Review of Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream (2006) by Archibald T — 19 Feb 2013

In the fall of 1970 is when the midnight movie explosion first occurred. It's all thanks to a little film called El Topo, directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Since he couldn't get any big studios to release his film, Alejandro went to an underground producer named Alan Douglas. Even he couldn't help Alejandro, but that didn't mean the film itself was never to see the light of day. At the museum of modern art, the film was shown to an audience and it immediately caught the eye of Ben Barenholtz.

Barenholtz was the owner of a movie theatre called the Elgin. It was based in New York and could seat a total of 600 people. This would be the home, or birth place, of the cult film movement as well as the Midnight Movie phenomenon. It all started as an experiment once Barenholtz was able to acquire the film El Topo. He said to the producer, Alan Douglas, that he could show the film at midnight and maybe that'll somehow reach an audience. After publishing an ad for El topo's midnight screening, people actually came out of the woodwork to see the picture. It then spread by word of mouth of how different the film was from anything they've ever seen. Even those that saw it once at midnight would eventually return for 20 or 30 more viewings. Celebrities even chimed in on this interesting idea. From Peter Fonda to Dennis Hopper and even Yoko Ono and John Lennon who loved El Topo so much they bought the film to give a much wider audience. Sadly that turned into a failure since El Topo was born to be a midnight movie for a midnight audience. Seeing it during the day would just decrease the experience.

Since the success of El Topo, midnight showings were starting to inspire other theaters to do the same. But the Elgin was the place to be since it brought to the masses a type of alternative to film viewing. Newly acquired films from the likes of John Waters (Pink Flamingos) and David Lynch (Eraserhead) were also rounded up and shown as part of the midnight movement. Included in this documentary are clips and interviews from directors of such films like:

El Topo, Eraserhead, The Harder They Come, Night of the Living Dead, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Flamingos.

Those are the basic films they cover, but the Elgin did show more midnight films like:

Freaks, Invocation of my Demon Brother, Reefer Madness, Targets, Un Chien Andalou and as well as a few random animated segments like Bambi meets Godzilla and Asparagus.

Just like in any decade, all things must come to an end. By the late 70s, the Elgin theater had shut down. The building was vacant until the early 80s when it was renamed as the Joyce Theater which caters now to the Dance and Performance crowd. Not movies. But to the lucky basterds who got the chance to witness a time of insomniac movie viewing, it'll certainly be something I'm sure they've cherished ever since they saw the first time Divine eating a dog turd on the big screen.