Midnight Movies and the Films That Found Their People

A cult film can be a bad film with a devoted following, and several on this list qualify as that, but what defines it is that it found its audience through channels that bypassed the mainstream: the midnight screening, the word-of-mouth recommendation, the VHS tape passed between people who had been waiting for something that felt like this. The audience of a cult film participates in it. They dress up, recite lines, throw toast at screens, form communities organized entirely around a shared experience of a single movie.

These twenty films reached their cult status in different ways: some through transgression, some through failure elevated to art, some through a vision that the mainstream wasn’t ready for when the film arrived. What they share is an audience that claimed them as their own in a way that conventional success doesn’t produce.

I’m fond of films the studios gave up on.

People whose job was to understand these movies dumped, cut, pulled or mis-sold every one of them, and ordinary audiences fixed that mistake without asking anyone’s permission. Nobody told those crowds what to like. They found these films in the dark, often by accident, and decided they were worth keeping alive for decades. I trust that kind of verdict more than any opening weekend number.

Writers looking to craft their own transgressive or visionary fiction will find essential techniques in the Genre Mastery Handbook.

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1. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

“Don’t dream it, be it.”

The Rocky Horror Picture Show flopped on its initial release in 1975. Within a year it was playing midnight screenings in New York to audiences who dressed as the characters, shouted callbacks at the screen, threw toast during the toast scene, squirted water pistols during the rain, and danced the Time Warp in the aisles. It’s been in continuous theatrical release ever since, the longest-running theatrical release in cinema history, and has never been a mainstream success.

It’s always been something more specific and more durable than that: a film that gave a certain kind of person permission to exist.

Richard O’Brien’s stage musical adaptation works as pure sensory experience.

The story is deliberately incoherent, the characters are archetypes, and Tim Curry’s Frank-N-Furter is the performance that holds it together through sheer magnetic force. Curry commits to Frank with a pleasure in his own creation that makes the character seductive as well as outrageous. The film doesn’t ask you to understand Frank. It asks you to become him.

The audience participation tradition is the film’s greatest achievement, a wholly spontaneous culture that developed around the film without any planning by its creators. The film became a container for community, and the community became more interesting than the film.

What moves me about Rocky Horror is the crowd. I wouldn’t defend the plot to anybody. A studio flop turned into a place where people who didn’t fit anywhere else could show up in costume and get cheered for it, and any film that does that for half a century deserves the top spot, script and all.

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2. Eraserhead (1977)

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“In heaven, everything is fine.”

David Lynch spent five years making Eraserhead on borrowed equipment on the American Film Institute campus, living in the set between shoots. The film is the purest expression of a singular vision in American cinema: an industrial nightmare in which a man is trapped in a hostile landscape with a deformed baby that won’t stop crying. Lynch has never fully explained what it means.

The most honest answer is that it means what it feels like (dread, parenthood, industrial desolation, the sense of a world that wants to crush you) and that the feeling is more real than any explanation.

The film became a midnight staple because it speaks directly to an experience of anxiety and alienation that mainstream cinema doesn’t acknowledge. Its devotees tend to have a similar response: they watch it once, are unsettled, can’t stop thinking about it, and watch it again. That loop, the film that unsettles and draws back, is the cult film’s defining psychological mechanism. Stanley Kubrick reportedly told his cast on The Shining to watch Eraserhead to understand the film he was making.

Eraserhead disturbs me in a way almost nothing else does, and I’d call that the highest compliment a horror film can earn. Lynch never explained himself, and he was right to hold out. My only gripe is a few stretches where the pacing will test anyone who came in expecting a story. The people who wave it off as art-school nonsense are reacting to the exact discomfort Lynch built it to cause.

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3. The Warriors (1979)

“Warriors, come out to plaaaay.”

Walter Hill’s film is a Greek myth in gang colors: a Coney Island street gang falsely accused of murder must fight their way home across New York while every other gang in the city hunts them. The premise is The Odyssey stripped to its action skeleton and dressed in 1979 New York street theater: Baseball Furies in pinstripes and face paint, the Orphans, the Turnbull AC’s, the Lizzies.

