Keyvan Sarkhosh and Winfried Menninghaus of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics have legitimized your cinematic guilty pleasures.

Their study, “Enjoying trash films: Underlying features, viewing stances, and experiential response dimensions”, published in Poetics 57, is the first scholarly study of otherwise unredeemable movies.

For instance, in discussing Sharknado, they say:

“Apart from flying sharks, blood and guts are the main ingredients of this surprise trash hit. At first glance it seems paradoxical that someone should deliberately watch badly made, embarrassing and sometimes even disturbing films, and take pleasure in them. To such viewers, trash films appear as an interesting and welcome deviation from the mainstream fare. We are dealing here with an audience with above-average education, which one could describe as ‘cultural omnivores’. Such viewers are interested in a broad spectrum of art and media across the traditional boundaries of high and popular culture.”

My take: Sometimes you just have to see a bad movie to put the better ones into perspective.