Word: midnighters
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Just another typical installment of Midnight Madness, the festival's nightly showcase for pictures with an outrageous agenda and a racing pulse. There are films, and then there are movies; the Madness audience knows the difference and celebrates it. But they're not slumming. "They're diehard festival goers," says Colin Geddes, the section's programmer. "They've been to three or four films that day and this is their last stop. They know they're going to see a film that will thrill them. But they understand world cinema. After nearly every film the director does...
...Some of the young directors taking those questions in years past have graduated with honors from Midnight Madness. This was where to find Peter Jackson before The Lord of the Rings (with Meet the Feebles and Braindead). James Wan launched his Saw franchise here; and Eli Roth, helmer of the Hostel horror movies, got his first international exposure with Cabin Fever. "After the first screening there was a bidding war for the film," Geddes says. "It basically kick-started his career...
...forget: directors start young," says Noah Cowan, who programmed the series through 1997 and now runs the festival with Piers Handling. "And when you're young you're attracted to the magic of horror and action. So Midnight Madness is an excellent festival recruiting tool not only for young audiences but also for young directors." The section thus makes room for low-budget horror films, extreme action epics, foreign gangster movies - what are known, affectionately or derisively, as genre films...
...That leaves a vast and vital batch of commercial stuff - which may be box-office hits in their home countries, though unknown elsewhere - for the connoisseurs of Midnight Madness. As Geddes says with justifiable pride, "It's everything that you don't expect to find at a film festival." His job is to honor the primary demand after-hours movie goers have for a film: that it keep them awake...
...Midnight screenings of outré films had been a staple of independent movie theaters since the early '70s, when the Elgin in New York City unearthed Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo and John Waters' Pink Flamingos. Late-night showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show evolved into their own audience-participation phenomenon. But no international festival had set up a midnight menu of genre films until Handling unleashed his staff on the project in 1988. Among the premier offerings were Frank Henenlotter's horror film Brain Damaged and the rock doc Decline of Western Civilization Part Two: The Metal Years...