Midnight Movies: From The Margin To The Mainstream

Documentaries are a form of commentary, so that the dvd extras accompanying a documentary can often seem redundant and reductive - but Momentum's excellent two-disc package for Midnight Movies gets everything right while avoiding unnecessary repetition. For although Stuart Samuels directed Midnight Movies and wrote the 1983 book of the same name on which it is based, he is neither seen nor heard in the film itself, so that the presence of both his audio commentary and the original book (accessible as an e-book via DVD-ROM) are a welcome addition.

In his commentary, Samuels emphasises that these six films, viewed at "the magic hour of midnight", were not just late screenings but a ritualised experience, both communal and countercultural, in which "everything was turned on its head". He is also keen to point out the irony that New Line, which would later bring the mainstream Lord Of The Rings trilogy to the world, cut its teeth on Pink Flamingos, a film about a murderous transvestite who literally eats shit.

One can certainly take issue with some of Samuels' generalisations. His argument that the midnight movies differed from the avant garde in that they were genre movies made for audiences hardly applies to Eraserhead (which genre exactly is it?), while his claim that "all midnight movies have humour" does not obviously extend to Night Of The Living Dead - but all this merely serves to confirm how disparate and uncategorisable (at least as a collection) the films are that found success in the midnight slot.

Still, Samuels' suggestion that neither George A Romero nor Alejandro Jodorowsky ever managed to live up to the high standard set by their original midnight movies will come as something of a surprise to fans of Jodorowsky's subsequent The Holy Mountain (1973) and Santa Sangre (1989), or of Romero's The Crazies (1973), Martin (1977), Dawn Of The Dead (1978) and Day Of The Dead (1985).

Contrasting with the cut-up, soundbite-sized chunks of comment from Jodorowsky, Romero, John Waters, Perry Henzell, David Lynch and Richard O'Brien to be found in Midnight Movies itself, 'Meet the Creators of the Midnight Movies' is 90 solid minutes of raw interview footage with these same filmmakers. Samuels' questions to them may be near inaudible and cuts in the interviews may occasionally come mid-sentence, but who's complaining when such a diverse and eccentric collection of talent is on offer.

Jodorowsky tells mad stories of bedding Marcel Marceau's wife and informing André Breton by telephone (at three in the morning) that he had come to Paris to save surrealism. John Waters declares his target audience to be "minorities that don't get along with people in their own minorities", and likens the shoot of Pink Flamingos to "committing a six-month crime". Romero insists that the production of Night Of The Living Dead was "completely collaborative", whereas Lynch champions the auteur approach to filmmaking ("there should be one person making the decisions - that way there is a chance it will all hold together").

Last but not least, Disc Two offers two full-length midnight movie features: Reefer Madness, a genuine anti-marijuana propaganda piece from 1938 that was re-released in 1972, much to the delight of pot-headed ironists; and Romero's absolute classic zombie allegory from 1968, Night Of The Living Dead, which at last found its proper audience on the midnight circuit in 1971, becoming a staple there for many years thereafter. What better way to convey the spirit of the whole midnight movies phenomenon?