At last week's Toronto International Film Festival, I saw Midnight Madness: From the margins to the mainstream. It was an affectionate look at the heyday of what we could call cult cinema.

But I'm afraid the panelists they had to talk about it afterwards are stuck in the past.

First the movie.

Stuart Samuels, who has adopted Toronto as his home town, made this engaging 88-minute flick tracing the rise -- and flatlining -- of cult cinema  in the United States.

Basically, the ground zero of cult cinema could be traced to New York's Elgin Theatre in 1970. The Elgin was very near Greenwich Village -- a hotbed of counterculture in those days, as opposed to being a great place to buy "I love NY" t-shirts like it is today (the Elgin's location wasn't noted in the film). Greenwich Village is in turn close to New York University, meaning there would be a large population of students -- the natural audience for these flicks.

As an experiment, theatre manager Ben Barenholtz screened El Topo, a surreal Western by Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

This film was viciously trashed by the heavyweight mainstream film critics of the period, but apparently watching it at midnight with your friends and fellow hipsters, along with a joint or a tab of acid, made it a whole lot more enjoyable! :)

El Topo played to packed houses for seven months straight. However, when John Lennon bought the rights to the film and tried showing it like a mainstream movie, it flopped.

Along with El Topo, the film looks at the rest of the canon of midnight movies:

Like El Topo, none of them did particularly well in mainstream release, although the Rocky Horror show has made something like $175 million US since its initial release in 1973.

But the films' key unifiers were this: The films were made for next to nothing by strong-willed auteurs who were making self-consciously counter-cultural works.

In turn, hipster audiences found the films through midnight showings in urban theatres, audiences which were built primarily through word of mouth. Some of these films developed intense -- dare I say cult-like? -- followings as a result.

Well, in the case of the Rocky Horror show, cult might indeed be an operative word.

Watching the film became an immersive experience, with the audience becoming part of the show. "A toast to the bride" meant throwing toast at the screen. As Susan Sarandon's character Janet was walking in the rain with a newspaper over her head, it became common to yell, "Buy an umbrella, you cheap bitch!" at the screen (for more on audience participation, see this article from the official RHPS website).

As one filmgoer told the camera: "Five days a week, I'm a nurse. For two nights, I'm a star!" One person in the film, identified as the president of the RHPS fan club, claims to have seen it 3,000 times.

One of the panelists afterward said: "I can think of nothing worse than watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show by yourself."

The times, they are a changin'

From my perspective, RHPS is a bit of a historical fluke. Other than Star Wars (which is in a different league), I can't think of too many films that have inspired such a devoted following.

Some films have their moments. The Talking Heads' concert film Stop Making Sense developed its own rituals, but I can't think of too many movies where watching it morphed into a lifestyle for some fans.

(Help me out here: What films am I missing?)

But generally speaking, the golden age of modern cult movies was already dying by the late 1970s. If I remember correctly from the film, the Elgin was out of the midnight movie business by 1978.

What happened?

In urban areas all over North America, single-screen theatres became less and less economically viable.

VCRs came on the market about 1980. Their spread meant you didn't have to see movies in a theatre any more. And today, we have DVDs and home theatre.

The boundary between counterculture and mainstream became less distinct. For example, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill are pastiches of old cult movies.

The cost of movie-making has risen. Night of the Living Dead cost $100,000 US to make. Today, an extremely cheap movie is at least $1 million US, said one of the panelists. An average Hollywood movie now is now $70 million US to $80 million US, with budget films seen as costing $20 million.

Then the cost of getting the thing seen has to be figured in.

And with so many movies being made today, films get cycled much more quickly than in the past. Many movies are only in theatres for three weeks before being shuffled off to DVD.

El Topo started with one two-line ad in The Village Voice and built from there. That's hard to imagine today.

One panelist, director Eli Roth, talked about the dearth of cult auteurs, although he did mention one of my heroes, director Takashi Miike.

But here's the thing: Miike's films are among the biggest draws at TIFF's Midnight Madness program.

While Rue Morgue (a Toronto-based horror mag) has screened some Miike stuff at the Bloor, it draws a few hundred people, but not much more.

The Royal, a major rep theatre here in T.O. , has largely given up screening Miike films. Actually, its Cult Madness Thursdays seems to have petered out some months ago and hasn't been revived. Kung Fu Fridays, a more targeted type of cult cinema held bimonthly at the Royal, has had 30 people in the audience on some cold winter nights.

Once a month or so, the Bloor screens RHPS and Oz/Darkside, where The Wizard of Oz is played to the strains of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

And PleasureDome does underground video at venues like CineCycle.

On balance, however, I think one could safely say that in a sophisticated film city of 2.5 million, the cult scene is relatively small and not that active.

One guy from SpaceTV somewhat defiantly said that film festivals are the new midnight madness. Great, but that's once a year.

Why not just admit that cult movie scene as it existed in its heyday doesn't exist any more and isn't coming back?

A few reasons why it might be truly done include the rise of gaming, which probably trumps filmgoing for obsessiveness among its devotees, and better television. Shows like Deadwood, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under (heck, even South Park) seem to have fairly devoted followings -- and now they're available on DVD. Personal video recorders also change the entertainment landscape.

There are a host of entertainment opportunities available to the presumed target audience for cult flicks today that simply didn't exist 30 years ago.

During the Q-and-A, I asked if the Internet might pose a solution for cult filmmakers in getting around the distribution problem, and whether it could allow for an interactive component.

That got shot down really quick.

"I think what you're talking about is DVDs," Roth said somewhat dismissively.

Well, not really, although I didn't phrase my question very well.

The Internet would help cut distribution costs immensely. As the technology advances, there could be an interactive component; maybe a two-way video link to allow a community experience among those separated by distance but linked by interests.

Space Guy dismissed the idea too. "Nothing will ever be as immersive as a theatre," is what I recall him saying. He added it wouldn't matter if you had a theatre-sized screen in your living room.

Roth, at the festival to screen Hostel, said the saviour of independent film might be digital projection systems. His movie was screened at the Varsity, not the Ryerson, because the Rye High theatre doesn't have a digital projection system.

Essentially, with digital projection systems, there's no film. Your movie sits on a hard drive.

If this cuts distribution costs significantly, that helps smaller-budget, quirkier films get in the game.

But while I think economics are part of the issue, I don't think the panelists gave enough consideration to the possibility that audiences and overall cultural environment have changed too much to duplicate what happened in the 1970s.

As someone who went to five Midnight Madness films at TIFF this year, I'm saddened by the possibility, but tastes change.