Transgressive & midnight

Not a genre so much as a scene: films made deliberately to disgust, provoke or bewilder, which the studios would not touch and which found their audience through late-night repertory screenings. The midnight movie circuit was their distribution system, and word of mouth was their marketing.

John Waters

The presiding genius of American bad taste. Pink Flamingos (1972), in which Divine competes to be the filthiest person alive and eats dog excrement on camera to settle it, is the purest act of cinematic provocation ever committed to film. Female Trouble and Desperate Living followed. Waters made offence into an art form and did it with genuine wit.

The others

Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo and The Holy Mountain built the midnight circuit. David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) ran at midnight for years and made him. George Romero, John Waters, and the Rocky Horror phenomenon all lived here. Later, Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik and the shot-on-video underground extended the tradition.

Why it belongs on this site

Transgressive cinema is exploitation's most self-aware wing: it exists to cross lines, and it knows exactly which lines it is crossing. Where the rest of the site's films offend by accident or for profit, these offend on purpose, as the entire point.

Where to start

Pink Flamingos if your stomach is strong, Eraserhead if it is not.