Culture Slut: Lost in Late Night Movies
“All great beginnings start in the dark, when the moon greets you to a new day at midnight.”
I recently had the opportunity to host an online screening as part of Polyester’s partnership with MUBI and I loved every second of it. I’m constantly analysing the films I love, particularly the camp and glamour of Golden Age Hollywood, the transcendental experiments of 60s European Art House, and the nightmares of the French New Extremity, so I was particularly excited to present the 2021 film Titane and facilitate a discussion about it afterwards. Titane is a confrontational French body horror spectacle that deals with identity and found family, and both unsettles and exalts the viewer in the surreal and visceral flesh. It was perfect. I’d been told about the event a few weeks before and knew that it would be a fun evening, but it wasn’t until I was filming the second take of my opening welcome for instagram in the Polyester studio, in my full face, wig, boa dress, complete with drink sponsor and brand names already on my tongue that I realised what I was doing, WHO I was: I was Elvira.
Elvira, video vamp, mistress of the dark, horror bimbo is a timeless classic, a comedic genius, part of a long history of vampiric women in cinema and an even more niche character type; that of a horror hostess. I know that this was more of a staple for American TV than British, what with Elvira being the successor to the iconic Vampira and then the scores of Horror hosts from the 60s onwards, but it was prevalent enough to touch my sheltered English adolescence and help create an exciting gateway into film and queerness. As a kid in the 90s, my family had an early form of cable television which included American channels, but also quite a few European ones. I remember stumbling my way across some schlocky Hollywood B Horror movies like The Bat with Vincent Price, but trust me, nothing could ever be as sinister as watching The Moomins in the original Finnish with no subtitles, just haunting music and empty landscapes (don’t even get me started on how scary the Groke was, doomed to haunting the forest, looking for friends that never came). I saw some Elvira re-runs that were quickly turned off by my parents, but was also introduced to the idea of late night movies on television.
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My parents weren’t against really against horror, my father’s family were actors in London, my grandmother, a professional walk-on, once had the highest honour of being the hand that opens the coffin door from within during the opening sequence of the Hammer Horror anthology series. She herself was an intellectual and a true bohemian, born in the 20s, art school in the 30s and 40s, stage actress, then working artist, born again at 40 in the 60s when she realised she could live like the European women she admired in Pasolini and Fellini films, became a true free spirit and master of her own destiny. By the time I was old enough to be left in her care whilst my parents went on American holidays or other jaunts she started nurturing my tastes as well. I had a liking for Greek myths (hello young queer kid) and loved the 1960s Jason and the Argonauts with the Ray Harryhausen claymation monsters, so she guided me towards one of the unrivalled masterpieces of Pasolini’s oeuvre; Medea, featuring the incredibly powerful Maria Callas as Jason’s neglected first wife. In the film, she decapitates her brother, sets fire to her husband’s mistress and even kills her own children. It was an eye-opening experience.
When I got a little older I was fortunate enough to have a small cheap television in my bedroom, mainly for my play-station, but it could also play real TV channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, and Channel 4, for those of you too young to remember this period in history) and I discovered the joy of late night television. I remember watching the pioneering lesbian series Sugar Rush after 10pm on school nights with the sound turned low so that no one could hear that I was awake. I remember that at 11pm on Thursdays was a show called Boys Will Be Girls, which featured former boy band stars formed into a new group all dressed in drag, and had to convince a crowd at a music festival and some record producers that they were a genuine girl band. I remember the original version of The Friday Night Project, one episode being hosted by Boy George, which included him performing his newest single with his band The Twin called Here Come The Girls (the music video of which is still on youtube and I highly recommend it.) Bust most of all, I remember the late night movies.
“I want to be intoxicated by the darkened ether of midnight, running through my fingers as sparkling stardust.”
Channel Four in the early hours of the morning started screening films from it’s Film4 catalogue and it made for some of the most formative cinematic experiences for me and thousands of other kids. From the cynical coming-of-age offerings of Greg Araki to the truly unhinged depths of modern foreign art house, it sincerely was like stepping into another world. Two films stick it out particularly in my mind,and both moved me in ways that I had never considered before. The first was Mysterious Skin, which I had only ever encountered as a short clip in the early days of youtube, two young male leads kissing having been fervently passed around the gay youth chatrooms at the time. Once, whilst late night surfing, I found the full film being shown and I would stop at nothing to see it. It was thrillingly exciting, very confronting with its themes of childhood sexual abuse, but also in the unabashed queerness and empowering sexuality of it’s leads. Featuring a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt, it follows two boys who were abused by their baseball coach and how they deal with that as they grow up. One retreats inwards and tries to solve the mystery of his childhood blackouts (he thinks it’s alien abductions, spoiler alert; it’s not), and Gordon-Levitt becomes a street smart teen prostitute in New York. It provided such a wide view of gay men in the late 90s, from predators to small-town cruisers to AIDS victims just yearning for human touch, that to an isolated queer teen was both terrifying and exciting. Whole universes existed outside of the kids who bullied you at school, outside of the innate loneliness of gay youth, outside the meagre fantasies of kissing boys and going to parties. I’ve mentioned this before, but accessible representation even as recently as ten years ago was almost non existent. Kids on the internet are up in arms these days over the age gap between Elio and Oliver in Call Me By Your Name (17 and 24), but they have no idea how things used to be. Even during the early days of the internet (pre-smartphone) it was so difficult to find queer kids your own age, let alone in your own home town, so movies reflected that, and it was all we had. I’ll take a difficult, confronting, dangerous portrayal of queer youth closer to my own coming-of-age experience than the saccharine Netflix-fronted Love Simons and Alex Strangeloves any day of the week.
