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Sandwiched between a massage parlor and a run-down motel, the Night Owl once stood as a proud nickelodeon bringing the novel magic of cinema to the people living in Los Angeles’s Hollywood district.

Long ago, the marquee proudly announced showings of great silent films like Napoleon and Metropolis. Slowly dying ever since, it reinvented itself as a revival house in the sixties and a grindhouse in the seventies. These days, it survived by showing the X-rated likes of New Wave Hookers and Café Flesh.

Tonight, however, the seedy little theater offered something new. Something truly nasty and startlingly taboo, a shocking film that brought the Moral Majority types screaming outside its doors for two weeks running.

TONIGHT’S MIDNIGHT MOVIE

IF WISHES COULD KILL