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Agrindhouse oraction house[1] is an American term for a theatre that mainly showslow-budget horror,splatter, andexploitation films for adults. According to historian David Church, this theater type was named after the "grind policy", a film-programming strategy dating back to the early 1920s that continuously showed films at cut-rate ticket prices that typically rose over the course of each day. This exhibition practice was markedly different from the era's more common practice of fewer shows per day and graduated pricing for different seating sections in large urban theatres, which were typicallystudio-owned.
Due to these theaters' proximity to controversially sexualized forms of entertainment likeburlesque, the term "grindhouse" has often been erroneously associated with burlesque theaters in urban entertainment areas such as42nd Street in New York City,[2][3] wherebump and grind dancing andstriptease were featured.[4] In the filmLady of Burlesque (1943) one of the characters refers to one such burlesque theatre on 42nd Street as a "grindhouse," but Church points out the primary definition in theOxford English Dictionary is for a movie theater distinguished by three criteria:[2]
Church states the first use of the term "grind house" was in a 1923Variety article,[5] which may have adopted the contemporary slang usage of "grind" to refer to the actions ofbarkers exhorting potential patrons to enter the venue.[2]
Double, triple, and "all night" bills on a single admission charge often encouraged patrons to spend long periods of time in the theaters.[6] The milieu was largely and faithfully captured at the time bySleazoid Express, an exploitation aficionado magazine that ran in the 1980s.
Because grindhouse theaters were associated with alower class audience, grindhouse theaters gradually became perceived as disreputable places that showed disreputable films, regardless of the variety of films – including subsequent-run Hollywood films – that were actually screened.[7] Similar second-run screenings are held atdiscount theaters andneighborhood theatres; the distinguishing characteristics of the "grindhouse" are its typical urban setting and the programming of first-run films of low merit, not predominantly second-run films which had received wide releases.
The introduction of television greatly eroded the audience for local and single-screen movie theaters, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. In combination withurban decay afterwhite flight out of older city areas in the mid to late 1960s, changing economics forced these theaters to either close or offer something that television could not. In the 1970s, many of these theaters became venues forexploitation films,[4] such as adultpornography and sleaze, orslasher horror, and dubbedmartial artsfilms from Hong Kong.[8]
Films shot for and screened at grindhouses characteristically contain large amounts of sex, violence, or bizarre subject matter. One featured genre were "roughies" orsexploitation films, a mix of sex, violence andsadism. Quality varied, but low budget production values and poor print quality were common. Critical opinions varied regarding typical grindhouse fare, but many films acquiredcult following and critical praise.
By the mid 1980s,home video andcable movie channels threatened to render the grindhouse obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles'sBroadway andHollywood Boulevard, New York City'sTimes Square and San Francisco'sMarket Street. Another example was the Jolar Theater in Nashville, Tennessee, on lower Broadway, which was active until it burned down on April 14, 1978.[9]
By the mid-1990s, these particular theaters had all but disappeared from the United States. Excerpts fromSleazoid Express were compiled into a book of the same title by authors Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford; the book discusses various exploitation subgenres as well as New York City's42nd Street grindhouses themselves.
I spent my first night inSan Diego sleeping in the back row ofthe Cabrillo Theater.
In that pre-Gaslamp, pre-multiplexdowntown of 1978 or so, half a dozen wonderfully eclectic – if mildly disreputable – late night movie houses operated within a few blocks of each other. Each grindhouses was a colorful oasis, plopped down in the middle of a seedy urban sprawl perfectly suited to the sailors on shore leave and porn aficionados that comprised much of its foot traffic.
A couple of bucks got you a double or triple bill, screened 'round the clock in cavernous single-screen movie theaters harkening back to Hollywood's golden age, rich in cinematic history and replete with big wide aisles and accommodating balconies. Horton Plaza had theCarbillo[sic] and thePlaza Theater, both operated by Walnut Properties, whose owner Vince Miranda maintained a suite at theHotel San Diego (which he also owned).
Because grindhouse theaters were nasty places, full of nasty people, and most of us wouldn't be caught dead in one. The few folks who were there for the actual movies were either poverty tourists or cinephiles who didn't notice anything except the flickering screen, and, in many cases, their cinephilia had burned out their sense of discrimination, because a lot of the movies that showed in grindhouses were bad.
