Revisiting a Classic Sundance Midnight Movie Screening

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age. 

First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing. 

Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.

The Pitch: Cold Sore Terrorism, Period Sex, and John Waters as Your Youth Pastor? Nice Work, Pauline!

It’s my understanding that the tampons were handmade.

Unfortunately, I was unable to hunt down the contact information for “Excision” writer/director Richard Bates Jr. to confirm that fact in time for this column’s ceremonial 11:59pm publication. (Cut me some slack; it’s festival season!) But what little information I could uncover about his debut film’s 2012 Sundance premiere — a storied screening that took place as part of that year’s Park City at Midnight lineup — there is sufficient reason to believe that Bates arrived in Utah armed with dozens of fake bloody tampons he made to give the press and his peers.

“It’s a very ‘industry’ festival and you don’t get audiences cheering and jeering and reacting. The goal of the film is to take you through every emotion, from comedy to horror to tragedy, and everyone at the Sundance audience is kind of dry,” the filmmaker explained in a 2016 interview for Empire. “I made bloody…