Lost Picture Show: Red Midnight (1966)
Scare films: propaganda and nuclear holocaust
This is the sixth in a (hopefully) ten-part series on film preservation. Using Vinegar Syndrome’s Lost Picture Show box set as a guide, each post will focus on a different genre and the importance of preserving film history, regardless of how “good” or “bad” we think the films might be. The fifth in the series on The Last of the American Hobos can be read here.
Whatever happened to the scare film? Propaganda films are made to warn us of oncoming dangers like nuclear holocaust or societal threats like drugs. Have we grown so sophisticated in our approach to filmmaking that everything has to be allegorical now? This was my primary thought as I sat through James Newslow’s Red Midnight (1966), a scare film made to warn society of the oncoming threat of nuclear holocaust and the hidden communist agenda.
I believe the short answer to that question is access to information. As society has increased its access to information and live updates there is no longer a need to receive news from one source. While newspapers have always existed and will continue for some time, the news-reel playing at theaters eventually transitioned into the daily and nightly news on television, which has built up to a 24-hour news cycle. Thanks to all of these advancements we no longer need to make up monsters in our head. We can watch it live. It can be argued that this creates its own form of speculative horror, but as it comes to fictionalized warnings, where is the need anymore?
Red Midnight tells the story of a doctor who gets involved with an ambiguous group of foreign spies intent on setting off nuclear bombs across the United States. The doctor and his friend pretend to side with the spies and sell the spies on an alternate plan to set large fires in the slums of major cities claiming it will cause a greater impact and still give the spies somewhere to live. The doctor points out that if the spies set off bombs everywhere, where would the spies be able to live without the threat of nuclear fallout? Of course, those backfires in the end. What kind of a scare film would shy away from showing the end of the world?
Scare films, and to an extent, propaganda films, are the exploitation version of a social guidance film. Social guidance films were educational films made to teach children and adults how to be well-functioning and upright citizens. Where social guidance films sought to warn and inform, the exploitation films played on the collective fears of society like the fear of communism or the fear of drugs. Red Midnight is just another in a long line of anti-communist “Red Menace” films like the b-movie The Red Menace (1949). Narcotic (1933), and Sex Madness (1934) are examples of earlier scare films focused on drugs, pre-marital sex, and venereal disease. The most famous of these scare films might be Reefer Madness (1936). It is a film so absurd in its depiction of marijuana usage that it has spawned its a stage musical and has been referenced in several other mediums.
I do not think there is a place for the scare film in today’s world. Audiences are generally smarter and our access to news and information has increased exponentially since the 1930s. We know that marijuana itself will not push someone to murder. People are not afraid to admit to being communist anymore. We know immediately if a documentary has even a hint of falsehood. If a film has even a hint of “wokeness” we cry that it is too preachy. 2021 saw the release of Don’t Look Up an allegorical film about climate change that replaces climate change with a giant asteroid. Maybe because it came and went as a Netflix film, but it hardly left an impact. There was no panic in the streets about climate change. We have embraced the scary in the form of documentaries and true crime. The only thing left to terrify us is ourselves (a thematic trend I have noticed in most recent horror films).
Like The Last of the American Hobos, Red Midnight belongs to a dying (or dead) genre) making the preservation of these films, no matter how “good” or “bad” you think they are, all the more important. Red Midnight was surprisingly well made. The director was an optometrist and this was his only film credit. The acting may have been lacking, but the shot composition, flow of the story, and ideas present were interesting enough. I know I sound like a broken record, but each of these films is a slice of history. It might be a small slice of history that has little to no impact on society as a whole, but it is the little things that are sometimes more interesting and make up the larger whole.