A 1945 sex-hygiene film was supposedly seen by one American in ten
Kroger Babb's Mom and Dad posed as moral instruction about an unplanned pregnancy, toured as a roadshow and ended up the third-highest earner of the 1940s. It set the template for exploitation cinema: cheap films that sell sensation, dodge the censors and grab whatever trend is hot.
Exploitation films chase profit through trends, niche genres and shock: sex, violence, drugs, destruction and the plain bizarre. Early examples appeared in the 1920s, and in the 1930s and 1940s many pretended to be educational so they could slip past censorship. Babb pushed his film hard, reportedly swamping towns with promotion and pioneering direct-mail advertising, and Time magazine claimed in 1949 that a tenth of people had seen it.
Hollywood's own rulebook shaped the genre by leaving a gap. The Hays Code of 1930 imposed strict limits on studio content until 1968, when a voluntary ratings system replaced it. Independent producers worked outside that system, treating controversy as free publicity and luring back audiences who had drifted to television. The 1950s brought monster movies and teen rebellion pictures; the collapse of the code in the 1960s opened the door to gore and nudity.
The 1970s are usually called the golden age. Films played in grindhouses, a name historian David Church traces to the 1920s grind policy of nonstop screenings at cut prices, and in struggling drive-ins that needed cheap content. Blaxploitation emerged early in that decade: Junius Griffin of the NAACP coined the word in 1972 while attacking the genre for racist stereotypes, yet films like Shaft (1971) put Black heroes at the centre and introduced funk and soul soundtracks. In Canada, a 1974 jump in a tax credit from 60 to 100 per cent spawned a rush of low-budget horror built to lose money.
Home video gave the form a new outlet in the early 1980s, but grindhouses faded from the mid-1980s and by the decade's end the films were becoming self-aware. The line between exploitation and art was always blurry: many art films banned under the code screened in the same seedy cinemas, and since the 1990s scholars have studied the whole field under the name paracinema.
Source: Exploitation film
