March of the Volunteers
"Song at Midnight" was released five months prior to the eruption of the Second Sino-Japanese War in China. The film's primary subplot concerns the activities of Chinese leftist revolutionaries, and did not easily evade the film censorship of Kuomintang, along with its serious punishment to films dealing with themes of horror, gods, spirits, or "superstition and heresy" at that time. With a passion to maintain his creation, and in order to successfully circumvent the censorship laws in China at the time, director Ma-Xu Weibang visited "Yiyong jun jinxing gu" (March of the Volunteers) writer Tian Han several times while writing the script. The pair met to ensure that the script would be approved under censorship.