What are magazines for if not to maintain the memory of loved shapes and to make an idea last over time? The one who animated the mythical Fantastic Midnight-Midnight, known as “MMF”, throughout its short existence of almost ten years (1962-1971) and 20 deliveries, was, much more than the confinement to a cinematographic genre, the defense of a cursed aesthetic bringing together all the strange forms , unusual, excessive, conducive to unleashing the imagination.
Its covers and its pages were the meeting place of creatures and chimeras, at the turn of which one could meet Dracula, Frankenstein and his fiancée with electric hairstyles, werewolves, mummies, Amazons, giant spiders, witches and warriors.
From 1968 onwards, the magazine was banned from under-18s
Born in 1962 from the ardent frequentation of the cinema “Midi-Minuit”, located boulevard Poissonnière, in Paris (2e), and specializing in horror, by a group of young fanatics (Michel Caen, Alain Le Bris, Jean-Claude Romer and Jean Boullet), edited by Eric Losfeld, sacred monster of literatures of the imagination, the magazine has contributed to the emergence of a willingly subversive horrific counter-culture. Long marginalized, even mocked, it has since largely infused mass culture and been taken over by mainstream entertainment – the work of Tim Burton or the saga Twilight are the proof.
Its republication at Rouge Profond in large luxurious collections, led since 2011 by Nicolas Stanzick, was itself a ten-year adventure which ends today with the publication of volume 4, bringing together the last six issues. The volume continues a work that goes far beyond the simple facsimile, and consists of a real graphic and iconographic restoration of the magazine, with its incredible photo tunnels, its passionate and scholarly texts, where we cross the signatures, here or there, by Pierre Klossowski, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jacques Sternberg and even Eugène Ionesco.
Censorship
In addition to its invitation to cinephile reverie, its pioneering interviews (here with Japanese snipers like Seijun Suzuki and Koji Wakamatsu), the book provides us with information on this last rugged period of a magazine that has always had a problem with censorship. , and which sees itself struck, since 1968, of a prohibition to the less than 18 years. Through it, it is the activities of publisher of Eric Losfeld which are targeted by the public authorities: the man is dragged before the censorship commission, subpoenaed in correctional, subject to prohibitive fines. The celebration of the fantastic takes the form of a fight for freedom of expression against official decorum and the control of performances. Assimilated to a deviance, which is played out in the pages of MMF, at the crossroads of violence and eroticism, is rather of the order of a quest, that of the sublime in the strong sense: this image which burns the retina, capsizes the senses, causes fainting.
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