Starring: Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Joan Bennett, Alida Valli, Udo Kier, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé
Dario Argento’s Suspiria is a candy-coated nightmare with an explosion of color and sound, heightening all the gory kills and strange occurrences to an all time pitch-perfect high. (Those bugs, the razorblades, the Goblin soundtrack!). In this horror fairy tale written by Argento and Daria Nicolodi, ballet dancer Suzy Banyon attends the German Tans Academy only to instantly find herself in the middle of a series of gruesome, and supernatural, murders. As she uncovers the dark history of the prestigious academy, the coven of witches tighten their grip on her and her classmates. She fights hard to solve the mystery before the Black Queen completely consumes her!
A group of friends are terrorized by a family of cannibals in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE!
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of a handful of films that punctuate the very life-blood of cinematic history. Intensely brutal with very little reprieve or consideration for the audience, it came out of a rift of a socio-cultural framework, bursting onscreen with the evisceration of the family structure, youth culture, and cultural fragility in a post-Vietnam United States. Like Night of the Living Dead did five years earlier, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre reveals the unraveling framework of society and places the possibility of horror/death to occur anywhere; not in the Gothic castle nor in the fields of Vietnam but, more terrifyingly, in our surrounding neighborhoods. The film also reveals one of the first final girls (Sally) in the American slasher genre.
An idyllic weekend of peace and quiet turns deadly for two college friends in HIGH TENSION.
A throwback to the grittiness of horror films from the 1970s, Alexandre Aja’s High Tension (Haute Tension) shows two best friends, Marie and Alex, who arrive at the country home of Alex’s parents for a quiet weekend of studying. And it all starts off very nicely until a homicidal delivery man (Phillippe Nahon from Gasper Noe film fame) arrives killing everyone, kidnapping Alex but unable to find the hidden Marie. What ensues next is a tense and extremely brutal game of cat-and-mouse in real splatter-style with an incredible twist ending that will undoubtedly shock you.
Part of Nitehawk’s FINAL GIRL October program.
A young woman’s psychological state comes undone while alone in her London apartment in Roman Polanski’s REPULSION. A 35mm presentation!
The psychological unraveling of Carol’s mind in Repulsion is expressed through sequences of dream imagery, vivid hallucinations, and real life horror as only Polanski can produce on screen. When Carol’s sister leaves her clearly disturbed sister alone in their London apartment as she vacations with a gentleman, it sends Carol over the edge and into madness. From that point on the architecture of London, her apartment and its individual rooms becomes a living, threatening character to Carol: it lets evil men in, houses all foul and decaying things, and literally reaches out to consume her. Men, however how well or ill meaning, are not to be trusted and Carol’s ultimately (and innocently) fights back.
Part of Nitehawk’s FINAL GIRL October program.
Starring: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Drew Barrymore
Many consider Wes Craven’s Scream to be the end of an era for 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. More than anything, and without being hokey, Scream is a whole lot of fun as a group of high school students ponder the “rules” of horror movies while a masked killer cleverly guts their peers.
Starring: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn
Robert Wise’s stunningly brilliant filmic adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s book, The Haunting of Hill House, reveals an evil house that has a life all of its own. Immediately after being built by Hugh Crain for his wife, Hill House began its violent history of psychological manipulations and murders. Many years later, when paranormal researcher Dr. Markway invites a group of people to investigate the mysterious home, bizarre occurrences happen almost instantly. One character in particular, Eleanor “Nell” Lance, has a strangely natural connection to Hill House and becomes utterly consumed by its past. Noted as being one of the most frightening films in cinema, Wise’s usage of camera angles, soundscapes and special effects made you believe that the architecture is breathing, tracking, and alive.
Mario Bava ignites the Giallo genre with his Rome murder mystery, THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. A 35mm presentation!
Considered to be the first Giallo, Mario Bava’s seminal film The Girl Who Knew Too Much (aka La ragazza che sapeva troppo) is a beautiful composition of a murder mystery meets horror movie. Nora is a young American visiting family in Rome when the shock of her Aunt’s sudden death sends her into the stormy night…and into her own whodunit. Her obsessive desire to prove that someone killed a young woman on the Spanish Steps involves a rather handsome detective (John Saxon) and a sequence of unfolding haunting events. (One scene in particular was reconstructed by Martin Scorsese in his remake of Cape Fear). As is typical with the Bava’s master cinematography and storytelling, The Girl Who Knew Too Much perfectly balances out the fright with humor and gorgeous imagery as it shows one of the first final girls in contemporary horror film.
Part of Nitehawk’s FINAL GIRL October program.
A car accident ignites a father’s obsession with replacing his daughter’s destroyed looks in Nitehawk’s 35mm presentation of EYES WITHOUT A FACE.
George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) is a slow-paced meditation on horror. After a car accident disfigures his daughter Christiane, a brilliant surgeon named Dr. Génessier feels such guilt that he kidnaps young women in order to graft their perfect skin onto her face (an act depicted in one of the most graphic scenes in film). Wearing a stoic mask, Christiane keeps to herself and to their guard dogs in their remote French estate but when she discovers what her father is doing for her, she makes sure it never happens again. A mixture of hauntingly gorgeous and disturbing imagery, Eyes Without a Face is an influential part of horror cinema and one that shows the very powerful importance placed on a woman’s beauty.
Part of Nitehawk’s FINAL GIRL October program.
A gang of masked, axe wielding murders invades the Davison family reunion in YOU’RE NEXT!
Nitehawk’s Final Girl series kicks off with one of the best new horror films and the latest release in series: Adam Wingard’s stellar home-invasion film, You’re Next. In the beginning, it’s the standard trope of a family happily gathered together in a somewhat isolated space for a celebration. Then comes the inevitable trouble: a gang of masked ‘Animals’ starts to systematically kill everyone and ruin all the fun. But Wingard puts a clever twist on the genre and reclaims the power of survival into a woman’s role by revealing that one of the victims (Erin) turns out to be the toughest killer of them all. Watch out because YOU’RE NEXT!
Part of Nitehawk’s FINAL GIRL October program.
Style Wars is regarded as the indispensable document of New York Street culture of the early ’80s, the filmic record of a golden age of youthful creativity that exploded into the world from a city in crisis. It captured the look and feel of New York’s ramshackle subway system as graffiti writers’ public playground, battleground and spectacular artistic canvas. Opposing them by every means possible were Mayor Edward Koch, the police, and the New York Transit Authority. Meanwhile MCs, DJs and B-boys rocked the city with new sounds and new moves and street corner breakdance battles evolved into performance art.
New York’s legendary kings of graffiti and b-boys own a special place in the hip hop pantheon. Style Wars has become an emblem of the original, embracing spirit of hip hop as it reached out across the world from underground tunnels, uptown streets, clubs and playgrounds.
Following Style Wars, we’ll be screening Style Wars Revisited from 2003:
Style Wars Revisited picks up where the documentary film classic Style Wars left off twenty years prior. This time, Henry Chalfaunt and Tony Silver enlist filmmaker Joey Garfield to join in tracking down and interviewing the now infamous crew of graffiti writers to see how they have progressed as individuals, artists and representatives of the burgeoning Hip Hop culture. A must see addition to the original.
