Cult classics happen mostly by accident. When Faye Dunaway showed up to set back in 1981 and bellowed that now-infamous line—“No wire hangers!”—she was under the impression she was contributing to a serious-minded portrait of Joan Crawford; she didn’t expect to inspire generations of drag queens. A decade and a half later, the filmmakers behind Empire Records made a movie they hoped would connect with disaffected mid-’90s teens, likely unaware that those kids would hold onto it tightly into adulthood. In 2001, as writers David Wain and Michael Showalter watched their goofy comedy Wet Hot American Summer tank with critics and at the box office, they never could have expected the film would become so popular one day that Netflix would ask them to make a prequel series. Cult films like these don’t always find an audience immediately, but by some happy accident—or the serendipitous positioning of a VHS case on a Blockbuster shelf—an audience eventually finds them. It’s a devoted audience, too, one often made of people whose tastes lie on the margins of the mainstream. (And finding a movie to love and others who love it as much as you do can be a reminder that you’re not so marginal after all.) The films in this chapter range from the “cult classics” that defined the term (LGBTQ favorites like Valley of the Dolls, Mommie Dearest) to newer titles that have found their tribes online (like the Will Forte comedy MacGruber, which Chicago critic Nathan Rabin writes on, and teen witch flick The Craft, in which Empire editor-in-chief Terri White finds a thrilling feminist rage). These are the films that live on in yearly Halloween costumes and at riotous midnight screenings, in widely shared GIFs, and deep in the hearts of their cultishly devoted fans—regardless of how splat-worthy critics may think they are.