If a “midnight film” is streamed on a laptop computer at two o’clock within the afternoon — and nobody is there to obsess about it with you — is it even a midnight film?
Some movies routinely qualify as midnight films because of material or conceptual guts; Divine didn’t eat canine shit so that you can disrespect “Pink Flamingos” (1972). Others get their style credentials grandfathered in by many years of followers screening them; tacky or not, “The Rocky Horror Image Present” (1975) all the time counts.
However previous counter-cultural phenomena can’t information the way forward for the style and weirdo film tradition without end. A convention rooted in transgression, left to wander down a tragic path of static nostalgia and “The Large Lebowski” (1998) quotes, isn’t transgressive in any respect. And it’s not as if there’s a scarcity of in-your-face cinema being produced. We’re dwelling in a world the place Agathe Rouselle fucked a firetruck in “Titane” (2021), and a sure cartoon bear used Eeyore’s severed tail as a flogger in “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” (2023). And but, the twenty first century’s embarrassment of ridiculous riches one way or the other appears to undercut the midnight film moniker.
With numerous taboo, transgressive, and low-budget indies streaming 24/7 (for all we all know, “Midnight Motion pictures” may already be the identify of a distinct segment streaming service), the real-world subculture that revolves round final century’s midnight films feels oversaturated and muted on the similar time.
On the one hand, figuring out and canonizing new midnight films ought to be simple; we’ve received greater than sufficient movies to observe and numerous artists screaming to say one thing. However, the times of sneaking out to the theater seeking provocative pictures you possibly can’t discover anyplace else are successfully over. Anybody with wifi and ten seconds to kill can discover myriad alternatives to shock themselves in unspeakable methods. Hell, “Hostel” (2005) was once on Hulu.
However with theaters on superhero life assist — and the web as chilly and huge an expanse as ever — the place to start turning titles you possibly can theoretically stream anytime into communal experiences greatest loved by hardcore cinephiles at the hours of darkness?
What Makes a Midnight Film?
Within the competition world, “midnight films” have taken on a broader definition as a class encompassing shit that’s too bizarre to program alongside extra mainstream fare. Main gamers like TIFF and Sundance have Midnight sections showcasing essentially the most surprising, genre-bending works from rising indie filmmakers. For a sure breed of unbiased artist, making the Midnight lineup at considered one of these festivals is a objective in and of itself. There’s a pleasant irony to the thought of bestowing institutional legitimacy on movies that do all the pieces of their energy to defy widespread decency, however we’re not complaining as a result of it’s cool as hell.
Nonetheless, outsourcing a whole counterculture to a handful of establishments is a idiot’s errand. Festivals have a significant function to play within the midnight film ecosystem, however their comprehensible concentrate on new releases implies that they’ll all the time be an incomplete resolution. A thriving midnight film tradition is a continuing dialogue between the ahead-of-its-time previous and the boundary-pushing current. The primary century of movie historical past is suffering from hidden gems which are begging to be found — and in some circumstances, reappraised with trendy cultural context that their creators would have by no means imagined was potential.
As of now, the web is a humiliation of riches for cinephiles trying to discover once-forgotten movies. However harrowing dispatches from the battlefields of the Streaming Wars are a relentless reminder that it might all disappear at any second. The awful actuality is that the surprising movie that you just’re obsessing over could possibly be unceremoniously pulled from each streaming library tomorrow with out a lot as an evidence. It’s time to understand what we now have whereas we now have it and construct a brand new canon of midnight films that’s worthy of continued preservation.
With over a century’s price of media at our fingertips at any given second (*nervously knocks on wooden whereas refreshing the Max library*), it usually feels as if the trendy cinephile’s predicament has gone from dying of thirst within the desert to doing so in the course of the ocean.
However somewhat than rendering midnight films an anachronistic custom, we imagine that cultural saturation solely makes them extra important. We’d like daring and wicked cinema to chop by means of the noise and remind us all that sure, there is nonetheless one thing on the market that we actually haven’t seen earlier than.
In our new column, IndieWire After Darkish, we’ll take a feature-length beat every week to focus on bizarre, great, way-too-much cinema and honor the altering expertise of communal viewing. Every version will anoint a brand new midnight film that considered one of us thinks is all the time price remembering — and the opposite is experiencing for the primary time.
We’ll spotlight new filmmakers whose brilliantly fucked-up visions demand bigger audiences whereas celebrating outdated ones whose work is simply too bizarre to be forgotten. A variety of genres are welcome right here, however every IndieWire After Darkish choice is a movie that threw warning to the wind and unapologetically swung for the fences. Some achieved their lofty objectives and others failed in ways in which created unintentional brilliance, however all of them reinforce the concept that artistic independence thrives after the clock strikes midnight.
IndieWire After Darkish publishes midnight film suggestions at 11:59pm ET each Friday. Or, you recognize, at the least till somebody will get sucked right into a wormhole or one thing.
