Wrestling women against the industrial crisis: exploiting the productivity of a subgenre

Abstract

We will analyze a cycle of films that exploited the popularity of horror and wrestling films to launch a variant based on the figures of female wrestlers, which had their scope between the sixties and seventies. We will delineate the generic hybridization as a distinctive feature for the development of plots, the use of wrestling iconography for the attraction of television and graphic media to cinema, in a movement implanted in the phenomenon of intermediality and mass culture, and the acquisition of some films by American producers for the realization of export versions. This phenomenon can be explained in its interest to consolidate the establishment of a cinema aimed at popular taste, standardized in its narrative and staging, and produced as an echo of the success of the wrestlers' cinema, whose productivity was in force at that time.