Fall Film Series: Avant-Garde Nightmares

Thursday, October 18 at 7pm

Oct 18th’s screening will be a night of spooky and sinister experimental films, including several ghastly and ghoulish short works to get us all in the mood for the Halloween season.

The evening’s debaucherous delights will include two works by legendary filmmaker Kenneth Anger: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a satanic ritual in film language, and Invocation of My Demon Brother, a mystical journey scored by Mick Jagger on the Moog synthesizer.

There will also be two avant-garde responses to the modern slasher-horror film: The Scary Movie, Peggy Ahwesh’s 1993 film in which two small girls re-enact the genre’s stereotypes, and Outer Space, in which Peter Tscherkassky re-appropriates horror-movie footage, literally deconstructing the image to implicate the viewer in a murder.

The screening will begin with The Furies, a silent work by early Hollywood auteur Slavko Vorkapich, and will conclude with Häxan, Benjamin Christensen’s feature-length Swedish pseudo-documentary about witchcraft from the 1920’s. We’ll be showing the hour long 1967 re-edit, which has a free-jazz soundtrack and narration by William S. Burroughs.