Stuart Samuels

The best definition of what a Midnight Movie was, to quote what was said towards the end of this documentary better than I could have put it myself, is that: what all the classic Midnight Movies have in common is that they were all made outside of the system, and often over a period of years by very strong willed individuals who, with very little support, created these films by hand.

To quote John Waters 'As such they broke ground in terms of what barriers were about in terms of taste, humour and censorship. They were pot head movies that shared a group madness at midnight that became a sort of religion.'
David Lynch and Jodorowsky both agree that they didn't make their films for an audience they made it for themselves and just hoped that other like minded people would come to watch them too..
The experience was in making the film and just living in that world.

Midnight Movies it says in this documentary were destroyed by the home video market.
However, if you lived in the UK up until the late eighties/early nineties in London you may have been fortunate enough to have discovered the Scala Cinema, that ran these types of films back to back all night till the small hours - those were the days! So in that sense I did experience the type of cinema experience talked about in this feature - the cheering, the popcorn throwing excitement that was the shared experience of the cinema. Not the morgue like farce that cinemas are today, where if you giggle too loud someone behind 'shushs!' you, or complains to the manager! Perhaps someone will make a documentary about the (British) experience too some day?

Cult movies eventually evolved into the main stream with films such as Stephen Spielbergs 'Jaws' and George Lucas' 'Star Wars' (which is still the biggest grossing cult film of all time.)

This is a great documentary that does its best to capture the essence of Midnight Movies (in America).
As a type of homage I ran this video back-to-back, alternating between the audio commentary and the main track, four times on the first day!

If you own this double disc DVD, you also own by default an E-Book copy of the book which you can find in the 'extras' on disc one.
As well as the Classic 'Night of the Living dead' (Not that dreadful colorized version I keep running into from 1986, but the original b/w!) and also, the propaganda film 'Reefer Madness' - both on disc two.

Happy viewing.… (altro)