The flip side of film history
Hollywood's double features came with an A picture and a cheaper B picture, like the two sides of a record. These are notes on the flip side: cult films and midnight movies, B-movies and drive-in fare, classic Hollywood, vintage cartoons and TV, and how to watch them today.
Side A
Horror has more cult films than any other genre: midnight shockers, low-budget originals and films that failed first and conquered later. Here are 25, plus Halloween picks and the best horror about cults themselves.
Side B
You do not need a pile of subscriptions to watch old films. Here are the legal ways to watch classic movies free, what each source is best for, and how to avoid poor-quality pirate uploads.
Film history is long, and most of it sits outside the handful of titles that everybody agrees are great. Beyond that short list lie the pictures made fast and cheap to fill out a program, the flops rescued years later by a stubborn audience, the cartoons that ran before the feature, and the studio films that taught Hollywood its habits. This site is about that territory.
The name comes from records. A single carried its hit on the A-side and something else on the flip, and a double feature worked the same way: a big studio picture, then a cheaper B picture to go with it. A surprising number of films that people cherish today began on the flip side. Flip Side Notes is written for viewers who are curious about them and unsure where to begin. You need a free evening and a little context, and this page supplies the context.
No studio can order up a cult film. The label arrives afterward, from people who watch a movie again and again, quote it, dress up for it and drag their friends along. Some were ahead of their time, some too odd for a wide release, and some are loved precisely because so much in them goes wrong. Late-night screenings for a devoted crowd, the midnight movie tradition, turned many of them into rituals.
Begin with what a cult film is and how a following forms. Then pick a path: cult classic movies arranged decade by decade if you want a watchlist, gloriously terrible films if you want a loud night with friends, or the strangest films ever made if you would like to be surprised.
In the studio era, "B" described a job, not a verdict. The B picture was the low-budget film on the bottom half of a double bill, often turned out quickly by the small studios known as Poverty Row. Later the term loosened to cover almost any cheap genre film, and the drive-in became one of its natural homes. Tight budgets forced invention: a monster suit, a borrowed set and a good title could carry a whole picture.
What a B-movie is, from double features to drive-in classics explains the history. For the fun part, try creature features and the wider family of monster movies and giant beasts. The rougher end of the low-budget world, sold on shock and sensation, is covered in exploitation films and the grindhouse era.
The studio years can look like a wall of black-and-white faces. It helps to enter through a single door. If you like crime stories, deep shadows and people making bad decisions, start with what film noir means and follow it with the best film noir of the classic era. If you would rather understand how the whole machine ran, read the golden age of Hollywood and how the studios worked.
From there you can travel backward. Pre-Code Hollywood covers a brief stretch when films were bolder than those of the years that followed, and silent films shows how much storytelling was possible before anyone spoke on screen.
For many people the first old films they ever saw were cartoons: shorts made for theaters and then rerun on television for years. They are a friendly way back into older styles of comedy, music and drawing. A short history of classic animation sets out the eras, and Saturday morning cartoons traces a weekly ritual from its rise to its end.
Television has a back catalog of its own. Old TV shows by decade is a guide to classic series worth revisiting; in December, turn to old Christmas cartoons and holiday films.
Finding these films is easier than it used to be, and there is no need for pirate sites. Some films are in the public domain: they are no longer protected by copyright, so anyone may show and share them. Others have been restored and reissued, or sit in the collections of libraries, archives and licensed services. The rules differ from country to country, so a film that is free to watch in one place may not be free in another.
Public domain movies: what they are and where to watch them explains the idea in plain terms, and where to watch free classic movies online lists legal sources. If the machinery interests you as much as the pictures, the Watching Old Films section also looks at formats, starting with 16mm film and the look it gives.
The best way to use this site is the way theaters once sold tickets: two films, one evening. A few pairings that work:
Dates, credits and history come from film archives and libraries, published film histories, studio and distributor records and reference works, and the sources are linked under each guide. Where accounts disagree, which happens often with older pictures, we say so instead of choosing the better story. Our editorial standards give the details.
No studio, distributor or streaming service pays to appear here, there are no affiliate links, and we never host or link to pirated copies. Flip Side Notes is an independent project; the about page explains what the site is and what it is not. If we have a fact wrong, tell us which page and we will put it right.
