There seemingly can't be enough in the way of All Hallows' Eve theme programming and repertory series in the local cinema. To my mind, the months of October and November could always do with more in the way of the season's genre film and its disorienting frights, crepuscular surrealism, and discomfiting atmospheres. Thankfully, Scarecrow Video steps up with their October screening room calendar and curated Halloween section of domestic and international horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and psychotronic selections. Their Psychotronic Challenge also returns in its fourth installment, challenging viewers to select a new theme category for every day in October from the deep trivia of the cues on offer. While we're here, lets talk the incomparable one-of-a-kind resource that is Scarecrow, and how if you live in the Northwest and are a fan of cinema (regardless of genre, era or style), it's essentially your personal obligation to ensure their doors stay open for business. For horror and genre aficionados, there is no other resource in North America like that offered by Scarecrow Video and their abundant catalog of obscure, foreign releases, out of print, and ultra-rare editions in the depths of their archive. With nearly 130,000 films on offer, there is no singular online streaming resource that can compare. In previous years, the annual citywide cinematic offerings for the months of October and November have seen a great set of films exploring desolate worlds, classic Japanese horror, a vampiric romaticism double feature and a night of music from a maestro of Italian horror. Also in the way of recent Halloween seasons of note, the local arthouse cinemas presented a an abundance on the theme of the haunted house in 2015, and 2013 saw no small number of invaders from beyond. 2017 was heavy on 1970s psychedelic and psychological horror from Europe, particularly from the era of abundance seen in the subgenres of French Fantastique and Italian Giallo.
Last year's programming taking a cue from Nick Pinkerton's feature for Sight & Sound, and their "The Other Side of 80s America" focus on the decade of independent and genre cinema issuing from the United States. Concurrent with the pop culture revelry of Reaganite family-oriented dramas, action, teen movies, and sci-fi blockbusters, a more rebellious and independent strain of US movie making explored the darkness on the edge of mainstream society. Anne Billson's supporting article "A Nightmare on Main Street" plumbs the deeper realms of the decade's more assertively subversive low-to-medium budget genre fare, often “unburdened by notions of good taste". These manic explorations of class conflict, Cold War dread, ecological disaster and suburban paranoia also featured in Northwest Film Forum's monthlong assembly of, Shock & Awe: Horror During the Reagan Years. One of the longest running, and most consistently satisfying of the local Halloween series has been The Grand Illusion Cinema's monthlong All Monsters Attack calendar of horror, creature features, classic thrillers, sci-fi, and cult cinema. This year's installment features the kind of core genre gems that audiences have come to expect, straight from the horror golden age of the 1970s through late 80s, alongside a selection of 1950's and 60's B-movies, and a set of strong contemporary films from Great Britain and Germany. Thematically, the offerings include Puritan and 17th Century horror in the form of Michael Reeves' assigning a substantial role for Vincent Price as the "Witchfinder General", and equally inspired by Shakespeare as Lovecraft, there's Ben Wheatley's "A Field In England". The new British indie director also put an indelible mark on the scene with his rarely screened 2011 feature, "Kill List", which may stand as his most notable film to date. Another strong contemporary entry can be found in Fatih Akin's beerhaus butcher that prowls, "The Golden Glove".
All-time Folk Horror classics, particularly those originating from Great Britain, like the 1973 "Wicker Man", by Robin Hardy appears in the series in it's new director's edition final cut, and American master of the urban psychodrama, Abel Ferrara, is represented by an early entry in his voluminous filmmography, "The Driller Killer". Returning after it's screening in SIFF, Alexandre O. Philippe's theoretical documentary "Memory: The Origins of Alien", explores Ridley Scott's classic in new ways, and character actor Dick Miller has a Halloween Double Bill, thanks to Roger Corman's mashing of horror and comedy, in both "A Bucket of Blood", and "Little Shop of Horrors". A corpse runs amok in Billy Senese's "The Dead Center", and the plague has a new set of symptoms in the medieval horror of Christopher Smith's "Black Death". Mads Mikkelsen's "one eye" is equally disastrous to everyone he encounters in Nicolas Winding Refn's dark ages barbarian drama, "Valhalla Rising". Jörg Buttgerei's "Nekromantik" is a different kind of grotesquerie, subjectively "erotic", depending on one's sensibilities, and interpersonal and familial psychodramas get their moment in Colin Eggleston's "The Long Weekend", and Peter B. Good's 1989 VHS-only "Fatal Exposure". Atomic horror also receives a set of films from the 1950s to 1980s. The first of which not often seen outside of the UK, Mick Jackson's "Threads" watches like a Cold War Twilight Zone update, and the poster kaiju for nuclear armageddon, Gojira celebrates his 65th anniversary with new restorations and theatrical screenings thanks to Janus Films and the Criterion Collection. The atomic goliath is featured in his original Ishiro Honda 1954 "Godzilla" incarnation, and in Yoshimitsu Banno's 1970's pop-psychedelic ecological monster clash, "Godzilla vs. Hedorah".
