Nitehawk’s third annual all-night Halloween screening A NITE TO DISMEMBER time travels through DECADES OF HORROR!

Get schooled on horror history with A NITE TO DISMEMBER: DECADES OF HORROR as we screen five classic movies from the past fifty years. Starting at midnight on Halloween, Nitehawk celebrates films that punctuated each decade like a knife to the heart: Poltergeist (1980s), House on Haunted Hill (1960s), Bay of Blood (1970s), and Scream (1990s) with a surprise spanking new horror release right in the middle so secret that it will only be revealed moments before we show it!

As we do each year at A NITE TO DISMEMBER, there will be a costume contest (with prizes!), trivia (more prizes!), horror short films (pint sized fear!), and complimentary Nitehawk breakfast (eggs and tots!). This year there will also be a complimentary cereal bar courtesy of POST Cereal and guests will receive a special “survival” gift bag that, amongst other treats, includes a discounted fare from Uber. And we’ve got you covered on the drink front with complimentary coffee from Fazenda Coffee and a specialty cocktail with Owl’s Brew. Plus, sweets from our neighbor SweetHaus! Hosted by Shudder’s Sam Zimmerman and Nitehawk’s Kris King.

Forget trick-or-treating, spend the nite with us!

FILMS (in order of screening)…

POLTERGEIST (Tobe Hooper, 1982) – 35mm
Come into the light Carol Anne…
Poltergeist took the haunted house in film into a whole new era. Brought to you by the director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Steven Spielberg, it shows the quick evolution from excitement to fear as the young Freeling family discovers their shiny new home in Cuesta Verde comes with a bad case of the evil spirits. Basically, the first in the Poltergeist series eviscerates middle class America in the 1980s by attacking them where it counts, their planned housing communities, with the technology of the time. Trust us, a television has never been so scary.

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (William Castle, 1959) – Digital
They’re coming for me now…and then they’ll come for you…
Speaking of haunted houses, you’d be hard pressed to find one more outlandishly fun than this Vincent Price classic. Starring as an eccentric millionaire, Price invites five strangers to spend the night in a “haunted” house and whomever survives will get one million dollars. (Disclaimer: you don’t get money for surviving Nite). Directed by the ultimate film showman William Castle, House on Haunted Hill is full of plot holes but the film’s charm is part of the fun-loving gimmick experience of the time period that would make Castle a legend. Just beware the flying skeleton in the theater.

MYSTERY FILM (2000s)

A BAY OF BLOOD aka TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (Mario Bava, 1971) – 35mm
Gee their good at playing dead, aren’t they?…
Violent, sexy and (yes) humorous, Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood or Twitch of the Death Nerve or the near countless other titles, is the film that inspired a generation of American horror. In fact, you may notice that one scene’s “inspiration” is outright copied in Friday the 13th: Part II. One the one hand, the story has a homicidal inheritance race. On the other, there’s a group of unaware sexed up, boozed up teenagers camping out in an abandoned house in the family bay who get caught up in the murderous mix. Like all of Bava’s films, A Bay of Blood is pure magic; pure gratuitous, gory magic. Know the original.

SCREAM (Wes Craven, 1996) – DCP
What’s your favorite scary movie?…
Wes Craven’s Scream has been called the movie that marks the end the American horror film as it folds in all of the genre’s tropes of the previous twenty years into one meta experience. With one of the more shocking first scenes in horror history (akin to Hitchcock killing off his main character in Psycho), it establishes everything you need to know about the ride you’re about to go on. Most important, the film doesn’t take itself too serious. In fact, it’s incredibly fun to watch this group of mid-90s high school students ponder the “rules” of horror movies while a masked killer cleverly guts their peers. At the center of it all is our Final Girl Sidney, a virgin who seems to be the target of the killer’s affection. And yes, there will be test at the end of the Nite so study up!