What makes donnie darko a cult film

According to Flickering Myth , Kelly told his dissenters, "No, it has to be in ! It has to be October of , in the build-up before the Bush-Dukakis election.

Donnie Darko was hailed as a testament to the '80s. Long before the nostalgia for sci-fi yesteryears spawned the release of series like Stranger Things , Donnie Darko set the standard. The giant bunny rabbit who stalks Donnie Darko throughout the film refers to himself as Frank.

The ominous character is inspired by Richard Adams's dystopian novel Watership Down. In Watership Down , anthropomorphic rabbits in southern England sort out a new life for themselves after their natural habitat is ruined. The book is interpreted as a giant metaphor for the human experience. Donnie Darko was released on October 26, , in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

In was shown on just 58 screens across the US over its opening weekend, which led to a lackluster debut. In it, the actor describes his experience making the film. Gyllenhaal was just coming onto the scene when he made the film.

In his forward, Gyllenhaal explains he still doesn't really understand Donnie Darko , but he thinks the film isn't meant to be understood. Gyllenhaal loves the elusive, philosophical undercurrents that make the film so perplexing and compelling. The home media formats earned millions. A double-disc director's cut also proved to be a massive success. In , filmmaker Chris Fisher released S. Donnie Darko is a densely layered story which touches on many themes, including sacrifice, destiny, and the power of art.

The film is withering in its contempt for sanctimonious hypocrites who peddle feel-good nonsense. He hopes the continued success of Donnie Darko will allow him to explore his political ideas even further in future films.

And check out some highlights from the discussion below. We obviously have things like drone strikes now. I want it to kind of wash over the viewer and leave them a little dizzy. A lot of people go to the theater and they want everything spelled out. They want to know exactly what happened, and then they want to go to dinner, or they want to go have a drink, and move on with their lives.

And it flopped. The finances tell a story - the story of why a movie now regarded as a paragon of early Noughties independent film was such a turkey. The fact that the pervasively grim Donnie Darko, with its plot about a falling jet engine, was released barely a month after the 11 September attacks in the United States must have played a part.

Bob Berney of Newmarket says: "I think the key factor was the bleak mood and the timing. I also think some critics either just didn't get it or weren't in the mood to accept it. The mood filtered through everything. But that explanation cuts only so much ice. Reviewers, in general, were impressed, if not entirely fanatical. They liked the opaqueness of the approach, the strangely pertinent references to David Lynch suburbia and comic-book superheroes, the lack of closure.

Take this from The Village Voice: "A wondrous, moodily self-involved piece of work that employs X-Files magic realism to galvanise what might have been a routine tale of suburban teen angst - OK, borderline schizophrenia. Part comic book, part case study, this is certainly the most original and venturesome American indie film I've seen this year. The reason Donnie Darko flopped at the cinema was, quite simply, that its target demographic, teenagers and young adults, didn't go to see it.

Instead, they waited for the darkness of the bedroom or a parent-free house to let Frank and Donnie into their lives. Ever since, particularly in the US, the internet has been awash with theory and counter-theory about what actually happens in the film, and why. One post demands another. There are now hundreds of websites devoted entirely to the phenomenon of Donnie Darko.

An undergraduate course in the film can be only round the corner. Four years after first release, the cult of Darko has never been stronger. It would take more hours than one is here on this earth to read the wealth of web-based literature devoted to the iconography of Frank the Rabbit, or the significance of worm holes, or the philosophy of time travel.

But merely dipping one's toe in the Darko ocean is enough to scare a surfer witless. The Artefact as explained in the book The Philosophy of Time Travel is usually metal, and its whereabouts cannot be explained. The jet engine that crashes into Donnie's house is the artefact Well, of course it does, Frank. He signs off: "As of October , I am taking no more submissions for theories or ideas on this movie. These are my opinions only. Live with it. On another site dedicated to Jake Gyllenhaal's contribution to Donnie Darko, Alice from Ontario voices her own plangent take on the penultimate scene of the theatre release, when the cover of the Tears for Fears song "Mad World" is played.

The only ones who seem to be happy are together Maybe the alone characters represent us