Few resources cover the burgeoning world of genre film studies than the veritable home of horror writing and criticism that is The Miskatonic Institute. Through a series of interviews with The Quietus, founding members Virginie Sélavy with Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor Press, and Coil's Stephen Thrower author of "Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents", spoke on the cross pollination of the postmodern situation. Wherein genre definitions break down, and in their fertile collision producing contemporary works inspired by, and expounding upon the cult film and fringe music of decades past, "At This Film Institute, Where the Course Material Is Killer". It is precisely this territory that the newly established The Beacon Cinema is looking to do some deep cartography of throughout the month, in two concurrent series, The October Country, and Folklore Phantasmagoria. Titled after a Ray Bradbury collection of macabre short stories, the lowering gloam of the season's shift from late summer into fall has evidently inspired The Beacon's Tommy Swenson. To begin with, they've assembled a genre-elusive set of films like Michael Rubbo's oddball "The Peanut Butter Solution", Charles B. Pierce's "The Town That Dreaded Sundown", Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's "Messiah of Evil", and peculiar BBC entries like Lesley Manning's "Ghostwatch". In the way of unexplained phenomena and the supernatural, the cinema will also be hosting its own night of, "The Beacon Guide to Unsolved Mysteries" starring Robert Stack, as well as their "The Beacon Halloween Special", featuring an undisclosed mystery gem of unusual hew. Arthouse masterpieces and studio classics also adorn the series, which includes the unhinged psychosis of Andrzej Żuławski's Cannes award-winning "Possession", a particularly rare opportunity to see Victor Erice's Spanish Civil War fable, "The Spirit of the Beehive", and Peter Weir's equally oneiric Australian period piece, "Picnic at Hanging Rock".
From the studio era we are treated to three of the greatest films of their respective decades, the incontestable brilliance of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho", Christian Nyby (and Howard Hawks'), "The Thing from Another World", and a Val Lewton production of Jacques Tourneur's "Cat People". No fall season genre series would be complete without American entries from the 1970s and 80s, and certainly not so without John Carpenter. He's represented here with a later film inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti, even spinning a clever variation on one of Lovecraft's titles with "In the Mouth of Madness". The descriptively titled Folklore Phantasmagoria series delivers on the promise of it's title with a set of stylistically vibrant works that put to test the parameters of the psychotronic. Both Kim Ki-Young and Kuei Chih-Hung's entries are deserving of a veritable mountain of adjectives, (and expletives), and neither "IO Island" nor "Boxer's Omen", are pure martial arts fables and even by Shaw Brothers Studios' "Black Magic" standards. Overflowing with ideas, psychedelic treatments, and disorienting turns to the point of excess, they share these same qualities in a much different thematic and color palette with their Euopean cousins of sorts found in Juraj Herz, Konstantin Ershov and Georgiy Kropachyov. The latter two functioning as a duo bringing us an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's Ukrainian folk tale, "Viy: Spirit of Evil". While decadent in a sense, Herz' film differs from the above in it's richly baroque production of a Alexander Grin gothic drama about the power struggle between two sisters of an aristocratic family. Where "Morgiana" deviates from the Grin is in its pointedly grotesque decadence, (think Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and the film's narrative vantage being that of the heteroclite and more sinister of the two sisters (and her cat).
