I always find it interesting to see the latest sleeper movie reach "cult classic" status topic percolate. Recently, that candidate has been District 9. Yes, that movie, the one with the bumbling South African bureaucrat who ends up becoming one of the unwanted himself as well. It was a commentary on both the old South African apartheid system as well as the trend of human beings regularly treating the down and out as less than worthy living beings.

A good number of earlier cinema greats ended up being so popular, then justified franchise returns years later. Blade Runner was probably the most impactful, especially in the dystopian realistic future category. Given world population growth and the overwhelming dictatorial march of corporations and their CEOs, that future vision isn't so far away from today.

Of course, the main question is why these movies weren't big hits when they came out. Well, they were, just to the wrong crowd. The mainstream crowd at the time for Blade Runner was adults in the early to mid-1980s. Star Wars had already redefined cinema sci-fi, and actors like Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford desperately wanted something grittier than a predictable hero-badguy tale. Blade Runner was the perfect anti-hero story, with the "bad guys" really just being sentient robots who wanted to live free, and humans being the actual evil characters hunting them down. 

District 9 followed the same theme, humans again in normal jobs acting out horrible crimes copied from the Holocaust and ghettos, but seemingly they were in the right until they were not. I takes a bit of time for society to catch up to movies like these, especially when they involve looking in the societal mirror and realizing the monster is "you."

The ultimate package in this genre of movie making is, of course, 1984. A cinematic translation of George Orwell's classic (which is now 75 years old btw), 1984 was the ultimate view of the world gone bad for the individual and free thought. In fact, the story was so influential, George Lucas did his own version of 1984 in the 1970s with the release of THX-1138 (1971). John Hurt's acting in the movie, across the table from Richard Burton, was amazing in its simplicity and visual mind-slamming of how bad life could get in the modern world. The same movie comes up again and again with re-releases, and I can bet it will surface again with a new following over the next year or two. 

And if you get scared watching them, you were paying attention to the details. Good job!