Paper plates are hard to throw. Toss them like a baseball and they fly straight up. Throw them like a frisbee and they sink like a stone.

I know this because the centerpiece of Northwestern University’s annual B-Fest -- a 24-hour nonstop marathon of cinematic detritus -- is a plate-strewn midnight screening of Edward D. Wood Jr.’s reviled and revered PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959).

Though most of B-Fest fosters an aesthetic of complete anarchy, the PLAN 9 activities are carried out the with the methodical tenacity of a fascist regime. Audience members are called upon to shout key phrases, based upon certain elements of 9’s visual text. By constantly pointing out the film’s schizophrenic reality, the ritual emphasizes Wood’s endearing ineptitude. Everyone screams “Day!” when Tor Johnson (“Tor!”) drives his car along a brightly lit strip of country road and “Night!” a moment later when he arrives in a pitch black graveyard.

The plates, though, are the key element. They are deployed each time one of Wood’s flimsy flying saucers appear on the screen. Since the pie tins or hubcaps that would best replicate PLAN 9’s “special” effects would be too painful if hurled into the air by hundreds of people, B-Festians use paper plates by the thousands, most decorated with snarky phrases or famous lines of movie dialogue (A random sampling of plates retrieved after the film: “Domo arigato, Mister Avocado,” “www.wherehasthisplatebeen.com,” “Girl, you give me Pac Man Fever,” “This Plate is NOT Microwave Safe,” and the mysteriously direct “Anal Punch”).

The quirky scrawls are a cornerstone of B-Fest tradition. Just don’t investigate when or where the plate writing began. No one -- not even the guys who have attended every B-Fest since its humble beginnings -- have any idea where it came from.

B-Fest is the sort of event that its fans look forward too all year with zealous anticipation. When I arrived at Northwestern’s Norris Student Center two hours before the festival began, there were already more than twenty-five people in the theater, claiming spots and preparing for the ordeal they were about to undertake.

No one comes to B-Fest without supplies. Organizers undersell the theater’s capacity by over 100 tickets so that each attendee gets several seats to use to store their junk. Everyone has a pillow; some even have inflatable mattresses which they blow up in the aisles. There is also enough sugary junk food in the room to kill a diabetic a thousand times over; crap food is almost as essential to B-Fest as the crap movies, though there are unspoken rules about bring loud or smelly snacks that would bother your neighbors.

For some, traditional social graces are left at the door. One guy named Marty proudly lounged in shorts and a t-shirt, with his shoes nowhere to be seen. Comfort was key, he told me. Others, like Linus, who I found passing the time before the start of the show reading Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures and who claimed he didn’t watch bad movies the rest of the year because there were simply too many good movies to watch instead, brought a toothbrush and deodorant. When I asked why he answered simply, “I care.”

This is the 23rd marathon in 24 years. The long-running affair began in 1981, at the peak of the midnight movie boom. Back then, B-Fest was known as “The Twenty-(plus)-Hour B-Movie, Horror, and Science Fiction Festival” and admission was three bucks for the whole night (today it’s twenty). According to Mitch O’Connell, who has attended every single B-Fest and provides the yearly artwork for B-Fest’s official shirt, the first festival was devoted entirely to American science fiction and horror from the 1950s. By the second year rubber Japanese monsters were involved. By the fourth year it assumed its annual position at the end of January and became known as B-Movie Fest (By 1994, it was shortened to B-Fest).

Today, the festival cuts a wide swath through all cinematic eras and genres, and in the interest of avoiding repetition, the boundaries of what is considered a B-movie keep expanding. Its impressive special effects and an all-star cast including Michael Caine, Richard Widmark, and Henry Fonda technically make 1978’s THE SWARM an A-picture. But its ludicrous story of perturbed, vengence-crazed African bees (who, the film goes to elaborate and borderline-racist pains to distinguish, are vastly different from the friendly, helpful, and no doubt God-fearing American honey bee) merit its inclusion. I’ll buy that angry bees could muck in the electrical equipment and cause the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. But could they really survive the ensuing explosion?

The experience of B-Fest is thrilling. 250 sugar-crazed maniacs hoot and scream and crack wise, like a live performance of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 starring the characters from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST off their medication. During the first film, EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS (1956), the comments were so loud it was almost impossible to hear the film’s actual dialogue. Without warning, people would run onto the auditorium stage, and act out a skit related to the film. Sometimes they had props, and costumes, or cue cards. (One of the funniest was a large scorecard that kept a running tally of each successful attack by Earth and the Saucer People). Anything, it seemed, could happen.

As the night progressed, things settled down. After PLAN 9’s midnight screening, already more than seven hours into B-Fest, much of the auditorium went to sleep. It’s this portion of the event that begins to resemble "the haze" that so many attendees describe when I ask them to recall the most exciting moments from B-Fests past. I fell asleep during the laboriously unfunny BEAUTY AND THE ROBOT (1960) which, at well after 3:00 AM, felt like an act of self-preservation. I regained consciousness in the middle of DEATH WISH 3 (1985), just as Charles Bronson blew a guy out of an apartment building using a rocket launcher. It was like waking from a nightmare into a fever dream.

Andy Freeberg, a member of Northwestern’s A & O Films and the head of this year’s B-Fest explained that it’s important, particularly in the late night hours between midnight and 9:00 AM to test and push the B-Fest attendees to their absolute limits. For every film on the schedule like THE APPLE (1980) -- a thematically- and gender-confused musical about a far-flung future where music corporations run by extraordinarily effeminate men in tiny g-strings control the world -- there is one like THE ADVENTURES OF NEEKA (1968), a tedious Lassie film slightly more entertaining than being stuck in a crowded elevator with a bad cases of the runs. With most of the crowd asleep or wishing they were, Freeberg intentionally delayed changing NEEKA’s reels, instilling the remaining conscious fans with hope that they would put something else on. After a lengthy pause, the film continued once again, to audible groans in the theater and audible laughter in the projection booth.

Though the midnight movie is largely a thing of the past, an event like B-Fest keeps its unique attributes alive. Here, too, offbeat fare is screened to rowdy late night crowds. In their book Midnight Movies, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum compare the audience reaction to films like PLAN 9, PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) and others to that of a religion. Though they see all film as a religious experience, it is the midnight movie or cult film in particular where they find metaphor to be most apt. “Philosophers of religion,” they write, “tell us that repetition confers a higher ‘mythic’ reality upon events.”

For men and women (but mostly men, mostly between the ages of 25 and 40 with a goatee) who delight in watching so-called “bad movies,” getting to watch them in a theater of enthusiastic like-minded geeks is a thrill, but the delight is tempered by the fact that it’s difficult to remain excited about anything when you are seated in a cramped theater in an uncomfortable chair for 24 hours straight. It’s like trying to eat all your Halloween candy in one night: even if it tasted great for a while, the end result is always a stomachache.

But what religion isn’t without its suffering? For bad movie lovers, B-Fest is like Christmas and Yom Kippur all rolled into one; a joyous celebration coupled with a painful night of atonement. The paper plates are like the Christmas tree. And the reason no one knows how the ritual started is because how it started is unimportant. The ritual’s repetition, not its origin, gives it meaning.

The B-Fest rituals will return next year. The paper plates shall fly, poorly and cruedly. If I’m lucky, I’ll be there to see it.

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