Toronto: Twenty years after writing the book, Stuart Samuels has finally made the movie, and later this year will see Midnight Movies, his look back on the cult films of the 1970s, go to air on Movie Central and Moviepix.

‘It’s the story of six films,’ he says – Night of the Living Dead, The Harder They Come, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, El Topo, Pink Flamingos and Eraserhead – ‘that were the opening wedge to the age of irony.’

Taboo bashing, weird sex, frustration with the status quo, these are all attitudes that, in Samuels’ view, began to invade the mainstream through to the early work of oddball filmmakers like David Lynch and John Waters. He made the same argument in his 1983 book of the same name but wanted to repeat his argument with a movie because people today, he warns, are losing touch with all that hard-earned irreverence.

‘So much of society is based on facade, surface, the patina of celebrities. It’s fun to poke fun at that,’ he says.

Samuels shot interviews last year with Waters, Lynch, zombie king George Romero and Rocky Horror’s Richard O’Brien, and with the theater owners, distributors and fans that kept the cult film scene going through its heyday.

The 90-minute HD pic is due to air on Movie Central and Moviepix by fall and will also hit the festival circuit, possibly putting in at the Toronto Interntational Film Festival, Sundance and Cannes. It is also set to air on Starz Encore in the U.S. Backed by tax credits and licence fees, it cost $700,000 and will be self-distributed.

Samuels has delved into movie and pop-culture history many times – most recently in the well-received 1998 doc Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream that he codirected with Simcha Jacobovici of Associated Producers. He is also a pioneer in high-definition video, shooting early HD music videos for Lou Reed and Mick Jagger in the late ’80s and winning accolades for the feature doc Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography, which he codirected with Arnold Glassman and Todd McCarthy in 1993.

And yet he’s frustrated by the current explosion of HD because the format still isn’t being used to its full potential. HD can do so much more with effects, layering and matting than is being explored by the current wave of HD shows, he laments.

‘In the 1980s, the idea was to use HD as a new production tool,’ he says. ‘We’ve gone from shooting on Beta to shooting on HD. It’s just another upgrade.’