. Describing the plot does little to explain how great this movie is. 2001: A Space Odyssey is so masterfully choreographed that it is one of the most beautiful films of all time. The ending of the film cannot be described other than to say that watching it is an experience you will never forget. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a mind-blowing film.
2 Easy Rider
Undeniably one of the most significant and influential independent films of all time, Dennis Hopper's legendary road drama Easy Rider has long since been lauded for being a landmark counterculture movie that features the actor-turned-director appearing alongside Hollywood heavyweights Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. In the Oscar-nominated picture, biker hippies Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) embark on a cross-country journey from Los Angeles down to New Orleans on a spiritual quest after earning a massive payout for smuggling cocaine from Mexico into the country.
Along the way, the duo crosses paths with a colorful assortment of unforgettable characters that alter their personal beliefs and opinions of the world and themselves, notably meeting the booze-loving lawyer George (Nicholson) and taking him under their wing. Easy Rider was one of a few noteworthy films of the decade that helped spearhead the New Hollywood Era, during which up-and-coming filmmakers first emerged including Francis Ford Coppola, John Carpenter, Woody Allen, and Martin Scorsese.
1 The Conqueror Worm (Witchfinder General)
The Conqueror Worm (also known as Witchfinder General) is one of the most nihilistic, pessimistic films ever made. Its young director died at just age 25, and this was his last film. Vincent Price plays historic witch hunter Matthew Hopkins, traveling from city to city, trying and executing local witches. This is a different Vincent Price than we are used to. Even at his worst, his characters usually have a sense of humor. Not so in this film, where he plays an extremely severe and moralistic monster, mastering this evil and horrible character.
One man seeking revenge hunts down Matthew Hopkins for a final confrontation which is nihilist as we can’t ever feel the joy that someone finally stops Hopkins. It is not clear from historical records how the real Matthew Hopkins died, but many people claim he was executed in the same fashion as his victims. In this film, we really see just how amazing Vincent Price is as an actor. Instead of cheering his evil antics on as usual, we just want him to die as he travels along with his sadistic sidekick killing and raping scores of innocent people.