What is an exploitation film? The Style of Sleaze reasons that the aesthetic and thematic approach of the key texts within three distinct exploitation demarcations 8211 blaxploitation, horror and sexploitation 8211 indicate a concurrent evolution of filmmaking that could be seen as an identifiable cinematic movement Offering a fresh perspective on studies of marginal cinema, The Style of Sleaze maintains that defining exploitation cinema as a vaguely attributed excess is unhelpful, and instead concludes that this period in American film history produced a number of the most transgressive, and yet morally complex, motion pictures ever made