Each gang is a different kind of threat with its own visual identity, and Hill moves the Warriors through them with the precision of a video game designer who didn’t know video games existed yet.

People blamed the film for gang violence at early screenings, several incidents occurred at theaters, and Paramount pulled the advertising. The controversy generated exactly the underground heat that cult films require. The Warriors became the film you had to see, the one your older brother had seen, the one that existed in the gap between what was permitted and what was happening. Its New York (pre-gentrification, ruined, somehow gorgeous) is the most purely realized city environment in the cult film canon.

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4. Flash Gordon (1980)

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“Flash! Ahhh-ahhhh, savior of the universe!”

Dino De Laurentiis spent a fortune making Flash Gordon with maximum visual ambition and minimum irony, and the result is among the most purely joyful films in the cult canon: a space opera in primary colors with a Queen soundtrack, Max von Sydow doing Ming the Merciless with a grandeur that the film doesn’t deserve, and Sam Jones as Flash with the air of someone who was cast for his chest measurements instead of his acting range and commits to the role with absolute sincerity anyway.

It doesn’t know it’s campy. This is its saving quality. Mike Hodges shoots everything with the seriousness of a man who believes he’s making a legitimate science fiction epic, and the gap between that conviction and the material (the wing men, the football tackle, the “Gordon’s alive!” moment) produces the comedy that camp requires. The Queen score is extraordinary, and Brian Blessed’s Vultan remains the most enthusiastic supporting performance in cult film history.

I have a great time with Flash Gordon, and I won’t pretend the Queen score and Brian Blessed’s bellowing aren’t most of the reason. My reservation is Sam Jones. Sincerity carries him a long way, but there are scenes where the movie needs a leading man and gets a haircut, and the film sags around him until Max von Sydow shows up to rescue it.

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5. The Evil Dead (1981)

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“We’re going to get you. We’re going to get you.”

Sam Raimi made The Evil Dead for $375,000 raised from Michigan dentists and businessmen, shot it in an unpleasant cabin in Tennessee over multiple freezing weekends, and produced the most influential low-budget horror film of the 1980s. The film’s technical inventions (the Raimi-cam, the extreme close-up, the rapid editing that created kinetic energy from limited resources) became a visual vocabulary that horror cinema still uses.

Stephen King called it the most ferociously original horror film of the year. The British Board of Film Classification banned it.

Bruce Campbell’s Ash is the film’s accidental hero, the last survivor by elimination, not competence, and the physical punishment Raimi inflicts on him across three films established the slapstick horror tone that Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness would develop into something entirely new. The original is frightening in ways the sequels aren’t, because Raimi hadn’t yet discovered that his instincts were as funny as they were horrifying. The comedy is in the film; Raimi just hadn’t noticed it yet.

The Evil Dead is the one I respect most of the three, because Raimi had almost no money and refused to let that show on the screen. It still frightens me more than the sequels do. I knock it down a little for effects that look their age and a middle stretch that drags, but the ambition outweighs all of it.

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6. Videodrome (1983)

“Long live the new flesh.”

David Cronenberg’s film predicted the internet in 1983 and has become more accurate every year since. A cable TV programmer discovers a pirate broadcast of torture and murder, becomes addicted to it, and gradually loses the ability to distinguish between his hallucinations and reality: the television set growing a mouth, his body developing a slot for videocassettes, his hand fusing with a gun.

Cronenberg is asking what media does to the body that consumes it, and his answer is that it becomes the body, that the membrane between screen and viewer is more permeable than anyone wants to admit.

The film’s cult following grew slowly because it requires multiple viewings to understand what’s hallucination and what’s not. And then it requires accepting that the distinction may not be the point. Rick Baker’s practical effects are extraordinary, designed to make the body’s violation by media feel organic. Debbie Harry’s casting as a woman who’s turned on by pain and danger is either exploitation or observation, and the film doesn’t resolve which.

