Horror, chimeras, night. Midnight Special Program
At midnight, the cinema turns into a mystical place. The usual movies fall asleep and horror movies, category "B" movies, forgotten action movies about kung fu and films that raise issues that could not be the subject of daily movies wake up. In short, the midnight film is strange, scary, sexy, psychedelic and almost never looks like what you can see in decent places at a decent time.
Night films are associated with cheap cinemas in New York and Los Angeles, which were not controlled by large studios. Therefore, they were indifferent to any rules, moral code, decent repertoire, and so on. Cinema owners have seen that unconventional films also bring in money, mainly because of the inadmissibility. Like, everyone is already in their bed at home, and we are watching here what will not be shown anywhere. In addition, on television, the night program slot was considered "safe": children sleep, and for advertisers there is very little contact with the audience.
That's why movies like Todd Browning's "Monster" or Andy Warhol's "Chelsea Girls", which would never be shown during the day, have become popular in the semi-legal space at night.
Later, in the 1960s and 1970s, there were more and more midnight screenings for strange films, and the audience began to interact more actively with the film. Therefore, at a session of night classics, such as "Mole" by Alejandro Khodorkovsky, the audience could shout, share impressions, laugh and wonder out loud. This culture of viewing eventually became the foundation for so-called "cult cinema," an almost religious worship of a particular film.
From the margins of the film process (at midnight, the films of underground outsiders were shown), such films moved into the mainstream. At first, the midnight movie appeared on home media such as VHS, where it huddled those who could not go to New York cinemas, and later reached major prestigious festivals. Since 2011, there have been midnight screenings in Cannes (usually three or four at a festival) featuring paintings by Gaspar Noe and Takashi Miike, famous directors for their transgressive work.
Since 2019, "Molodist" also invites viewers to this atmosphere of midnight sessions in its out-of-competition program "Midnight Special". Here are shown tapes for the stout of heart and open-minded viewers.
For the stout of heart, the program will include several horrors and tapes that tell about the darkest aspects of human existence. "Wanted" by Ben Rehim is one of them. Following the traditions of spaghetti westerns, where there are no completely good characters, the film paints a dark picture of Filipino society during the reign of the odious President Rodrigo Duterte. In fact, the story is directly related to him and his anti-drug program in the country. Duterte directly called for "cleansing" the streets of drugs through "extrajudicial killings." And if you are on the list of undesirable elements, such as Mary's husband, then, consider that your fate is decided or turn into a dark thriller without hope for salvation.
Horror is a very chamber genre, in which there are usually three or four characters. "My Heart Won't Beat If You Don't Command" by Jonathan Quartas and "Friend" by Oscar Martin are such chamber stories. Quartas tells the story of a family in which Thomas, the youngest of the brothers, suffers from an unknown disease, and Dwight and Jesse have to support his life. However, after a while, the question arises: should we continue to give Thomas life, considering the way he lives?
Oscar Martin in his film also talks about intimacy, not about family intimacy, but about friendship one. Out of guilt for his own involvement in the accident, David begins to take care of his friend Xavi, who was injured in it.This begins as a story of true friendship and quickly develops into an unhealthy relationship, similar to what can be seen in Stephen King's novel Misery.
Such a spiral construction of the film, where the whirlwind gradually thickens all the scariest and most horrible things that another person can bring, is typical for two more tapes of the program. Galina Raine's "Instinct" shows a very close to reality, but no less scary story. Psychologist Nikolin, working in a penitentiary, falls in love with one of the convicted rapists, Idris. A relationship in which charisma borders on psychopathy and equality turns into violence cannot end well.
Natalia Meta's "Stranger" draws the line between the ordinary and the horrible along the border of the real and the imaginary. The main character Ines after a traumatic event begins to confuse the real world and the paranoid world. She begins to see dead people in her dreams and sometimes in reality. The fight for her consciousness determines the main conflict of the film.
For those who are open-hearted for the midnight, a strange, bizarre movie like Ryan Krueger's "Fried Barry" is shown. The story of an alien who captures the human body to experience the pleasures of earthly life cannot be not strange. And if you add the really inhuman plasticity of the main character, Barry, and the fact that the action takes place during one night, you can get a film, which is equal in effect to two energy drinks in a row.
And Ronnie Sen's "Cat Food" can generally be described as a drug trip. Because all the characters in this black-and-white film, which takes place overnight, are united by their thirst for drugs. Broken landscapes, night lanes and altered states of consciousness accompany this peripheral picture for the Indian film industry in general.
And finally, for the savage mind, another film is presented, which probably has one of the best titles in history - "Jesus shows you the way to the highway" directed by Miguel Janso. In the 21st century, midnight films, and category B films in general, have begun to consciously use the paths characteristic of such cinema. "Jesus ..." is just such a film. It contains virtual reality with tapes, the Cold War, the Soviet Union virus, a thief in a cardboard mask of Stalin and, in fact, Jesus, who shows the way to the highway.