The National Film Registry at the Library of Congress preserves The Godfather and Citizen Kane, and it also holds The Rocky Horror Picture Show and John Waters' Pink Flamingos, inducted in 2021. This episode explains how films designed to be repulsive or unmarketable earned the same protection as the classics, by tracing the midnight movie phenomenon back to a 1953 Screen Actors Guild residuals deal that let studios dump cheap B movies onto local television, FCC rules that pushed them into late-night slots, and the 1954 debut of Maila Nurmi's Vampira Show, which taught audiences to laugh at bad movies together.

We then move to the Elgin Theater in New York, where Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo sold out midnight shows for months and won over John Lennon, and to the circuit that followed at the Waverly and the Bijou with Night of the Living D ...