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7. Repo Man (1984)

“The life of a repo man is always intense.”

Alex Cox’s film is the definitive LA punk film: a young man falls into the repo business, encounters a conspiracy involving a 1964 Chevy Malibu with something in the trunk that dissolves anyone who opens it, and gradually understands that the conspiracy and the repo business are both expressions of the same American drive toward acquisition and disposal. The film’s politics are worn on its sleeve and don’t simplify the story.

Cox’s Los Angeles is observed, from the suburban wasteland to the punk scene to the government operatives who are as hapless as everyone else.

Harry Dean Stanton’s Bud is the film’s philosophical center: a man who has elevated the repo life to a code, who believes the principles he articulates, who’s both right and completely deluded. Emilio Estevez’s Otto is the straight man who discovers there’s no straight man position available in this film. The generic food products (Beer, Food, Milk) are the film’s best visual joke and its clearest statement of intent.

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8. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)

“These go to eleven.”

Rob Reiner’s mockumentary is so closely observed that multiple real musicians have reported watching it in horror, convinced that someone had filmed their band. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer improvised the band’s history, personalities, and songs with enough internal consistency that Spinal Tap feels more real than most actual rock documentaries. The self-delusion is too specific for anyone to invent, the logic of the band’s mediocrity too coherent for anyone to fabricate.

The modern mockumentary format begins here, along with its central technique: the performers never acknowledge the comedy. Nigel Tufnel explaining why his amplifier goes to eleven is the genre’s foundational scene, a man explaining a non-solution to a non-problem with complete confidence in both the problem and the solution, and the comedy is entirely in the gap between his certainty and the audience’s understanding that the gap he’s describing doesn’t exist. The film is cited as one of Roger Ebert’s favorites. Many believed it was real on initial release.

Spinal Tap makes me laugh harder than almost any comedy I can name, and it does it without a single character noticing the joke. People have quoted the amp that goes to eleven to death and it’s still funny. What impresses me most is the restraint. Every lazy parody since has mugged for the camera, and they’re all worse for it.

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9. Brazil (1985)

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“Mistakes? We don’t make mistakes.”

Terry Gilliam’s battle with Universal over Brazil’s ending is the cult film story in miniature: the studio wanted the happy ending, Gilliam wanted the ending where the protagonist is lost in fantasy while his body sits lobotomized in a government dungeon. Gilliam won in Europe and lost in America, where the film was briefly released in a butchered version before the correct cut prevailed. The entire conflict, individual vision versus institutional accommodation, is exactly what the film is about.

Brazil’s world (a retro-futurist bureaucratic dystopia of ducts, paperwork, and casual state terror) is the most fully realized production design in the cult film canon. Every element of the world is consistent with its central premise: a society so organized around procedure that it’s lost track of why the procedures exist. Jonathan Pryce’s Sam Lowry escapes into fantasy not from cowardice but from a completely rational assessment of his situation, and Gilliam’s film is honest about what escape costs: everything real, and nothing imagined.

Brazil is the dystopia I believe in, because forms and ducts run it instead of cartoon villains, and anyone who’s spent years inside a big organization will recognize the smell. The fight over the ending still looks like a scandal. A studio tried to paste a smile onto a film about an institution crushing a man, and in doing so proved Gilliam’s point for him. My one quibble is that a few of the fantasy sequences overstay their welcome.

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10. Re-Animator (1985)

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“I must say, Dr. West, your condition seems much improved.”

Stuart Gordon’s Lovecraft adaptation is the finest horror comedy in the cult film canon and the one that best understands what makes the combination work: the comedy and the horror work at exactly the same intensity at once, and neither concedes to the other. Jeffrey Combs’s Herbert West is one of genre cinema’s great creations, a man whose complete commitment to his research has bypassed all ethical structures not through malice but through pure single-minded focus, who finds the inconveniences his work creates puzzling instead of troubling.

