The cultish appeal of midnight movies expanded after Jim Sharman’s “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a camp spectacle that invites audience participation, opened at the Waverly in 1976. It soon became a national phenomenon.

What bound the midnight films was their originality.

“The movies were told in a way that was further out,” Mr. Barenholtz told The Times, “where you felt that if you showed it through the normal channels it would be impossible for it to get a normal audience.”

Ben Barenholtz was born Berl Bernholz on Oct. 5, 1935, into a Jewish family in Kovel, Poland, and grew up in the village of Kupichev, which is now part of Ukraine. His father, Aaron, was a timber merchant; his mother, Paula, was a homemaker. Their lives, and that of Berl’s older brother, Rubin, were roiled by the occupations of the Soviets in 1939 and the Germans in 1941.

As the Nazis, with help from Ukrainian nationalists, began to murder the local Jews in 1942, the Bernholzes fled their ghetto for the safety of a Polish farm family sheltering other Jews in a barn. For more than two years, the Bernholzes found safety at the farm and in various forest hide-outs. But on March 15, 1943, Aaron Bernholz was killed by a Ukrainian nationalist as Berl sat next to him.

“My father’s last word to me was ‘Run,’ ” Mr. Barenholtz said in various accounts of his childhood.

He survived, lived in a refugee camp in Austria, and immigrated with his mother to New York in 1947. His brother, who is his only survivor, left for Palestine.