Interestingly there is not mention of Scorpio Rising in this article, but it does offer insight into the sensationalist modes of biker movies of the 1950’s, 60’s, and early 70’s. The interest in motorcycle gangs arose most significantly with the emergence of the infamous Hell’s Angels in the mid-1960’s. These bikers gained notoriety through the media, and it was press stories that aided in the creation of biker movies. These movies often used other genres as templates, especially the western, and this fusion led to confusion.
    The media gave the group great publicity by making known to the public the sensational exploits of the outlaw bikers. Mainstream media created the public image of motorcycle clubs when they further depicted the bikers as savage brutes threatening civilized society. News coverage presented very deviant actions of the Angels who enjoyed playing up to their immoral reputation against conservative, middle class society, and a Newsweek article even speculated on their homosexuality. These press stories were transformed into biker movies that heavily relied on media coverage for their story. The release of The Wild Angels in 1966 was met by great success, and this began the trend of a cycle of films on outlaw biker gangs continuing up until the early 1970’s.
These exploitation movies often made use of other genres as narratives and templates, such as themes of war, gangsters or cops. The most commonly used template was the western in which overt parallels were drawn between outlaw biker gangs and outlaws of the Old West. The author attributes the failure of exploitation cinema to exist for an extended time particularly to their fusion of news reports and movie genres. This synthesis of two separate, established forms of media, which have their own distinct and independent structures of semantics and syntax, result in conflict and confusion, and lends to the fact that exploitation films failed to develop their own stable structures.
    The outlaw biker film came out of the negative media publicity of biker gangs, especially Hell’s Angels. Exploitation films have failed to make use of the deeper structures of meaning of the genres that they employ, resulting in confusion and leaving biker gangs elusive and contradictory.