Gordon’s film received an X rating for violence and nudity, was released unrated, and built its audience through home video. It’s more graphically extreme than most films in this list and more funny than all of them. Gordon understands that Lovecraft’s horror is often inadvertently comic (the pomposity of the prose, the overwrought reactions to the unspeakable) and builds the film around that gap. The head on a tray is both the film’s most disturbing effect and its funniest joke.

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11. Blue Velvet (1986)

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“It’s a strange world, Sandy.”

Lynch’s most accessible film, accessible being relative, begins with a severed ear in a field and descends from there into the darkness beneath American suburban normalcy. The film’s central image is literal: the manicured lawn and white picket fence of Lumberton, and the insects churning in the soil underneath it. Jeffrey Beaumont’s discovery of the ear is the discovery that the world he thought he lived in has another world directly beneath it, operating on different rules, and that he’s attracted to that other world in ways he can’t fully explain.

Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth is the film’s defining performance: a man whose violence and need are so completely merged that they can’t be separated, who uses the language and postures of childhood while doing things that no childhood contains. It’s pathology rendered as performance. Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy Vallens is the film’s moral and emotional center, and Lynch’s treatment of her is both exploitative and sympathetic in ways the film doesn’t try to resolve.

Blue Velvet is as close to perfect as American film gets for me. Hopper’s Frank Booth frightens me, and I’ve never seen a villain who feels less like acting. Lynch takes a tidy small town and shows you the rot under the lawn without a wink, and I admire the nerve that took. My only small reservation is Jeffrey himself, who looks pale next to Frank, and even that might be the point.

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12. The Princess Bride (1987)

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“Inconceivable!”

Rob Reiner’s second film on this list is here for different reasons than Spinal Tap: The Princess Bride is a real cult film because it was misunderstood. It performed modestly in theaters in 1987, was embraced on home video, and has been accumulating devotees ever since.

William Goldman adapted his own novel with complete faithfulness to its central trick, a fairy tale that at the same time celebrates and gently satirizes its own conventions, and Reiner executes it with a lightness of touch that makes the self-awareness feel warm.

The film is about storytelling (the grandfather reading to the sick grandson is the frame, and the story keeps breaking to acknowledge its own artifice) and it works because Goldman loves the genre he’s sending up. The swordfights, the giants, the battle of wits, the miracle pill: these are played straight and affectionately, not deflated by the humor surrounding them. The film’s devoted following quote it with the pleasure of people who have found a work that confirms everything they already believed about the world.

I adore The Princess Bride, and I don’t feel any need to be clever about it. Goldman wrote a fairy tale that pokes fun at fairy tales without once sneering at them, and that’s far harder than it looks. I like every scene. A kid can watch it for the swordfights and an adult can watch it for the jokes, and it’s the film I’d hand to anyone who claims they don’t like fantasy.

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13. Heathers (1988)

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“What’s your damage, Heather?”

Daniel Waters wrote Heathers as a savage satire of high school social hierarchy and the American tendency to redeem everything, including murder, through the language of therapy and self-help. Winona Ryder’s Veronica murders her way through the popular clique with Christian Slater’s J.D. and watches the school community transform each murder into a lesson about sensitivity and awareness. The film’s argument (that the culture will absorb any transgression and convert it into a teaching moment) has only become more accurate since 1988.

Nobody could make it today, and that’s an observation about the film. I’m not complaining about today. It works in a tone of black comedy so specific to its moment (the late 1980s, when the culture was still developing its current mechanisms for absorbing transgression) that any contemporary version would either soften it or overcorrect it. What exists is the pure version: a film that hates nothing more than the language of niceness deployed to avoid actual engagement with actual ugliness.

Heathers is savage, and I’m grateful for every nasty line of it. Waters trusted his audience to understand that a movie can show murder without endorsing it, and that kind of trust is rare. Winona Ryder runs the movie on a raised eyebrow. My only gripe is a final act that gets a little frantic, but the script’s aim never wavers.

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14. Clerks (1994)

“I’m not even supposed to be here today!”

