Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream (2005)

Fascinating look into the ‘midnight movie’ phenomenon of the 1970’s, and the films that made it happen. The documentary is primarily the story of six movies, the giants of the midnight circuit, which launched careers and influenced the pervasive irony of modern cinema from art house to blockbuster. The first ‘real midnight movie’ was the 1970 Mexican film El Topo. A sort of Siddhartha meets Spaghetti western with traces of Todd Brownings Freaks (which also had much success in a second run as a midnight movie), it’s the story a Mexican gun man turned religious figure/revolutionary. The movie didn’t do very well until a New York City theater owner decided to show it at midnight after all his other shows were done. It became a phenomena, playing for six months to packed houses, and only taken from midnight showings when John Lennon arranged for an ultimately short lived mainstream re-release; it would be back playing around the county at midnight in short order.

Other important midnight movies include Night of The Living Dead, made by a group of Pittsburg friends and released in 1968, it didn’t gain cult statues until the studio accidentally let the copyright expire and it could be played basically for free across the county. John Waters first widely shown film, Pink Flamingos (1972) celebrated filth and united alienated sub cultures likes gays and hippies. The Harder They Come (1973) the first film made in Jamaica about Jamaicans was a sort of gangster picture that brought about something of a Reggae craze in the United States. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) show became maybe the most famous and successful of the midnight movies, with hordes of devotees that have turned its midnight showings into an interactive experience with special props, costumes, and lots of ‘speaking to the screen’. Finally David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead (1977) was unlike anything anybody had seen. A fascinating though loosely defined school of film, midnight movies (which would often play for years in the same theater) have largely dissipated as a collective experience since the 1980’s and the rise of home video; but the practice of midnight showings is still commonly revived for the initial release of expected block busters (its self sort of ironic). A fun informative documentary about some of cinema’s most significant ’cult films’. 4 out of 5.