Defined this way, Ed Wood, who, by consensus, is considered the worst director ever, is actually a pretty good filmmaker with a strong body of work. Wood, with his pulpy fascination with the occult, sci-fi, and skin flicks, did an extraordinary job of channeling the vast pool of muck that’s been a fertile source for American pop culture since the beginning of the Industrial Era and the rise of the big cities. Yes, it’s raw—but it’s also unfiltered, and there’s a considerable virtue in that.

And to make the key point, we’re only able to bully Wood and his films because they’re actually entertaining. If he wasn’t able to engage and hold an audience, Plan 9 or Glen or Glenda or Bride of the Monster or The Sinister Urge wouldn’t be on anybody’s lists because we would have been bored or repelled and unlikely to even remember their names, let alone their plots or favorite scenes.

Ditto for Manos. It’s exactly because Harold P. Warren was a fertilizer salesman who had never made a movie in his life and only made this one as part of a bet that he couldn’t get too fancy and had to stick to an unvarnished tale from the dark undercurrents of the culture. Sure, just about everything about the film is inept—or, to quote MST3K, “there’s a buffet of loathsomeness in this movie”—but once we start watching it, we don’t turn away. It could be argued that’s because it gives us something to feel superior to, but that just underlines my point about the dubiousness of the whole “worst of” thing.

When we ridicule a “bad” movie, we get the high that comes with thinking we’re owning it. But we’re actually the ones being owned, duped as easily as a bunch of rubes at a county fair. The world of “worst ever” is actually a Potemkin village erected to divert your attention from the fact you’re being tricked into paying to watch a bunch of movies you otherwise would never go near. Like almost everything in contemporary culture, it’s all just a marketing exercise, and whether it’s some mega-budget effects-laden action film or some made-on-a-dime exploitation throwaway from the ‘50s is irrelevant. Your money still ends up in somebody else’s pocket. (The irony is that something like Jail Bait will always have a way longer shelf life than the blockbusters that make $250 million their first weekend then disappear forever.)

Let’s not be so smug. Let’s stop treating the past as in some way inferior—less enlightened, less accomplished, or whatever than the present. There is nothing in human history (or human nature) to support that position—just the money-mad need to make us believe we’re somehow better than our forebears so we’ll more readily snap up the cultural equivalent of junk food. The next time you come across Manos or Ed Wood or Coleman Francis or Bert I. Gordon (even I hesitated to type that last one), give them the benefit of the doubt. Put yourself in their shoes and look at their work on their terms instead of the way the carnies want you to see it. You’ll be doing all of filmmaking a huge favor.