Don't let the title fool you. This isn't a book just about fandom, nor is it a book about European cult cinema. Instead, this is a book about how and why people make ‘things’, approaching the enterprise of fans as an ‘alternative economy’. I use this term alternative economy to indicate the existence of a parallel economy, or what is often termed as a grey market, where produced artefacts are exchanged as gifts and/or commodities. Colin Williams (2006, p.1) uses the term ‘underground economy’ when describing what he refers to as hidden enterprise culture, or ‘off-the-books’ business. Williams believes that the underground economy has been all but ignored in accounts of enterprise culture, being viewed as improper or illegal; yet he notes that many enterprises started by being underground before becoming legitimate businesses. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to consider how the practices of fans, which result in the formation of enterprises, can be understood as an alternative economy.

To do this, I focus on a specific fandom: European cult cinema. I choose this fandom for three specific reasons. Firstly, the majority of current academic work focuses on European cult cinema as a fan object, rather than questioning how it emerged and has been made significant. Secondly, the fan practices relating to European cult cinema are not unique to European cult cinema fandom; they are evident in other fandoms. Thirdly, as a fan of European cult cinema, this book emerges out of my own practices as a fan producer; a reflexive position that I will later demonstrate as being advantageous in both investigating and understanding practices that take place in an alternative economy.

So, how does this work relate to my own fandom? Well, in 1996 I read a review of a film named Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975) in a 1994 issue of the British horror magazine The Dark Side (Martin, 1994). Being a teenage cult film fan, the lurid representations of murder and the challenging ‘whodunnit’ aspect of the film described in the review, led me to seek the film out.