https://vo.rs/tags/counterculture/Latest from the Counterculture desk at vo.rs.Hugo -- gohugo.ioenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Fri, 31 Oct 2025 13:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/screen/the-midnight-movie-canon/<p>The midnight movie is a delivery system as much as a genre. It began at the tail end of the 1960s, when a handful of New York cinemas discovered that the films too strange for a normal booking could fill a house at midnight, week after week, with the same crowd coming back to worship. The Elgin, the Waverly and the Bleecker Street cinemas turned unshowable pictures into rituals, and a distinct kind of film grew up to fill the slot: transgressive, dreamlike, often barely coherent, and always better with a room full of the converted shouting back at the screen. These are films that needed a congregation. Seen cold and alone on a laptop, many of them look like failures; seen in a packed room at one in the morning, the same films become scripture. The audience was always half the show.</p>Fri, 31 Oct 2025 13:00:00 +0000