Midnight Movies: How Late-Night Screenings Built Cult Audiences

In December 1970 a small theater on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan began showing a Mexican western at midnight. The film was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, the theater was the Elgin, and the man behind the booking was Ben Barenholtz, who could not afford the American rights but persuaded the producer to let him show it after hours. The screenings sold out for months, running into the summer of 1971, with no conventional advertising. That run is usually treated as the moment midnight movies went from a programming oddity to a movement, one that would shape how cult films were discovered for the rest of the decade.

I have spent more of my life than I can justify in cinemas after midnight, and the appeal is easy to explain. The late show is a different room. The audience chose to be there, the film is usually one that daytime programming would not touch, and there is a sense of belonging to something slightly secret. This is the history of how that room was built.

Before the movement: late shows and TV hosts

Midnight screenings were not invented in 1970. Exploitation films had played late-night roadshow dates since the 1930s, and Hammer’s horror pictures prompted midnight presentations in the late 1950s. Television helped too. After old studio films began reaching TV in the 1950s, stations filled their late slots with horror and B-movies, often introduced by costumed hosts. One of the first was Maila Nurmi, whose The Vampira Show began on KABC in Los Angeles in 1954, initially in a midnight slot.

In San Francisco, the Palace Theater was running regular midnight programs from early 1969, which is why some historians dispute the Elgin’s claim to have started the trend. In New York, the Elgin itself had experimented with late-night underground films before El Topo arrived. What changed in 1970 was scale and attention.

The economics made sense for a struggling independent house. A midnight slot used an auditorium that would otherwise sit empty, the films on offer were often ones no one else wanted to book, and a loyal crowd could keep a single title running for months without a newspaper ad. For filmmakers outside the studio system, that patience was worth more than any opening weekend, because it gave a difficult film time to find the people who would love it.

The Elgin and the birth of midnight movies

El Topo was the perfect midnight film: violent, mystical, visually overwhelming and impossible to summarize. Word of mouth did all the work. Musicians, artists and students came back repeatedly, and John Lennon’s enthusiasm led to a distribution deal through Allen Klein. (Jodorowsky’s later, never-made projects are covered in this article on King Shot.)

By the end of 1971, several Manhattan theaters, including the St. Marks, the Waverly, the Bijou and the Olympia, had regular midnight programming. George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead played the Bijou. In 1973 the Elgin added two films that defined the circuit’s range: John Waters’s Pink Flamingos, a deliberately outrageous underground comedy notorious for its shock finale, and Perry Henzell’s Jamaican crime film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff. The latter had flopped in its regular release, then played the midnight and college circuit for years. At the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it ran for so long that it became part of the theater’s identity.

Key midnight movies of the 1970s

Camp revivals

Not every midnight film was new. The revival of Reefer Madness, a 1936 anti-marijuana scare film, in the early 1970s helped establish a parallel tradition: watching an old, earnest picture for its unintended comedy. That strand of midnight viewing fed directly into the modern love of so-bad-it’s-good movies, where the audience’s reaction is as much the show as the film.

Rocky Horror and the participation era

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a British-made musical from 20th Century Fox, opened in 1975 and failed. The studio tried it again as a midnight attraction, and it opened at the Waverly in Greenwich Village on the night of April 1, 1976. Over the following months, regulars began calling out responses to the dialogue, dressing as the characters and eventually performing the film in front of the screen as it played. Theaters around the country followed.

By the summer of 1979, Rocky Horror was playing weekend midnights in around twenty theaters in the New York suburbs alone, with Fox circulating roughly two hundred prints nationwide. It is the longest-lived midnight phenomenon by far; regular screenings with live casts continue in a number of American cities today. More importantly, it changed what a cult audience could be. A film no longer simply had fans; it had a ritual.

Eraserhead: the slow-burn midnight hit

David Lynch spent about five years making Eraserhead through the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies, working whenever money allowed. It premiered at a midnight screening at the Filmex festival in Los Angeles on March 19, 1977, to a tiny audience: around two dozen people on each of its first two nights.

Ben Barenholtz, by then running the distributor Libra Films, persuaded Cinema Village in New York to show it as a midnight feature, where it played for a year. The Waverly ran it for 99 weeks, the Roxie in San Francisco gave it a year-long midnight engagement from 1978 to 1979, and the Nuart in Los Angeles screened it for three years, from 1978 to 1981. For a long stretch it was paired with Suzan Pitt’s animated short Asparagus. A film that would have vanished in conventional release instead built Lynch’s reputation, one Friday night at a time. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2004.

Why the circuit faded

The original midnight scene was tied to cheap, independent theaters in big cities, and those theaters were fragile. The Elgin closed in the late 1970s; the building later reopened as the Joyce Theater, a dance venue. Home video and expanding cable television in the late 1970s and 1980s gave audiences another way to find strange films, and many independent cinemas closed.

The studios also noticed the late-show audience and began feeding it. The Warriors (1979), Mommie Dearest (1981), Pink Floyd – The Wall (1982) and Repo Man (1984) all found midnight business, as did animated features such as Heavy Metal (1981) and later Akira (1988). Liquid Sky (1982) is often cited as one of the last independent films to make a major late-night impact. In 1983 the critics J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum published Midnight Movies, the book that gave the era its history, at almost exactly the moment the era was ending.

The midnight tradition today

The late show never died completely. Some theaters kept long-running series, and festival programmers built on the idea; the Toronto International Film Festival launched its Midnight Madness section in 1988. Newer films have joined the canon through late screenings, notably Donnie Darko (2001) and The Room (2003), the latter now perhaps the best-known audience-participation film after Rocky Horror.

What the 1970s circuit really created was a model for how cult films find people: outside normal release patterns, through repetition, through a crowd that becomes part of the event. That model was later carried by video stores, college film societies and the internet, but it began in rooms like the Elgin and the Waverly, after the last regular show had ended. For more on the qualities those films share, see the guide to the best cult movies.

Tips for a first midnight screening

• Check the house rules. Participation screenings often have their own etiquette, and some theaters ask audiences not to bring props.
• Arrive early. Popular late shows still sell out, and the pre-show crowd is part of the fun.
• Go with an open mind. Many midnight classics were rejected by their first audiences precisely because they were unlike anything else.