Midnight Movies PB

Night Moves

Midnight Movies, by J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum is a rare an insightful study of a particular type of film that has gotton popular through underground avenues. Published 1991 by Da Capo Press, at 360 pages, Midnight Movies looks at a selection of offbeat films that for the most part have been made for very little money and have gotten known for having a popular following.

I remember seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time ever with my girl friend and didn?t know about avoiding the front row. The touring cast that accompanied the film came in dressed in overcoats and we had no idea about the toast and water guns that soon were being thrown on everyone. I?m not sure if the touring cast still performs the show this way but it seems like one of the things that insured the film?s popularity.

Tim Curry got his break with Rocky Horror as Frankenfurter and the appearance of Susan Sarandon in this cheesy trash music comedy is one of the highlights of the movie. The movie is bad, a stupid spoof of Frankenstein but done with such high camp and low-brow homage to the horror genre and musical movies that the stupidity is made palpable and delicious.
My experiences are similar with Night of the Living Dead. When I first laid eyes on the black and white movie I thought that it was an inept film with bad sound and an unprofessional unknown cast. But that is the form of the movie and testament to the genius of David Lynch. The director necessarily had to make his film with various inexpensive products and methods but gradually as the film progresses and the tittering from the audience settles, the dark vision of the filmmaker comes through.

George Romero was following one of his childhood impulses with Night of the Living Dead. The zombies who inhabit the world of the film have no purpose except to eat humans and wander though the night. The horror partly comes from the mystery surrounding the creatures dining manners- close ups of human entrails being pulled from bodies and devoured by zombies stand as some of the features of this horror film, that and the lack of hope for the humans to escape. This was a new kind of horror film when it was introduced and the concept turned out to be substantial as it has spawned three sequels.

Eraserhead and the eventual success of David Lynch with successive films is highlighted as well as one of those films that ostensibly should not have become a midnight movie because the film defies any logical explication. Here again is a movie whose images are muddy, seemingly unrealized and unprofessional with characters and shifts in tone and action that goes beyond leaving a sense of dread or horror in the viewer- the film has the ability to disgust the viewer with its grossness.

David Lynch explains the film by reverting to his own perceptions as they represent what he perceives is the perceptions of the general public. The function of the human mind as it synthesizes viewed images and reorganizes them into a narrative is as individual as each person watching and Lynch himself is one of those directors who presents his own visions in exciting high-concept ways that simultaneously attract and repulse the viewer, but Lynch realizes that given a choice the viewer will always look and become involved in the screened images.

Originally Eraserhead was funded by AFI and David Lynch made the film while working for the New York Times delivering papers. Lynch comes from a visual art back ground as a painter and his interest as a filmmaker is to present texture of images and this extends into the layers of relationships and cerebral landscapes of characters as they reflect on the viewer, and affect how a film is perceived.

David Lynch got distribution for Eraserhead slowly and the film and the genius of the director has slowly become known from selected screenings, many of which were midnight showings in cities of high urban subculture aesthetic activity like New York.

These are three representative films from this well-documented book about midnight movies, films that would never secure distribution from mainstream companies. In nearly every case the films in the book are exploitation films centered on some particular fetish. Andy Warhol?s films are talked about, as are Stan Brackage and of course John Waters.

The chapter on John Waters, ?John Waters Presents ?The Filthiest People Alive?? contains gems like the reported multiple arrest of the filmmaker for juvenile shoplifting, and his inability to finish New York University because in all the film classes they only showed Eisenstein?s Battleship Potemkin ?over and over?. Influenced by his Catholic upbringing the filmmaker made numerous shorts before making one of the most famous ?bad-taste? midnight movies Pink Flamingos for about $10,000 dollars which he borrowed from his father. As with all his ventures Waters turned a profit and paid his father back with interest.

John Waters? success can be a lesson to any struggling filmmaker anywhere in this age of over-budgeted films in which the money used for catering could be used to make three independent films. Part of the problem today is that Screen Actors Guild sucks up most of the independent film budget with an insistence that actors of the union be paid regardless of the eventual life of the film. Looking at the development of Independent Film and the availability of Digital Video and non-professional actors there is hope for the future of the personal vision and aesthetic of the non-funded filmmaker.

Midnight Movies doesn?t scrimp on coverage for the other films that have gained recognition for themselves and their creators. There are more than a few films covered by the authors. The cultural effects surrounding the popularity of the type of film that becomes a Midnight Movie- there is no standard, and the authors don?t really try to find a standard but rather look at more than 100 movies to see how they have become hits in spite of poor budget, lack of star power, or un-commercial story.

Some of the other films explicated in the book are Myra Breckenridge, El Topo, Andy Warhols? My Hustler, and assorted pieces featuring Joe Delesandro and Edie Sedgewick, and a host of others based on cults, fetishes, and freaks. Films with titles such as Desperate Living, Pink Flamingos, The Holy Mountain, Scorpio Rising, Reefer Madness, Trash, El Topo, Freaks, and Female Trouble all deal with as their subject matter some of the most banal topics in the most sincere or lackadaisical ways engendering a real message that appealed to a select demographic that was willing to physically attend multiple late-night performances. The appeal of these films in some cases has increased over the years due to the culturally historical value of the subject matter and also that many of the filmmakers have entered the mainstream as respected directors.

Easily this wave of low or no-budget filmmaking was inspired by what John Cassavettes was able to accomplish and has led the way to what we can view on YouTube and other internet sites daily. YouTube is clearly derivative of the wave of interest that ignited the midnight movie craze.