“Why stay home at midnight? What are you going to see there?” —The trailer for Pink Flamingos

Forty-five years ago, John Waters’ Pink Flamingos premiered at the Baltimore Film Festival. Eventually, it would become the midnight movie in residence at the legendary Elgin Theater in Manhattan, succeeding Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo—the first movie to make its bones by being exhibited exclusively at midnight, according to J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s seminal 1983 book, Midnight Movies. Because even at the height of the director-driven, boundary-pushing New Hollywood era, only at midnight could you screen a film about a competition to be “the filthiest person alive”—one that (spoiler alert) climaxed with its star eating dog excrement.

“It still works, I know that,” Waters tells Vanity Fair. “It didn’t get nicer; it might have even gotten more hideous. Even people who think they’ve seen everything are sort of stunned by it. They may hate it, but they can’t not talk about it. That was the point. It was a terrorist act against the tyranny of good taste.”

Today, Pink Flamingos can be streamed, downloaded, and rewatched on home video (in a Criterion Collection set, no less). It still plays the occasional midnight, but Waters notes that his films do much better now at the box office when they are not shown at the stroke of 12.

And indeed, the old maxim that “They don’t make ’em like they used to” applies to midnight movies as well. According to Waters, films of singular vision and outré sensibility—such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead—have been coopted by platforms like the Sundance Film Festival and savvy studio marketers. “I don’t think there is such a thing as a midnight movie [anymore],” the director proclaims. “[That era] is over. It’s a dead genre.”

That’s sad, laments his nostalgic interviewer, who fondly recalls mid-1970s midnight treks to Chicago’s funky 3 Penny Cinema to see the French anti-war film The King of Hearts, coupled with the animated shorts “Bambi Meets Godzilla” and Lenny Bruce’s “Thank You, Masked Man.”

“It’s not sad,” Waters insists. “Time marches on. That’s like saying it’s sad there’s talkies.”

To be sure, showing movies at midnight is still a going concern at venues nationwide, from the IFC Center in Manhattan and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, Massachusetts, to the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, and the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles. To quote the Coolidge’s “After Midnite” online guide, programming is given over to “horrifying, weird, camp, avant garde, tripped-out, and cult films.” That covers a lot of ground, from the adrenaline rush of the original Point Break to The Void (think Assault on Precinct 13, but in a hospital terrorized by hooded cult figures).