If Mysterious Skin touched me as a queer teen, then the 2006 Hungarian film Taxidermia blew my fucking head off. Described sometimes as a surrealist art house comedy, it is a story of three generations of Hungarian men, each act focusing on a different bodily fluid. The first part was about Semen, and showed a young soldier driven delirious by his desire to masturbate, ejaculating in every direction, through a glory hole into a hen coop, into the carcass of a slaughtered pig, and in his superior officer’s wife. The second part was about Saliva, and showed the officer’s wife’s son grown into a champion speed eater, constantly guzzling the most absurd amounts of food and sludge, a never ending abyss. He falls in love with a fellow speed eater and they have a son. The third act focuses on Blood, and shows us the son having grown into a taxidermist who stuffs his own father when he dies, and then, himself. His body is later discovered and exhibited in an art gallery. I’m not sure who was in charge of this particular broadcast at Channel Four, so I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but the film was shown without subtitles, making it an even more enigmatic and mysterious for non-Hungarian-speaking viewers. The only English lines in the film comes at the end when there is a translator repeating after the curator of the exhibition of human taxidermy, telling us that “in art, some things just cannot be mounted.” It left me absolutely floored. I had never heard of this film before, never knew that something like this could exist, that it could even be imagined, let alone shown on television. It was so dynamic, so bewildering, and it had come to me unbidden, like a gift, like I was meant to see this film, that something out there had said “Misha must see this film, it will be beamed directly into his bedroom through the black mirror we all share” and it was done.
The late night movies shown on Channel Four were gateways into other worlds, key steps in the artistic education of all who saw them, from kids aspiring to artistic understanding, to people just wanting to see more of the world, and this is something that has almost been lost since the introduction of streaming services. In our modernity, our desire for choice and comfort, our access to the strange and confronting has been severely limited. Thank God for Titane, MUBI and the BFI Player is all I can say right now. You might have Netflix, do you think you will see some truly unhinged eastern European cinema there? You might have acquired some self awareness and started looking for more curated streaming services (MUBI is a perfect example of this) but even this requires prior knowledge of what you are searching for. No longer are bat-shit movies beamed for free into youthful bedrooms, just the repeated drudgery of sitcoms ten years out of date (and not even era-defining camp classics like Dynasty or I Love Lucy, just Friends and Parks and Rec, god save us all from another bloody millennial think piece about the non-wokeness of Friends). Where can impressionable teens get their eyes assaulted by John Waters and Divine’s underground slapsticks? Where can adolescents have sticky sexual awakenings over the decadent parties of Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine, or the goth rock sexy vampire classic Queen Of The Damned? How are these god damned baby gays meant to be able to quote All About Eve and The Little Foxes and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? if Netflix considers 80s schlock to be “Classics”?
And now comes the final blow, the death knell; Channel Four is on the verge of privatisation. Woe to the republic of free thinkers, of artists, of thrill seekers, woe to the uninitiated just about to be shaken loose from their suburban conformity by a film about vagina with teeth that castrates rapists. Mourn the loss of the wealth of independent cinema snatched from our grasping hands. Mourn the tide as it continues to turn its back on originality in favour of more and more disney commodified space wars and super heroes that all look like The Rock or Chris Hemsworth. Mourn the increasing inaccessibility of subversive queer narratives for our questioning youth! A call to arms for the protection of the artistic integrity of our future generations: SHOW KIDS WEIRD MOVIES! Take your own children, your nephews, nieces, non-binary he/theys, she/theys and they/thems, and show them the weirdest films you can think of! Derek Jarman’s Jubilee for the pop-punk emo revivalists! John Waters’ Female Trouble for the acne-ridden beauty influencers! Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex for the youthful Greek scholars!
If late night broadcasts die, it is your duty to keep the spirit of transgressional cinema alive! Let the Jennifer Lawrence mid-00s B pictures fade into obscurity instead! Fight for filth! Fight for discomfort! Fight for the new! For the Now! For you! For wow!
Words & Collages: Misha MN