Kevin Smith made Clerks for $27,575, shot it overnight in the New Jersey convenience store where he worked, and financed it on credit cards. Sundance rejected it and accepted it the following year after a successful screening at the IFC. The film’s black-and-white photography is the result of budget instead of aesthetic choice (the store’s lighting was too inconsistent for color) and the technical limitation became the film’s visual identity.

The dialogue is the actual achievement: Smith writes characters who think obsessively about the details of mass culture (the independent contractors on the Death Star, the implications of Return of the Jedi’s ending) with the same energy they should be spending on their actual lives, and the film understands that this is both a symptom of arrested development and a real form of intelligence. Dante and Randal aren’t stupid; they’re applying their intelligence to the wrong problems. The film is honest that this is a choice they’re making.

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15. The Big Lebowski (1998)

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“The Dude abides.”

The Big Lebowski flopped on its 1998 release and has since generated an annual festival (Lebowski Fest), a religion (Dudeism, which has ordained over 600,000 ministers), and the most obsessive cult following of any Coen Brothers film. The film’s cult status is inseparable from the Dude’s philosophy: a man who refuses to be disturbed by a world that keeps disturbing him, whose equanimity isn’t stupidity but an achieved calm, becomes the patron saint of everyone who has decided that the world’s urgency is mostly manufactured.

You’ll also find it in the comedy list on this site, and it belongs here as well, because its cult isn’t primarily a comedy audience. Lebowski cultists quote it the way other people quote scripture, with the conviction that the text contains actual wisdom about how to live, delivered through a detective story nobody can follow about a rug that really tied the room together.

I enjoy The Big Lebowski, and the Dude’s refusal to be rattled appeals to me more the louder the world gets. He’s a better philosopher than plenty of people who write books on the subject. My reservation is the one the page already admits: the plot barely holds together, and there are stretches where the shaggy dog wags a little too long for my taste.

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16. Donnie Darko (2001)

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“Why are you wearing that stupid bunny suit?”

Richard Kelly’s debut was released on October 26, 2001, six weeks after 9/11, to minimal audiences and immediate cult adoption. The film’s subject matter (a jet engine falling from the sky, a teenager who may or may not be hallucinating the end of the world) was too close to the cultural moment for comfortable mainstream consumption, and that’s why a certain kind of viewer claimed it immediately. Donnie Darko is the definitive alienated-teenager cult film because it takes the alienated teenager’s conviction that something is wrong with the world completely seriously.

The time travel mythology is internally consistent if you read the supplementary materials Kelly published, and completely mysterious if you don’t, and the cult is divided between those who need the explanation and those who find the explanation reductive. Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance (smart, furious, tender, frightened) is the best work of his career. Frank the rabbit remains one of cinema’s great images of ambient dread.

I like Donnie Darko a lot, mostly because of Gyllenhaal and that rabbit. The homework is the weak point. A film that needs supplementary material before its plot adds up has handed part of its job to the audience, and I think Kelly let himself off easy there. Given the choice, I’ll take the mystery over the manual.

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17. The Room (2003)

“Oh hi, Mark.”

Tommy Wiseau spent $6 million, of unknown origin, making The Room, a film in which he wrote himself as the tragic hero of a love story, had everyone he loved betray him, and delivered lines he’d written as dialogue with the cadence of someone who learned English from books and has never heard it spoken. The film is objectively terrible by every conventional metric and is the most purely entertaining viewing experience in the cult film canon.

The Room shows that the line between genius and disaster is sometimes thinner than craft can measure.

Wiseau’s performance as Johnny is the great unintentional comic performance in cinema: every scene reveals something new about the gap between what he intended and what arrived on screen, and that gap is consistently more interesting than competent execution would have been. The film has been playing monthly midnight screenings in Los Angeles since 2004. Audiences bring spoons to throw at the framed pictures of spoons. Wiseau attends regularly and insists it was always meant to be a black comedy.

I rate The Room as high as I do because I can’t think of a film that’s more fun to sit through with a crowd. It’s awful, and I adore every awful minute of it. What I respect is that Wiseau meant every frame. Cynical, competent movies vanish from memory within a week, while this one keeps drawing people who bring spoons. My one complaint is that it drags between the good disasters.

