How ’80s Subculture Staple Night Flight Was Reborn as a Punk-and-Horror Streaming Network

Night Flight Plus has been running for 11 years now, steadily growing all the while. Alongside period slasher flicks and vintage profiles of Sade and the Replacements, there are brand-new videos from RVNG Intl. and Sub Pop and a host of titles from indie film company Factory 25. The platform’s biggest innovation has been the launch of two real-time streaming channels in addition to their on-demand offerings. The first plays a 24/7 selection of music videos, concert films, music docs, and original Night Flight programming; it’s hosted by radio veteran Pat Prescott, whose voice-overs graced the original show as well. (When I tuned in recently, I caught a block of recent Kate NV videos whose lo-fi video quality made them look like they could have been produced in 1983; the effect was uncanny.) The second channel, also running 24/7, plays a mix of horror and cult films. Since adding those play-out channels in 2020 and 2021, average viewing time has skyrocketed, Shapiro says—confirming, perhaps, that the era of legal weed has created just as many lean-back viewers eager for horror schlock and weirdo music as you might have expected.

Night Flight’s latest project is the Night Flight Music Video Film Festival, a contest for unsigned artists. The contest is now in its second year, with an awards ceremony to be held at Prospect Park’s Nitehawk Cinema on December 11. “Independent music videos are the most creative shit happening,” says Shapiro. “They’re esoteric, they’re making them on really low budgets, and they’ve got real creativity behind them. I’m really devoted to that—it’s an important part of who we are.”

For Matt Werth, founder of New York record label RVNG Intl., the devotion goes both ways. “Stuart clearly has a love and obsession for fringe culture, and a scrappy, DIY sensibility,” he says, praising Night Flight as an alternative to the centralization of the current streaming landscape. “I love seeing our artists alongside documentaries about Betty Davis and the Cramps, films from Factory 25 and Oscilloscope Laboratories, and so much more.” Werth isn’t just a supplier of content—he’s a fan from the original era, even though it aired past his bedtime. “Night Flight scrambled my mind as a kid,” he says. He recalls catching hardcore punk documentary Another State of Mind on Night Flight in the ’80s as a pre-teen, a chance encounter he calls a “life-changing and life-affirming event.”