Fantastic Fest 2009

Between 1970 and 1977, a small cluster of films pushed the boundaries of bad taste and rewrote the rules for social and sexual taboos. What made them unique was the fact that they were only played at midnight. This handful of low-budget, intensely personal visions - almost handmade films - transformed the way we make and watch movies.
Alejandro Jodorowskyís surrealist Western El Topo; George Romeroís Night of the Living Dead; John Watersís scandalous Pink Flamingos; Jamaican Perry Henzellís outlaw reggae movie The Harder They Come; the legendary The Rocky Horror Picture Show; and the uniquely original work of David Lynch in Eraserhead: these films changed the face of independent - and now mainstream - cinema.
Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream tells the hidden history of these classics through interviews with the directors of the films and with critics, and accounts from theatre owners, as well as from the audiences of disaffected youth culture who got their weekly dose of filmic nihilism inside darkened moviehouses at midnight.
In the seventies, these films were made at the very edges of traditional culture, beyond the fringe; today, their ironic sense of humour, flaunting of bad taste, celebration of the grotesque and the bizarre, and their championing of sexual diversity have all become firmly established in mainstream American popular culture.
The journey from the margin to the mainstream starts with these first film flashes flickering inside art-house cinemas. Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream is my celebration of their liberating spirits.
- Stuart Samuels