Basically I meant anything featuring teenage characters that was sufficiently "quirky" and either originated outside of the major studios or became a remarkably bigger success on home video than it was in theaters.
There were more of them that became cult classics in the '80s for sure, with the slasher genre in full swing and everybody trying to cash in on the popularity of John Hughes movies (which would be too mainstream for this particular group, as great as some of them are).
'90s? Dazed & Confused definitely qualifies, as does Election which I mentioned. Possibly Superstar and The Faculty. Scream and Clueless both feature some of the attributes I'm looking for in these types of films, but both were big mainstream successes right out of the gate and quickly led to high-profile sequels and/or TV shows.
2000s? I'd say Wet Hot American Summer and Napoleon Dynamite, possibly Juno which is certainly quirky but probably wouldn't be considered a cult film after being embraced by the Oscars.
I can't really think of any from this decade so far. I enjoyed The Dirties which Kevin Smith distributed through Smodcast Pictures, but I haven't really heard anybody else so much as mention it. Last year's The Final Girls has a shot at being a cult classic, but only time will tell. The closest thing to what I'm talking about this decade may be Kick-Ass. But in general these types of movies aren't made that much these days. Hollywood would rather make sequels and remakes of everything. Most of the original ideas have migrated to TV or to independent cinema, where the proliferation of digital cinematography has made it easier than ever before for somebody to make a movie and harder than ever before for that movie to stand out from the pack and actually develop a fan base.
"Once a decade" may have been an exaggeration, but the fact remains that there aren't that many of them, especially over the past two decades.
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