Examines the American exploitation film blaxploitation, exploitation-horror and sexploitation between 1959-1977What is an exploitation film? 'The Style of Sleaze' reasons that the aesthetic and thematic approach of the key texts within three distinct exploitation demarcations blaxploitation, horror and sexploitation 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.