What is a “grindhouse” movie?
Any fan of Quentin Tarantino will be familiar with the term “grindhouse”. But the idea of grindhouse cinema goes back much further than the Death Proof director. In fact, the term is almost as old as cinema itself, dating back to 1923. Grindhouse movies have played an integral role in shaping cinema history, even though they occupied the margins.
Tarantino might have lost a considerable amount of money on his own Grindhouse project in collaboration with Robert Rodriguez despite the star names the two directors managed to attract. But the original idea of grindhouse cinema was all about making money by the most direct means necessary.
Just like cabaret promoters before them, cinema managers and the studio distributors they worked with were looking squarely at the bottom line. And so, they looked to appeal to the lowest common denominator with the cheapest forms of motion picture they could produce.
The idea was to show movies made on a shoestring with zero concern for artistry earlier in the day than bigger-budget box-office draws in the evening. These matinee showings would cost a pittance, opening them up to a demographic of people who otherwise couldn’t afford to go to the pictures on a regular basis. To entice punters, what the grindhouse films lacked in quality, they made up for in titillation by showcasing brutally violent or sexually suggestive imagery.
But why’s it called “grindhouse”?
The early grindhouse cinemas of New York were named as such, not because of the verging-on pornographic content they sometimes showed, as is often suggested. Nor does the name have anything to do with the “bump and grind” of burlesque cabaret shows they’d replaced as cheap entertainment.
Instead, the “grind” part of their nickname originated from a slang term for the shouts and body language of the barking show announcers, who would stand outside cinemas trying to grab people’s attention and lead them inside. The name stuck, and by the 1970s, the apocryphal origin of the term seemed much more appropriate.
42nd Street in Manhattan became synonymous with a whole strip of grindhouses, which showed movies unrated for their excessive gore and unfiltered sex scenes. In Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, we see Travis Bickle frequenting one of these cinemas, and his love interest Betsy instantly recoils in horror when she realises Travis wants to take her there.
Grindhouses were a key feature of the notorious New York depicted in New Hollywood. Some of the movies they showed during that decade have inspired Tarantino and other filmmakers to produce highly stylised films with openly exploitative elements.
Indeed, the term “grindhouse” has become synonymous with exploitation cinema since grindhouses were primarily where the first self-consciously exploitative movies of the 1960s and ‘70s were shown.
Any movie today which relies on sex or violence as an integral element of its aesthetic or narrative approach owes a debt to these movies and the cinemas that housed them half a century after they first appeared.
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