Master of Midnight
How one theater owner launched DAVID LYNCH and birthed the midnight movie
Recently, I implored you to eat your cultural vegetables. This week, I’m feeding you battery acid and glow stick juice.
Pull up a beanbag. Tear open some banned-in-Europe snacks. We’re watching midnight movies.
The ritual of screening movies at ungodly hours - especially the low-budget, high-weirdness variety that feature deviant sex, ecstatic violence, and delinquent youth - started in the 1930s, and took root on late-night TV in the Fifties. But midnight screenings in movie theaters were largely the invention of one man.
Ben Barenholtz was running a threadbare repertory theater in Chelsea when he caught a private screening at MoMA: a Chilean acid western called El Topo, directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Barenholtz offered to screen the movie, with one condition: He only wanted to show it at midnight.
He wanted to give audiences a sense of self-discovery, he explained, mostly to blank faces and raised eyebrows. “Who’s going to come to see a film at midnight?” the experts sneered. “You’re out of your mind.”
El Topo premiered in December 1970, and ran to full houses every single night until the end of June 1971. John Lennon became obsessed. His manager, Allen Klein, bought the rights to El Topo and distributed it across the U.S. For years, the film wasn’t available on home video. It could only be seen by those willing to seek it out and stay up late.
Barenholtz went on to discover offbeat filmmakers like David Lynch, who slept on his couch for several months and branded Barenholtz the “Grandfather of the Midnight Film,” as well as the Coen Brothers, John Sayles, and Guy Maddin.
“If it wasn’t for Ben, I don’t think Eraserhead would have been discovered at all.”
Barenholtz passed away in 2019, but the midnight movie lives on through camp spectacles like Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Tommy Wiseau’s The Room.
Though I’m unreliably conscious when watching movies past 9 pm (lame, I know), I’ve long been fascinated by the “midnight movie” designation, and the mystique it conveys. That’s why today, I’m counting down some lesser-known titles that played a role in Midnight Movie history - films you should consider adding to your after-bedtime watch list. But first, the news.
News Reel
Taste Is the New Intelligence,
declared this week in : “In an age where AI can generate anything, the question is no longer ‘can it be made?’ but ‘is it worth making?’ There will always be creators. But the ones who stand out in this era are also curators. People who filter their worldview so cleanly that you want to see through their eyes. People who make you feel sharper just by paying attention to what they pay attention to. That’s rare now. And because it’s rare, it’s valuable.”The House of Representatives budget bill passed last week includes a measure that would ban any AI regulations for ten years. What could go wrong?
- of has fascinating post on media and machines - once separate forces that have now collapsed into a single system that governs our lives: “Whether you build products, tell stories, direct capital, or curate culture, you are now both architect and artifact of this age. The media-machine complex will metabolize and manifest whatever we feed it, then spit it back out for you to binge. So feed it carefully.”
“In 1930, the average shot length (ASL) of English language films was around 12 seconds. In 2014, it was around 2.5.” Modern movies are training us not to pay attention,
warns in this week’s edition of , in which he explores the history of editing and defends slow cinema.
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This week’s Underexposed Movie Pick:
Sunlight (2024, dir. Nina Conti)
It has been said that ventriloquists possess a peculiar gift - a loophole in the laws of candor - allowing them to voice their wildest, strangest, and most impolite truths not directly, but through lacquered lips and felted mouths. Narrative filmmaking may not be so different: Directors and writers conjure characters to whisper the things they dare not say aloud.
In Sunlight, a luminous and improbably touching road comedy directed by the British ventriloquist Nina Conti, that metaphor becomes delightfully literal. Conti herself stars as Jane, a woman on the run in a monkey costume, opposite the screenwriter Shenoah Allen, who plays Roy, a man consumed by resentment and despair. When these two misfits find each other, they take off across the sun-bleached highways of the American Southwest, and something unexpected blossoms. I caught this movie on a whim this week at the Quad Cinema, it really affected me. It is exactly the sort of film Underexposed was made to champion: odd, authorial, and impossible to shake. If it’s playing near you, don’t miss it.
Where to watch Sunlight
Now playing in select theaters.
That’s all for this week’s free edition. Underexposed VIPs can join me for a bonus segment, Midnight Madness, in which I count down a few lesser-known midnight movies you should know about.
Midnight Madness
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