Midnight Movies

Starz Home Entertainment

R1 DVD

Released in Australia by Roadshow

R4 DVD

Midnight Movies from the Margin to the Mainstream is an 86 minute documentary charting the development of Midnight movies with a focus on six key films. It includes interviews with a range of key directors, distributors and filmmakers as well as extensive clips from each film.

The film opens with an exploration of El Topo by Alejandro Jodorowsky. El Topo is a marvellously enigmatic film mixing a spaghetti western plot with violent, sexual and ritual content. Its foreign exoticism made it a unique unusual film and it was not well received in the general cinema market. Accordingly the Elgin Theatre decided to try it at midnight, marketing the film to the college student audience and the Midnight movie was born. The first showings had little success, but soon patrons were lined up around the block.

While many other films were used within the Midnight movie slot such as Freaks by Todd Browning and even Witchcraft Through the Ages with a commentary by William Burroughs, none were especially successful. The next big discovery was The Night of the Living Dead. Romero took the classic zombie horror film and took it one step further with extreme gore (for the time), a political message and a palatable sense of terror. It was an instant success.

As New Line Cinema searched around for new films to distribute they came across the old drug paranoia title Reefer Madness which became a great Midnight classic. At the same time they were contacted by an unknown young filmmaker, John Waters, from Baltimore with a film called Multiple Maniacs, while interested they passed, asking him to send on a more polished production. Waters next film, Pink Flamingos, shocked and horrified a nation. Considered the filthiest film ever made, it has singing arsehole, shit eating drag queens and everything in-between. It is still considered the most outrageous Midnight movie ever made and put New Line Cinema on the map.

Strangely Pink Flamingos was followed by a very different sort of Midnight movie. The Harder They Come was a Jamaican made film which brought Reggae to America and set the stage for Bob Marley arriving on U.S. Soil.

One of the best known Midnight movies which also crossed over into mainstream cinema was The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A bizarre, sexually ambiguous celebration of difference it developed from a live show into a failed Hollywood musical. However when the film hit the Midnight circuit it developed fan clubs across the world and has continued to be the longest running Midnight movie ever released. Its musical mix of glam and punk has continued to spawn all manner of new adaptations as well as re-enactment clubs and audience participation nights.

Eraserhead by David Lynch is considered the last true Midnight movie. It was very different from what had gone before. A bleak art film with an industrial score, it was a very slow-mover and only became a success due to the dogged persistence of the distribution companies and its promotion by John Waters.

As home video became a new form of distribution, the time of the Midnight movie passed. Soon cult films could be enjoyed in the privacy of your own home and while the joy of watching a strange film with friends at a midnight showing may have passed, new digitally remastered of rare films, now available on DVD, means they can survive the ravages of time forever.

El Topo is available in Australia from Siren Visual, The Night of the Living Dead has had multiple releases including special editions, Pink Flamingos is still banned in Australia, uncut editions are available in R1 from the U.S. The Harder They Come was released in Australia by Shock, Rocky Horror Picture Show has had multiple releases in various editions while Eraserhead has a superb special edition release from Shock.

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This review will appear in Volume 3 No. 3 of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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