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18. Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

“Vote for Pedro.”

Jared Hess made Napoleon Dynamite for $400,000 in Preston, Idaho, where he grew up, and produced a film so specific in its observation of one kind of rural American life that it became universally recognizable. Napoleon never gets the conventional film loser’s arc.

He’s never humiliated, beaten, or redeemed. He’s simply who he is, doing what he does, with total commitment and zero self-awareness, in an environment that’s equally strange and equally committed. The film refuses the coming-of-age arc. Napoleon doesn’t grow. He dances.

Its deadpan approach (no jokes are signaled, no reactions are performed, every character is equally committed to their own reality) produces a comedy tone that divided audiences on initial release and has built its following through accumulated recognition: the reaction of a person who knows exactly what this world is and is delighted to find it documented. The dance at the end is one of cinema’s great payoffs: Napoleon performing a skill he’s developed in private, for a community that has no idea what to make of it, which accepts him anyway.

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19. Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)

“REPOSSESSION IS THE LAW.”

Darren Lynn Bousman’s rock opera is the most committed film in the cult canon: a dystopian future in which organ transplants have become consumer products and defaulters have their organs surgically repossessed, told entirely in song with Paris Hilton, Sarah Brightman, Paul Sorvino, and Anthony Stewart Head performing material that ranges from haunting to gleefully excessive. The film was given a limited release of eleven theaters by Lionsgate. That then pulled it after one weekend. It’s been in continuous cult operation since.

The midnight screening culture around Repo! is among the most active in contemporary cult film (audience participation, cosplay, cast appearances, shadow casts) and the film has sustained it for over fifteen years on the strength of its conviction. The production design, costumes, and music exist at the intersection of opera, glam rock, and graphic novel, and the film commits to that intersection with the knowledge that the mainstream isn’t invited. This is a film for its people, made by people who knew exactly who their people were.

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20. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

“You made me swallow my gum! That’s going to be in my stomach for seven years!”

Edgar Wright’s film cost $60 million, was marketed to a mainstream audience, opened to $10 million, and became a cult classic in about eighteen months.

Universal had no idea how to sell a film that looked like a video game, moved like a comic book, and expected its audience to be conversant in both. The film’s failure was a marketing failure instead of a quality failure. It was exactly what it was trying to be, and what it was trying to be had no existing audience category.

Wright’s editing grammar (the fastest, most precise cutting in mainstream American cinema) creates a film that rewards obsessive repeated viewing because new details appear on every pass. Scott Pilgrim’s cult is a close-watching cult: the visual jokes operating in the background of the action jokes, the references layered three deep, the editing choices that are themselves jokes. The film is constructed for people who pay the kind of attention that most films don’t require and don’t reward.

What Cult Films Know

Every film on this list was, at some point, a film that the mainstream either rejected, ignored, or failed to understand. The cult formed in that gap, in the space between what the mainstream could process and what the film was. The devotees aren’t people who enjoy bad films; they’re people who recognize something in a work that the general audience missed, and who build communities around the shared recognition.

The cult film’s audience doesn’t merely consume the work. They become custodians of it. They introduce it to new people, defend it against dismissal, perform it in theaters, quote it as a shared language. The relationship between a cult film and its audience is the most intense relationship in cinema, and it’s almost never the relationship the film’s creators anticipated. The cult chooses the film. The film doesn’t choose the cult.

I’ll take a film somebody loved too hard over a polished product any day. The people paid to judge these movies misjudged every one of them, and ordinary viewers overruled them one screening at a time. That should embarrass the gatekeepers more than it does. When I picture a crowd dressed as Frank-N-Furter or throwing spoons at a screen, I see an audience doing the job the studios failed at, and those crowds deserve most of the credit for keeping these films alive.

What Do You Think?

What’s missing? What cult film changed your life? Drop a comment below.

Honorable Mentions

1 more reviewed on this site and worth your time, ranked by the same scale as the list above.