How a surreal Western at a Chelsea cinema turned midnight into a cult ritual
In December 1970, a surreal Mexican Western by Alejandro Jodorowsky opened at midnight in New York's Elgin Theater and sold out night after night for months. Fans came back weekly. That run kicked off the midnight movie circuit, which later found its biggest hit in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The label began on television. After the Screen Actors Guild accepted a residuals plan in 1953, local stations could cheaply air B pictures, and they slotted them late, past the safe-harbour hour when indecency rules largely stopped applying. In spring 1954 Los Angeles station KABC added a host: Maila Nurmi, as the vampish Vampira, introduced low-budget horror with dark jokes. Imitators such as Zacherley followed, and in 1981 Cassandra Peterson's Elvira began at KHJ-TV before going national.
The theatrical version grew out of the counterculture. Exploitation films had played midnight roadshows since at least the 1930s, and who deserves credit for the first true midnight movie is disputed; candidates include a February 1969 programme at San Francisco's Palace Theater and Kenneth Anger's short Invocation of My Demon Brother. Most accounts, though, point to El Topo, which ran at the Elgin until June 1971, when John Lennon prompted Allen Klein to buy it for a conventional release. By November 1971 four other Manhattan screens held regular midnight bills, including Night of the Living Dead, which George A. Romero had made in Pittsburgh.
John Waters shot Pink Flamingos in Baltimore over the winter of 1971–72, running power through a mile-long extension cord, and it helped seed the independent film movement. The Jamaican crime drama The Harder They Come, a flop when sold as blaxploitation, played midnights for six years and helped popularise reggae in America. Then, just after April Fool's Day 1976, The Rocky Horror Picture Show opened at the Waverly in Greenwich Village. Audiences dressed as the characters, shouted at the screen and acted out scenes with props; by summer 1979 20th Century Fox had roughly two hundred prints in circulation.
Success also changed the form. As the crowd drifted from political opposition to camp in the 1980s, the arthouse cinemas that had fed the circuit began closing; the Elgin shut in 1977, and the VCR and cable finished off many independents. Today the phrase serves loosely as a synonym for B movie or cult film.
Source: Midnight movie
