Abstract
Genre film festivals are contested cultural spaces where curatorial decision-making and subcultural fandom intersect in complex ways, presenting genres frequently dismissed as lying outside the boundaries of 'good taste' to a wide and diverse public. These events form a subcircuit that partially operates outside the broader film festival network, and function as hybrid sites where the boundaries between spectatorship, performance, and fandom become fluid. While film festival studies has expanded significantly over the past two decades, genre film festivals remain a largely understudied area, despite more than one hundred such events taking place across Europe alone. This research investigates how curatorial decision-making at European genre film festivals connects to community building, festival network hierarchies, and cultural legitimation, employing a qualitative approach combining semi-structured interviews with organisers and programmers, ethnographic fieldwork at five festivals, and an audience study of the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival. The study addresses questions about which festivals function as nodal points of influence and taste-making, how curation builds and sustains subcultures and how programmers navigate tensions between subcultural authenticity and institutional legitimation.
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