Thursdays (2)
Lovecraftian Horror: Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn
Programmed by Kian Bergstrom
2015-04-02 @ 9:30 PM
Re-Animator
(Stuart Gordon, 1985) · Based on an early Lovecraft story, Re-Animator is a gross-out masterpiece of horror comedy. Herbert West is a medical student obsessed with undoing death. He has a serum that will revive the dead, but in murderous zombie form. His professors are willing to kill to get it and his friend's fiancee is getting suspicious. The first major film from Chicago-native Stuart Gordon, Re-Animator expertly alternates between goofy exploitation and nightmare.
runtime: 86 min format: 35mm
2015-04-09 @ 9:00 PM
From Beyond
(Stuart Gordon, 1986) · Like Re-Animator before it, From Beyond is based in Lovecraft. Also: it's the horror flip-side to Ghostbusters. Dr. Pretorius creates The Resonator, a device used to access a parallel shadow world. His assistant, Crawford Tillinghast, flees from the machine's violence and monstrosity, only to be arrested for the murder-by-decapitation of Pretorius! Can Tillinghast clear his name and save the world from an invasion of shape-changing terrors?
runtime: 86 min format: 35mm
2015-04-16 @ 9:15 PM
The Whisperer in Darkness
(Sean Branney, 2011) · This adaptation of the eponymous short story is a homage to early 1930s horror films. Albert Wilmarth investigates a series of strange happenings after a recent flood. He meets Henry Akeley, a farmer who believes aliens may be invading earth. But why is Akeley shrouded in darkness, and what horrors lurk in the mysterious cylinders he keeps in his home? Haunting and beautiful, this has been called the best adaptation of a Lovecraft tale.
runtime: 103 min format: DCP
2015-04-23 @ 9:15 PM
The Color Out of Space
(Huan Vu, 2010) · In this beautiful German-language adaptation of Lovecraft's science-fiction story, the young director Huan Vu makes a stunning debut. After a private investigator is unable to locate his missing father, Jonathan Davis decides to search for him himself and travels to Germany, where he had been stationed after WWII. But his investigations turn up a mysterious meteorite, a deadly secret, and a monstrous presence that threatens to ravage the world anew.
runtime: 86 min format: Blu-Ray
2015-04-30 @ 9:30 PM
Manos: The Hands of Fate
(Harold P. Warren, 1966) · Widely denigrated as one of the worst films ever made, Manos: The Hands of Fate has languished in purgatory for decades, but this restoration reveals it to be stranger, and greater than we thought. A family on a road trip takes a wrong turn and finds themselves locked in a house with a mad satyr named Torgo and the Master, a warlock who intends to add the wife and daughter to his demonic harem. Will they escape, or be forever wedded to the house's evils?
runtime: 74 min format: DCP
2015-05-07 @ 9:15 PM
The Last Wave
(Peter Weir, 1977) · In Peter Weir's even-more-uncanny follow-up to Picnic at Hanging Rock, an inexperienced lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) defends a group of Aboriginal men accused of murder during a freak rainstorm. In way over his head, he begins to dream of an upcoming apocalypse. Coincidence? Or is an ancient evil haunting the Dreamtime breaking through into our world? Armageddon's just around the psychic corner as the boundaries between reality and nightmare crumble.
runtime: 106 min format: 35mm
2015-05-14 @ 9:15 PM
The Evil Dead
(Sam Raimi, 1981) · A group of not-so-bright college kids led by Ash (the immortal Bruce Campbell) spend the night in a cabin in the woods. Recently, an archaeologist left behind the Necronomicon–a Book of the Dead bound in human flesh and inked in blood–along with a recording of himself reading it aloud. When they play the tape, it unleashes an ancient force of evil that takes over their bodies one-by-one. Raimi’s feature debut displays an astounding cinematic intelligence.
runtime: 91 min format: 35mm
2015-05-21 @ 9:15 PM
Nightbreed
(Clive Barker, 1990) · Troubled Aaron Boone dreams of monstrous Midian but lives in decrepit Calgary. A lunatic is stalking the streets, and his psychiatrist keeps telling Boone to turn himself in. But is Boone a serial killer, or something much, much scarier? Why is he so drawn to that deserted cemetery? And gosh, why is that shrink, played in a rare on-screen role by David Cronenberg, so very creepy? Come tonight to see the original version in glorious 35mm!
runtime: 102 min format: 35mm
2015-05-28 @ 9:15 PM
In The Mouth of Madness
(John Carpenter, 1995) · John Trent (Sam Neill) is an insurance investigator looking into the disappearance of novelist Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow). Cane's stories are said to cause paranoia, madness, and hallucinations in his readers, but because Trent hasn't been watching the movies in this series, he thinks that's all just nonsense. Au contraire, Mr. Trent: Cane's missing last book is so evil and powerful that, if published, it would in fact bring about the end of the world!
runtime: 95 min format: 35mm
2015-06-04 @ 9:15 PM
Kill List
(Bill Wheatley, 2011) · In this Lovecraftian take on the gangster film, Jay and Gal, former soldiers and now hitmen, take an ill-advised job from a mysterious client, a three-person kill list literally signed in blood. But their victims all seem to have connections to their own lives, and a group of cultists have started following them. Ben Wheatley burst on the horror scene with this vicious and visually-striking film, one of the most disturbing and violent you're likely to see.
runtime: 95 min format: 35mm
