Sex, drugs, and midnight screenings of Eraserhead — Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s freewheeling and nostalgic documentary Scala!!! tells the story of the (in)famous London cinema that served the city’s outcasts, punks, and misfits from the late 1970s until the early 1990s.

For much of its existence, the Scala cinema was based in pre-regeneration King’s Cross, where it screened films around the clock, specialising in the kind of art-trash hybrids — Jubilee, El Topo, John Waters movies — that are still associated with the ‘cult’ label today. It dodged laws around banned and pornographic material by charging for membership, meaning it could get away with sexploitation, all-dayers, and screenings of Pasolini’s Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, which were often programmed alongside gigs by bands like The Fall and Throbbing Gristle. This, alongside its reputation for debauched audiences, led to its being christened ‘The Sodom Odeon’.

Using a mix of archival material, talking heads, and clips from oft-screened films, Scala!!! emphasises the cinema’s importance and its influence on countercultural figures of the 1980s and beyond. Anecdotes varying from amusing to tedious come from contributors including musicians Barry Adamson (Magazine) and Jah Wobble (Public Image Ltd, or PiL), filmmakers Peter Strickland (Flux Gourmet) and Mary Harron (American Psycho), and comedians Stewart Lee and Adam Buxton. The Scala was known for its grindhouse-style all-nighters, where exploitation and genre films would play to raucous crowds; but arguably its most important and long-lasting work was to provide a space for marginalised audiences to connect with cinema and ideas. It’s moving to hear Jim MacSweeney from Gay’s the Word bookshop recount seeing screenings of queer films, or Lina Gopaul of the Black Audio Film Collective describe longed-for feelings of belonging at the cinema.

The Scala met its end in 1993 after a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 masterpiece A Clockwork Orange, which was banned from distribution at the filmmaker’s behest following accusations of copycat violence. The Scala screened it anyway, got lumped with a lawsuit from Warner Bros., and was forced to close as a result. Today, the building still exists as a club and gig venue with its name intact.

The film understandably treats the cinema’s closure as the end of an era, but the legacy of the Scala can still be seen in cinema exhibition today. In cynical corporate terms, the nostalgic desire for cinema-going experiences that are heavy on the ‘experience’ has led to heavily monetised, structured versions, like pop-up ‘immersive’ screenings with £50 tickets, or chains like Everyman, where a cinema trip is more about ordering cocktails and burgers to your seat than what film you’re watching. I’m sure the atmosphere at the Scala was electric for those who visited, but today the idea of a riotous audience shouting during a film just gives me grim flashbacks to a screening of Suspiria at an Everyman, feeling like I was paying through the nose to watch it on a TV screen in a shit, expensive pub.

More positively, the Scala’s gonzo approach to programming is reflected in independent exhibitors, film clubs, and micro-festivals around the country, with curators and film fans often putting on screenings in bars, clubs, and community halls. The most direct evidence of this influence is in the ongoing Scalarama, an annual festival which takes place in venues around the country every September. Founded in 2011, the festival has supported screenings of cult, classic, and under-seen films in venues from a town hall in Ballymena to a church in Jersey. Local iterations of Scalarama act as mini-festivals in areas including Leeds, Nottingham, and the Highlands of Scotland, and often incorporate events of the kind of mixed art forms that the Scala specialised in, with music, comedy, and drag shows taking place alongside films.

The local Scalarama in Glasgow, where I live, has always been a lively reflection of the local micro-indie exhibition scene. In the past couple of years alone, I’ve seen short films about black drag performers in a gay bar, 1970s horror in a downstairs club, and all of Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy in an arts centre. At the last edition of Weird Weekend, a festival of cinematic oddities organised by local programmers Matchbox Cineclub, I saw TV movies and rarely- screened horror films, as well as an all-night programme of seventies gay porn curated by Ask Any Buddy director Elizabeth Purchell (I made it until 2:30am). Admittedly, this is in a big city with a rich and long-lasting film-going culture, but it’s a snapshot of the ongoing appetite for left-of-centre programming. These local scenes are also supported financially and logistically by crucial organisations like the British Film Institute’s Film Audience Network (BFI FAN), which has outposts in areas across the UK.

Watching Scala!!! in Glasgow and thinking about this legacy, I couldn’t help but feel a familiar cynicism about the London- centricity of popular cultural history. Undoubtedly the Scala was an important venue and a sanctuary for marginalised and countercultural people, and its existence is worth celebrating — but I wonder about the history of radical film exhibition throughout the rest of the country that is lost to time. What other venues and people were taking risks by showing transgressive filmmaking around the same time? Of course, it’s much easier and cheaper to independently screen films in 2024 than in 1984 — and thanks to digital technology, you don’t necessarily need a cinema, costly equipment, and a skilled projectionist to do it. But there must still have been rogue cinema programmers and punk film clubs with the spirit of the Scala in other places — I’d love to see their stories brought to light.