The season of Halloween genre film and its disorienting frights, crepuscular surrealism, and discomfiting atmospheres has arrived once again. A nucleus for genre film in the Northwest, Scarecrow Video annually steps up with their curated Halloween section of domestic and international horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and psychotronic selections. The Psychotronic Challenge also returns in its ninth 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, let's talk the incomparable one-of-a-kind resource that is Scarecrow Video. For horror and genre aficionados, there is no other resource in North America like that offered by Scarecrow and their abundant catalog of obscure, foreign releases, out of print, and ultra-rare editions, and with 160,000 films on offer, no singular online streaming resource can compare. To state it simply; if you live in the Northwest and are an appreciator of cinema, it's your personal obligation to ensure their doors stay open for business. Now more than ever this participation ethos applies. A Save Our Scarecrow funding campaign has been launched, as the last video store and film archive of its kind in the United States is at a pivotal point, wherein "Scarecrow Video Needs to Raise $1.8M or Face Possible Closure". Their sister organization, The Grand Illusion Cinema also has a narrowing timeline, their building is up for sale and imminently to be development into high-cost housing, "After 53 years, Seattle Theater Maintains its Grand Illusion … for Now, and as such they are in search of a new location. Across town, the month of "Scarecrowber" has been designated for Scarecrow Video's programming of the SIFF Cinema calendar. The sixteen films on offer span classic black and white French thrillers like Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face", technicolor mid-century adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, in Daniel Haller's "The Dunwich Horror", the high style and fetishistic theatrics of Dario Argento's "Opera", the unease of 1970s B-movie slashers like John Hancock's "Let’s Scare Jessica to Death", a set of career-defining films from John Carpenter in "Halloween" and, "Christine", as well as two of the greatest horror films ever made. George Romero's genre-birthing "Night of the Living Dead", and the unwavering, indelible terror of the "Symphony for the Devil" this is Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre".
In addition to a set of season-specific genre films at Northwest Film Forum, and The Beacon, the longest running, and most consistently satisfying of the local Halloween series has been The Grand Illusion Cinema's All Monsters Attack showcase. This monthlong slate of horror, creature features, classic thrillers, sci-fi, and cult cinema, includes new and returning genre classics and recent releases, both in new digital restorations, 35mm and 16mm celluloid, a triple-feature pizza party, and a night exclusively presented on VHS. A highlight from previous editions returns with a memorial night for Seattle's most dedicated cinephile, music lover, and man-about-town, William Kennedy. Before his passing in 2021, Bill wished for nothing more than his friends and cultural compatriots to join together for a screening of the director's cut of David Cronenberg's classic body-horror techno thriller, “Videodrome”. Unclassifiable genre-elusive cult films are represented by the eccentric smut of Curt McDowell's "Thundercrack!", and a VHS midnight movie-era restoration of Bruce Toscano's "Charon" with the director in attendance. Two nights of obscurities on 16mm will be hosted by the Sprocket Society with Ted V. Mikels' absurdist gross-out, "The Corpse Grinders", and a triple bill of pre-Code horror classics and period shorts in their Secret Vault of Horror. Among the films on offer on 35mm, the lineup includes such memorable 1990s entries as Antonia Bird's "Ravenous", Clive Barker's first directorial effort in adapting his own "The Hellbound Heart" into the major studio production of "Hellraiser", and quality franchise films like Guillermo del Toro's "Blade II", and Ernest R. Dickerson Tales from the Crypt entry, "Demon Knight". There's also rare Asian horror on offer with Sisworo Gautama Putra's "Satan's Slave", and no Halloween season series would be complete without a selection from the explosive abundance of 1980s horror and genre films issuing from the United States. Anne Billson's feature in "The Other Side of 80s America" issue of Sight & Sound 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 are represented here by the first entry in Wes Craven's quintessentially 1980s franchise, "A Nightmare on Elm Street".
