The Wake

Bound in a straight jacket and spurred by an LSD trip, Hadie recalls her first meeting with Charlie Manson. “Have you ever made love to the son of God?” Manson asks, before the audience—11 brave souls in Oak Street Cinema for a midnight showing of Live Freaky! Die Freaky!—is assaulted by a puppet sex scene more gratuitous than anything in Team America: World Police.

Two weeks later on a Saturday night across town, moviegoers massed outside the entrance to Uptown Theatre onto Hennepin Avenue, waiting in line at quarter to midnight to watch Johnny Depp’s ether induced hallucinations in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

In the light of day, neither film would pass as more than convoluted attempts at filmmaking gone horribly wrong. But in the dark of night, reality is suspended. Audiences resurrect trashy, off-the-wall films from the depths of Blockbuster’s two-for-one bins. Is this the bewitching hour at work, or just good, dirty fun?

Whatever it is, it’s not going away anytime soon, thanks to local art house theaters, which have kept midnight movies alive. Last summer the Oak Street Cinema drew a devoted following with weekly screenings of the 1990 TV series Twin Peaks, while diehards congregate every Saturday night at the Uptown Theatre for a year round fix of subversive entertainment.

Mark Valen, the film programmer for Uptown Theatre’s midnight series, is the guy that decides to show a movie starring Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy (The Muppet Movie) and a 3-D porn (The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy) on back-to-back weekends.

“On every series I try to make it very eclectic,” Valen said. “It makes it more fun to mix it up.”

So what is it that makes a movie worthy of a midnight time slot? According to Valen, there’s no magic ingredient. Eighties adventures (Goonies), offbeat comedies (Harold and Maude), anything “trippy,” (Fear and Loathing) and a quirky sense of humor all fit the bill. And then, of course, there are the cult classics.

Night owls first began flocking to midnight movies in the decade of peace, love and go-go boots, but it was the ’70s that spawned infamous flicks, like Night of the Living Dead, Reefer Madness and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Part of these films’ appeal is their participatory nature. Rocky Horror is legendary for its fans, who dress like dominatrices, substituting toast (unbuttered is recommended) and squirt guns for whips and chains. Most late night screenings don’t require such drastic preparation, but the same boisterous atmosphere persists.

“They’re like parties,” Valen said. “People come in groups. You get a very audible audience, making comments and laughing a lot.”

“A lot of patrons tend to be drunk when they come in and don’t have very many inhibitions,” said Natalie Kern, a manager at Uptown Theatre. “Sometimes they start to smoke in the auditorium or cheer a lot, they might know the lines and tend to speak during the film.”

True to form, cheers rang from the balcony of the Uptown Theatre as the clock struck midnight and Depp appeared on screen, dodging an imaginary bat attack while weaving down a road to Sin City.

“There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” Depp’s character may have been talking about Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan sidekick in Fear and Loathing, but the same could be said of midnight movies. For better, or—well, you know.