Midnight movies: Late-night screenings are making a comeback

It took 30 years for the director Alexandro Jodorowsky to pick up the phone and call Allen Klein to end the dispute that has kept El Topo under lock and key. The dispute started when the former manager of John Lennon got annoyed with the film-maker after he pulled out of making The Story of O for Klein at the last minute because he didn't want to make a movie about a woman who is a slave. Klein told Jodorowsky that if he jumped ship he would ensure that the three Jodorowsky films he owned, Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, would be kept under wraps until after Jodorowsky died, when Klein would release them and make a whole heap of money.

Jodorowsky was 76 when the duo made their peace, in 2005. The director spoke to Klein's son on the phone and arranged for the warring couple to meet in London. Jodorowsky, speaking at his home in Paris, picks up the story: "I was walking through the streets of London, wondering what I was doing and what was going to happen. Finally, I knocked on his hotel- room door, and he said to me: 'You are not a monster.' I replied: 'You are a spiritual master.' We hugged and our dispute was over."

Nobody quite knew how to unleash El Topo on to the American public in 1971. The batty film stars Jodorowsky himself as a black-suited, black-haired gunslinger who, to win over a woman, ventures into the desert to do battle to the death with four other famed fighters. Heavy on symbolism, dead animals and impossibly red blood, the movie ventures into craziness when our hero dies and is reborn as a blond man in a white loincloth, living in a community of dwarves trapped underground. In order to redeem his past sins, he helps them escape from their prison.

Cinema-owners were petrified of playing the film as there was no obvious audience for a surreal Mexican saga. Then, in late 1970, Ben Barenholtz, manager of the Elgin Theatre in Chelsea, New York, having seen the film at the Museum of the Moving Image, decided to programme the film for a screening at midnight. Word of mouth and repeat viewers soon gave the film a legendary status. The midnight screening became an event, and the 600-seat theatre regularly sold out for the next nine months. It was after one of these midnight screenings that Lennon persuaded his manager, Allen Klein, to acquire the distribution rights to El Topo, and Yoko Ono and Lennon financed Jodorowsky's next project, The Holy Mountain.

Now Klein is allowing the film to be seen legally again. The re-emergence and long- overdue rerelease of El Topo has sparked a wave of nostalgia for late-night screenings. The ICA has put on a season of Midnight Movies; the National Film Theatre is currently running a Jodorowsky season, in which the famed director, comic-strip writer, novelist and tarot-card reader is giving a talk; and Stuart Samuel's documentary, Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, is out on DVD on Monday.

Part of the magic of midnight movies is that nobody quite knows how to define them. Samuel's documentary takes its lead from a 1983 book, Midnight Movies, by two of America's foremost critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum and J Hoberman. They categorise them as a New York-led phenomenon of movies that failed to set the box office alight but then found an audience when subsequently screened at late-night showings in New York cinemas.

These films include Night of the Living Dead, the re-release of Reefer Madness, Tod Browning's Freaks, The Harder They Come, Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead and, of course, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Now all cult classics, these films existed outside the mainstream and were embraced by an audience searching for a counter-culture. They ran at theatres for years rather than weeks.

The limits of the classification of midnight movies as espoused by Samuel is that it defines them in purely commercial terms. It neglects the fact that the term "midnight movies" was first coined by television stations in the 1950s to describe the inexpensive genre films that they showed in late-night slots. These were B-movies with very little artistic value. Echoes of the 1950s' view of midnight movies could be found in the 1980s when the American actress Cassandra Peterson, in her Elvira, Mistress of the Dark persona, introduced late-night screenings of niche horror films on television. TV executives saw the slot as belonging to films that didn't try to cater for what would today be described as "the multiplex crowd".

The best thing about midnight movies is that, unlike formulaic blockbusters, it's virtually impossible to make a film with the intent that it will connect with the witching-hour crowd. The best midnight films are those such as Pink Flamingos and Eraserhead, in which the director's personality is stamped all over them. Andy Warhol, an admirer of El Topo, so desperately wanted his 1972 film, Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers, to be welcomed by this particular audience that he held its premiere at midnight. No one bought it. Jodorowsky described the phenomenon best when he said, "I didn't make a midnight movie; it was the people who decided to make the film a cult hit."

