It took us 300,000 years to make it to the movies. Will it take us just a couple hundred years to lose them?
Writer and critic Simon Miraudo has unveiled Last Rites for Lost Films: Charred Celluloid, Digital Decay and the Certain Death of Cinema, due out 6 October 2026 via Low Heroes Press, with pre-orders now open.
Last Rites for Lost Films is a new non-fiction book that charts humankind’s march towards cinema—a miracle of technology, artistry and cultural myth-making—and wonders why it keeps dying on us.
It follows Miraudo's hit, independently published Book of the Banned: Devilish Movies, Dastardly Censors and the Scenes That Made Australia Sweat, which was named one of The West Australian's Best Reads of 2023.
Last Rites... is a cosmic celebration of cinema, and a caustic cautionary tale for a crisis that once inspired Martin Scorsese to scream in an open letter, “Everything we’re doing right now means absolutely nothing!”
Featuring interviews with Oscar nominees, international preservationists, cinema owners and those who have been literally erased from cinema history, Last Rites for Lost Films describes the doomed productions, deleted files and directors’ cuts you were never meant to see, and the ones you never will. This is for anyone who’s ever lusted after the prospect of witnessing Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried or Marvel’s first—and forsaken—Fantastic Four, as well as everything else you heard was burned, shelved or sued into oblivion.
Ahead of its October 6 release via Low Heroes Press, pre-orders have commenced via Kickstarter. Cover art by Sean Morris.
Pay your respects as we travel from the missing first movies to cinema’s likely last gasp, and find out if there’s still a glimmer of hope for film—and humans—yet.