What is going to put butts in seats for midnight showings in theatres? One New York movie house, the IFC Center (formerly the Waverly), is grappling with that issue.
An excerpt:
A midnight movie," said Stuart Samuels, a filmmaker whose documentary "Midnight Movies: From the Margins to the Mainstream," played at this year's Cannes film festival, "has to be a personal vision, it has to be a total critique of society and it has to be discovered by the audience."
What was once culturally transgressive - sexually, thematically, aesthetically - has now been made mainstream, he said, by filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, whose "Kill Bill" would have been a perfect midnight movie if it had been made in 1975. "Today's margin becomes tomorrow's mainstream," he said, adding that with the ubiquity of home video, audiences do not need to congregate at midnight to discover outré cinema. ...
The Waverly was where "Rocky Horror" first became a midnight hit. But like "Pink Flamingos" and "Eraserhead," it played decades ago to countercultural crowds often under the influence of illegal substances. "Midnight movies are now being watched on DVD," explained Irv Slifkin, author of "Groovy Movies: Far-Out Films of the Psychedelic Era." DVD favorites like "Donnie Darko" and "Mulholland Drive" are "trippy movies that would be at home with the 70's films," Mr. Slifkin said. ...
... John Vanco, head programmer and general manager of the IFC Center, is taking a more ambitious, thematic route with his midnight programming. Titled "New York After Dark," the IFC Center's first midnight series will include William Lustig's splatterfest "Maniac" (1980), Walter Hill's surreal teenage gang classic "The Warriors" (1979), Susan Seidelman's indie "Desperately Seeking Susan" (1985) and Abel Ferrara's avant-garde gangster movie "King of New York" (1990). Mr. Vanco is also looking into what he called "New York junkie vampire movies," like Michael Almereyda's "Nadja" (1994), splatter movies from almost any decade, and Asian genre pictures from directors like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike.
"I don't think midnight movies are just an artifact," he said. "There are different films, different aesthetic contexts that are transgressive from today's mainstream that might draw audiences."
Noting that Mr. Tarantino and Richard Rodriguez recently announced a joint horror project called "Grindhouse," Mr. Vanco said grindhouse films were coming back as midnight fare. Movies like the 1980's Italian horror flicks "Cannibal Holocaust" and "Deep Red," he said, the kind "that played in those sticky floor, all-night 42nd Street theaters; there's a huge nostalgia for that."
Two perfect midnight madness showings, for me, are Takashi Miike's Gozu and Zebraman (I saw both at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2003 and 2004 respectively).
Why? They're hilarious, totally irreverent and wildly imaginative, and that makes them the ultimate in cult moviegoing fun (of the two, Gozu is a bit more violent, but nothing like, say, Ichii the Killer or Audition). I love absurdist black humour, and nobody does it like Miike.
I watch Hollywood movies when I want a totally predictable movie experience. I watch Miike when I want a film that will be predictable only in its complete and utter unpredictability.
As one shell-shocked woman said stumbling out of Gozu: "Now I know what's wrong with me; I'm just not weird enough to think this shit up!"
One other cult fave before I end this thread for tonight: Bubba Ho Tep -- about an aged Elvis battling an evil Egyptian zombie. Ya gotta see it!
Got some cult fave recommendations? Leave them in the comments. TIA!