Midnight movie
Beginning in 1978, the Waverly developed another midnight success that was much smaller commercially, but more significant artistically: Eraserhead, originally distributed the previous year. of the official release date.Leading midnight movie venues were beginning to fold as early as 1977—that year, New York s Bijou switched back permanently to the live entertainment for which it had been built, and the Elgin, after a brief run with gay porn, shut down completely. In succeeding years, the popularization of the VCR and the expansion of movieviewing possibilities on cable television meant the death of many additional independent theaters.
While Rocky Horror soldiered on, by then a phenomenon unto itself, and new films like The Warriors (1979), The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), The Evil Dead (1981), Heavy Metal (1981), and Pink Floyd The Wall (1982)—all from mainstream distributors—were picked up by the midnight movie circuit, the core of exhibitors that energized the movement was disappearing. The Elgin, in New York City s Chelsea neighborhood, would soon become famous as a midnight venue when it gave the U.S.
Older films are also popular on the circuit, appreciated largely in an imposed camp fashion—a midnight movie tradition that goes back to the 1972 revival of the hectoring anti-drug movie Reefer Madness (1938). Two popular midnight movies made during the phenomenon s heyday have been selected to the National Film Registry: Eraserhead (inducted 2004) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (inducted 2005). David Lynch s feature debut, a model of shoestring surrealism, reaffirmed the midnight movie s most central traditions. The commercial viability of the sort of big-city arthouses that launched outsider pictures for the midnight movie circuit began to decline in the late 1970s as broad social and economic shifts weakened their countercultural base.
Starting at L.A. s KHJ-TV in 1981, Elvira s Movie Macabre was soon being syndicated nationally; Peterson presented mostly cut-rate horror films, interrupted on a regular basis for tongue-in-cheek commentary. Since at least as far back as the 1930s, exploitation films had sometimes been presented at midnight screenings, usually as part of independent roadshow operations. premiere of a very unusual Mexican movie directed and written by a rather Dalí-esque Chilean. The movie generally recognized as igniting the theatrical midnight film movement is Alejandro Jodorowsky s surrealist El Topo, which opened in December 1970 at the Elgin.
As a cinematic phenomenon, the midnight screening of offbeat movies began in the early 1970s in a few urban centers, particularly New York City, eventually spreading across the country. Harold and Maude, a cult film before it was adopted as a midnight movie, was also inducted in 1997. A distantly related phenomenon is the practice of premiering blockbuster films (e.g., the Lord of the Rings series, the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, the Star Wars prequels, the Spider-Man, Batman, and Harry Potter series) at midnight or 12:01 a.m.
Midnight movie staples Freaks (1932) and Night of the Living Dead (1968) were inducted in 1994 and 1997 respectively. The term midnight movie is rooted in the practice that emerged in the 1950s of local television stations around the United States airing low-budget genre films as late-night programming, often with a host delivering ironic asides.
Every Friday and Saturday night, audience members would talk back to the screen, dress up as characters in the film, and act out scenes complete with props. The format was echoed by stations across the country, who began showing their late-night B movies with in-character hosts such as Zacherley and Morgus the Magnificent offering ironic interjections. A quarter-century later, Cassandra Peterson established a persona that was essentially a ditzier, more buxom version of Vampira.
A celebrated episode of television s The Drew Carey Show features a song-and-dance battle between Rocky Horror fans (led by Drew Carey) and Priscilla fans (led by Mimi Bobeck). Since the turn of the millennium, the most notable success among newly minted midnight movies has been Donnie Darko (2001). As Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, Peterson became the most popular host in the arena of the TV midnight movie.
By the time the fabled Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shut its doors after a fire in 1986, the days of the theatrical midnight movie as a significant countercultural phenomenon were already past. In 1988, the midnight movie experience was institutionalized in a new manner with the introduction of the Toronto International Film Festival s nightly Midnight Madness section. The national success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the changing economics of the film exhibition industry altered the nature of the midnight movie phenomenon; as its association with broader trends of cultural and political opposition dwindled in the 1980s, the midnight movie became a more purely camp experience—in effect, bringing it closer to the television form that shares its name.
New Moon set records as the biggest midnight screening of all time with sales of $26.3 million on November 20, 2009. Published Online—Authored Online—Archival Film Cracking · Scene · Demos (Demoscene) .
The most successful of the 1990s generation was the Australian drag queen road saga The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). The screening of nonmainstream pictures at midnight was aimed at building a cult film audience, encouraging repeat viewing and social interaction in what was originally a countercultural setting.
In the years since, new or recent films still occasionally emerge as midnight movie hits on the circuit of theaters that continue to show them. Playing with the conventions of the spaghetti Western, the film was described by one newspaper critic as full of tests and riddles and more phony gore than maybe 20 years of The Wild Bunch. Shot over the winter of 1971–72, John Waters s filth epic Pink Flamingos, featuring incest and coprophagia, became the best known of a group of campy midnight films focusing on sexual perversions and fetishism. On the midnight following April Fool s Day 1976, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which had flopped on initial release the year before, opened at the Waverly Theater, a leading midnight movie venue in New York s Greenwich Village.
The term midnight movie is now often used in two different, though related, ways: as a synonym for B movie, reflecting the relative cheapness characteristic of late-night movies both theatrically and on TV, and as a synonym for cult film. In 1953, the Screen Actors Guild agreed to a residuals payment plan that greatly facilitated the distribution of B movies to television. Midnight screenings of the film soon became a national sensation, amassing a cult following all over the United States.
One of the theaters to show it regularly at midnight was New York s Waverly (also now closed), where Rocky Horror had played for a house record ninety-five weeks.
