Dr Calum Waddel's research is largely focused on so-called "lowbrow" cinema and what such films might tell us about place, representation and history. His first book "The Style of Sleaze, The American Exploitation Film 1959-1977" argues that American exploitation cinema be seen as a stylistic movement within cinema history. He drew further on this research by identifying Blaxploitation cinema's many transnational adaptations in apartheid-era South Africa with his monograph "Images of Apartheid: Filmmaking on the Fringe in Old South Africa". In this study, he argues that South African Blaxploitation should be belatedly accepted as an identifiable form of paracinematic engagement that localises some of the key tropes of the most famous American films, albeit often for problematic and propagandistic purposes. He continues his study of "lowbrow" cinema in South Africa with the book "South African Horror Cinema" for Bloomsbury Academic.
He has also written about race-representations and misrepresentation of ethnicity and location in mondo documentary and the Italian cannibal-horror film filone, which has been broadened by his production work on Blu-rays of many of the key motion pictures in this field. As a documentary maker much of his work has been distributed on American streaming channels such as Tubi and Night Flight Plus via the Oscar winning editor Bob Murawski. This includes his award-winning documentary on apartheid-era Blaxploitation cinema in South Africa .