The Birth of the Midnight Movie: How El Topo Turned Cinema into a Secret Society

At midnight on 18 December 1970, a small New York cinema began showing a film that most respectable distributors would have preferred to leave in the desert.

It was called El Topo.

Part western, part religious hallucination, Alejandro Jodorowsky's film contained enough violence, mysticism and bewildering symbolism to exhaust an entire conventional cinema programme.

Its prospects looked uncertain.

Instead, audiences started returning night after night. Word spread through the city's counterculture. The screenings became an event, then a ritual, then a phenomenon.

The history of midnight movies stretches back before 1970, but what happened at Manhattan's Elgin Theater helped establish something new: a cinema culture in which the audience, the hour and the shared experience mattered almost as much as the film.

Before Midnight Became a Brand

Late-night film screenings were not invented by the counterculture.

American cinemas had experimented with midnight presentations for decades, particularly with horror, exploitation pictures and unusual attractions. San Francisco's Palace Theater was already programming unconventional late-night cinema during the late 1960s.

But these screenings were generally regarded as additional entertainment rather than a distinct cultural identity.

By 1970, American filmgoing was changing.

Young audiences were discovering European art cinema, underground filmmaking and increasingly confrontational independent productions. Traditional Hollywood narratives no longer satisfied everyone.

Meanwhile, small cinemas needed ways to survive against larger commercial competitors.

The solution was wonderfully simple: show films that ordinary cinemas wouldn't touch, at an hour when ordinary audiences were asleep.

El Topo Arrives at the Elgin

The man who recognised the opportunity was Ben Barenholtz, manager of the Elgin Theater on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan's Chelsea neighbourhood.

Barenholtz had seen El Topo at a private screening and recognised its peculiar appeal.

Jodorowsky's 1970 production followed a black-clad gunslinger through a landscape of violence, spiritual trials and increasingly extravagant allegory. It borrowed the visual language of spaghetti westerns while abandoning most of their narrative conventions.

Rather than attempt a conventional release, Barenholtz placed the film in the midnight slot.

The experiment began on 18 December 1970.

Screenings continued seven nights a week until June 1971, with late shows scheduled at midnight or, on some nights, 1am.

The Elgin became a destination for people who wanted to experience something unavailable in mainstream cinemas.

And, crucially, they told their friends.

The Audience Was the Secret Ingredient

The remarkable thing about the Elgin screenings was not simply their commercial success.

It was the behaviour of the audience.

People returned repeatedly. They discussed the film's symbolism, recommended it to strangers and treated attendance as evidence of belonging to a particular cultural world.

Watching El Topo became an experience that could not be entirely separated from the circumstances of watching it.

The late hour mattered. So did the unconventional crowd, the ageing theatre and the sense that something forbidden or overlooked had been discovered.

There was no elaborate national advertising campaign manufacturing a cult following.

The audience largely created one for itself.

That distinction remains central to the meaning of cult cinema. A cult film is not necessarily a commercial failure, an obscure production or a deliberately outrageous spectacle.

It becomes a cult film when audiences develop an unusually intense relationship with it.

The Elgin provided the meeting place.

From Underground Curiosity to Cultural Institution

The phenomenon attracted some influential admirers.

John Lennon reportedly became fascinated with El Topo, and his interest helped bring the film to the attention of Beatles manager Allen Klein, whose company acquired its distribution rights.

By then, other cinema owners had recognised the potential of midnight programming.

Films including Night of the Living Dead, Pink Flamingos, The Harder They Come and Eraserhead developed substantial late-night followings.

Then came The Rocky Horror Picture Show, whose audience participation eventually transformed cinema attendance into something resembling a theatrical performance.

The films differed enormously in style, politics and artistic ambition.

What united them was the discovery that an enthusiastic minority could sustain a film long after conventional distribution logic had written it off.

When Going to the Cinema Meant Joining Something

The original midnight movie phenomenon belonged to a particular moment.

It required physical cinemas, limited access to unusual films and audiences willing to travel across a city because somebody had whispered about something extraordinary.

Home entertainment and digital distribution eventually removed much of that scarcity.

Today, almost any obscure film can become a recommendation, a streaming discovery or an online obsession.

Yet the essential impulse survives.

Independent cinemas still organise cult screenings, while repertory programmes and audience-participation events preserve the communal experience.

Hellwood's El Topo T-Shirt celebrates the film that helped turn this strange after-hours activity into a recognisable cultural movement.

The lasting achievement of the midnight movie was not persuading people to watch strange films.

It was giving them somewhere to find one another.

Explore more unconventional screen history in Hellwood's Cult Classic Movies collection, discover international cinema in the Foreign Films collection, or browse the wider Film T-Shirts collection.

EL TOPO T-SHIRT

The film that helped create the midnight movie phenomenon.

A Hellwood tribute to Alejandro Jodorowsky's extraordinary 1970 acid western, whose surreal imagery, spiritual symbolism and uncompromising originality helped transform underground cinema into a cultural movement.

Featuring a black-clad gunslinger against vivid orange-and-red artwork, the design celebrates one of the most influential and unconventional films of the counterculture era.

VIEW THE EL TOPO T-SHIRT