Indeed, it was audience interaction that ensured that The Rocky Horror Picture Show became the most successful midnight movie of them all. Richard O'Brien's play was transferred to the big screen by Jim Sharman and flopped on release. It was revived on the midnight circuit in April 1976 at the Waverly Cinema in New York's Greenwich Village. It would play there for 95 weeks.

Audiences at the now-closed Waverly soon started to come dressed as the characters, and to dance and cry out in the theatres. It was such a phenomenon that more than 200 cinemas across the United States had Rocky Horror playing at midnight, almost always on a Friday or Saturday night. It would eventually take more than $139m (£70m) at the box office.

The audience was usually made up of fans who had already seen the film dozens of times. That was largely down to the fact that it was the audience rather than the movie that had became the main attraction. Going to a midnight movie was becoming a two-fingered salute to the mainstream; it was a celebration of non-conformity and the audiences, who would holler at the characters and sing along to the songs, wanted everyone to know that they were just as far outside the mainstream as the characters in the movie that was bringing them together. Cinema programmers began putting on other movies aimed at niche markets at midnight. Kung fu films and blaxploitation pictures proved extremely popular.

Indeed, any genre that Quentin Tarantino has decided to riff had legs as a midnight movie. From Clarence meeting the blond bombshell Alabama in a movie theatre in True Romance to the forthcoming Grindhouse, he has celebrated late-night viewing.

Grindhouse combines two feature-length movies - Death Proof, made by Tarantino, and Planet Terror, by Robert Rodriguez - in a double-bill designed to replicate the experience of going to a grindhouse theatre in the Seventies and Eighties. The failure of the film to set the US box office alight on its release last weekend was strangely apt, but also indicative of how far midnight movies have fallen from grace.

The advent of video is generally perceived to have killed off the phenomenon. John Waters, director of Pink Flamingos, says: "There is certainly no midnight movie any more. When midnight movies were up, there was no video. As soon as videos came out, people would have their own parties in their own house, and get high and smoke pot and watch movies.

"I think today that the next midnight movie that will cause a sensation and unite people will be on the internet, when they figure out how to do that. That is going to be where the next pirate is, the next crazed kid. I think that Tarnation [Jonathan Caouette's home-made autobiographical documentary] was the closest to it in recent years. It was a great underground movie."

I worked as an usher at a cinema in Hammersmith [in what was then the Virgin Hammersmith] in the late 1990s. It was the dream of the cinema's manager to have a successful series of midnight-movie screenings. Yet it was in this period that the cinema decided not even to bother having any late-night screenings on Friday and Saturday as they cost more to put on than they earned. The weekend late show died out as surround-sound systems entered the living room. Video became the place where films that failed at the box office were given a second life, and now YouTube is the first port of call for those looking for something that is outside of the mainstream.

However, the notion that the midnight movie is dead fails to consider the Donnie Darko phenomenon. The film's recent success at midnight screenings is, in many ways, more impressive than those films that struck a chord in the 1970s. Released in October 2001, this film about an emotionally disturbed high- school kid, plagued by hallucinations of a giant demonic bunny, initially flopped at the box office. On DVD, it became a cult smash, and this fuelled a desire in many fans to see the movie on a big screen. The Pioneer Theatre in Manhattan's East Village then began screening it at midnight, where it played for 28 months, despite being readily available on DVD.

Donnie Darko only stopped playing when the distributor decided to pull the film in order to promote the director's cut of the movie. It would seem that the last rites were administered to the midnight movie a little too soon.

The Jodorowsky season continues at the NFT, London SE1 (www.bfi.org.uk) to 19 April; Jodorowsky gives a talk at the NFT tonight; 'Midnight Movies' is released on DVD on Monday; the Jodorowsky box set is out in May