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- Sean Burns
This time of year, there’s something to be said for curling up at home under a blanket and staying up too late watching scary movies. But it’s always more fun being frightened out of your wits with a crowd. In an era of unsteady cinema attendance, horror is the only genre that’s consistently dependable at the box office — as not even your most sophisticated home entertainment system can replicate the communal feeling of a whole room full of strangers shrieking and screaming at the same time. According to the indispensable repertory trackers at Screen Boston, there are more than 40 frightening films showing at area indie theaters over the 10 days between now and Halloween. Here are a handful of highlights.
'Nosferatu' (1922)
When the Somerville Theatre screened F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” earlier this month, it was accompanied by a live performance from Gina Nagger’s New England Film Orchestra featuring Czechoslovakian virtuoso Matěj Číp on the cimbalom. Now they’re running it with… Radiohead? Get ready for the local debut of Silents Synced, a program pairing early silent films with ‘90s alt-rock records. Did you ever get high in college and watch “The Wizard of Oz” while listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon”? Same idea here, except Murnau’s 1922 chiller is played over Radiohead’s “Amnesiac” and “Kid A.” I tried it at home and some eerie synchronicities abound: Count Orlok makes his first appearance right as “Knives Out” kicks in, and the climax cues up nicely with the aptly titled “Motion Picture Soundtrack.”
Even if you find the band’s morose, hypno-drone sound to be something of a drag, it does make an excellent match for the doomy sadness of Murnau’s movie. But then “Nosferatu” — itself a bootleg “Dracula” riff that Bram Stoker’s widow tried to sue out of existence — is an endlessly adaptable work, having already been remade by Werner Herzog in 1979 with a new Hollywood version on the way this Christmas from “The Lighthouse” director Robert Eggers. Purists and people who don’t like Radiohead can see the film a few days later at the Brattle Theatre with live music by the Andrew Alden Ensemble or with a solo organ score performed by Brett Miller at Symphony Hall.
“Nosferatu” screens at the Somerville Theatre on Saturday, Oct. 26, and at the Brattle Theatre and Symphony Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 30.
'The Invisible Man' (1933) & 'The Fly' (1986)
Coolidge After Midnite’s annual all-night horror movie marathon keeps most of its lineup under wraps until the films hit the screen, releasing only the first two titles as a teaser for what’s to come. Now in its 23rd incarnation, the 12-hour, all 35mm extravaganza kicks off this year with two mad scientist movies that make an uncommonly thoughtful double feature about man’s hubris and its consequences. James Whale’s rip-roaringly entertaining adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man” made Claude Rains a movie star even though you don’t see his face until the final shot. The ingenious early special effects have aged better than some CGI monstrosities from last year, and Rains’ endearing arrogance makes a smart lead-in to director David Cronenberg’s devastating romantic tragedy.
An unexpectedly weighty remake of a 1958 Vincent Price B-picture, “The Fly” is the sexiest, saddest gross-out movie ever made, with a heartbreaking Geena Davis caring for her real-life future ex-husband Jeff Goldblum — their onscreen chemistry is off the charts — after a lab accident splices his genes with that of an insect. Much was made at the time about the movie being a metaphor for AIDS, but in true Cronenberg fashion it’s more about how our bodies will eventually betray us, and that in any romance one lover will inevitably outlive the other. Good luck to the five films that have to follow this one.
The 23rd Halloween Horror Marathon runs from Saturday, Oct. 26 through Sunday, Oct. 27 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
'The Slumber Party Massacre' (1982)
They say the best satires are indistinguishable from the real thing. Fourteen years before “Scream,” lesbian activist and “Rubyfruit Jungle” author Rita Mae Brown penned a slasher movie parody called “Don’t Open the Door,” which was re-written by director Amy Holden Jones and shot with a semi-straight face for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Corman never minded whatever subversion his filmmakers got up to, so long as they met their quota of bare breasts and bloodletting, and “The Slumber Party Massacre” is a hilariously self-reflexive slasher film in scare quotes, sending itself up so slyly that a lot of critics at the time — as well as horny teenage boys who may have rented the VHS multiple times, ahem — missed the joke entirely.
Jones, who went to Wellesley College and studied film at MIT before working as Martin Scorsese’s assistant on “Taxi Driver,” turns the picture into a wryly funny academic exercise while also delivering the genre goods. It’s a movie that has its overwrought phallic imagery and drills it, too. Part of the Brattle’s two-week tribute to Corman’s crazily influential legacy, the screening will be followed by 1987’s “Slumber Party Massacre II,” a half-kidding but mostly incomprehensible affair directed by Deborah Brock and starring TV sitcom mainstay Crystal Bernard. The sequel has its rabid partisans, a group that does not include this critic.
“The Slumber Party Massacre” screens on Wednesday, Oct. 23 at the Brattle Theatre.
'Practical Magic' (1998)
Director Griffin Dunne’s adaptation of Alice Hoffman’s bestseller was a critical and commercial dud upon initial release, but over the ensuing years has developed a fervent following on cable and home video. It’s easy to see why, as the movie’s unruly pleasures are the kind that wear well on repeat viewings, prioritizing a good-time vibe and a great-looking cast over some puzzling plotting and bizarre tonal shifts. Set in Sudbury, Massachusetts but shot on Whidbey Island in Washington, the film follows Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as temperamentally mismatched sisters from an infamous family of witches who run afoul of the law and a very bad boyfriend (played by former “ER” hunk Goran Visnjic — I miss that guy).
It’s a fun hang, as who wouldn’t want to have moonlight margaritas while casting spells with witchy old aunties Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest? Bullock and Kidman are positively radiant — they’ve never been lit better — the former striking serious sparks with Aidan Quinn, playing a clueless cop from Arizona. The plot’s a mess but the movie thrives on their sisterly bond — celebrating the one person in the world with whom you share a secret telepathic language who will also bury a body in the rose bushes with you. Author Alice Hoffman will be at the screening, presented by Lovestruck Books, which will open in Harvard Square in November. Brooms optional.
“Practical Magic” screens on Tuesday, Oct. 29 at the Brattle Theatre.
'Frankenhooker' (1990)
Mary Shelley never saw this coming. New Jersey power plant worker Jeffrey Franken has been kicked out of three different medical schools, but that doesn’t stop him from keeping his girlfriend’s head alive inside a jar after she’s otherwise shredded in an unfortunate lawnmower accident. He attempts to reassemble her with parts culled from sex workers on 42nd Street, an experiment that goes comically awry in director Frank Henenlotter’s high-spirited, enthusiastically goofy splatter-fest.
Like a lot of movies from producer Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma Studios, “Frankenhooker” is spectacularly cheap and beyond bad taste, yet not without its own morality — calling out polite society’s knee-jerk dehumanization of drug addicts and practitioners of the world’s oldest profession. It’s anchored by a game turn from 1988 Penthouse Pet of the Year Patty Mullen as the reanimated Elizabeth Shelley — note the name — who reveals all, including some crackerjack comic timing as she engineers a comeuppance befitting Jeffrey’s chauvinism. (Monica Bellucci’s big entrance in the current “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” owes more than a little to Mullen.) If this kind of thing tickles your fancy, Henenlotter’s 1982 breakthrough, the even grosser “Basket Case,” is showing Oct. 27 as part of the Somerville Theatre’s annual Halloween Hullabaloo.
“Frankenhooker” screens on Friday, Oct. 25 at the Coolidge Corner Theatre.
'Little Shop of Horrors' (1986)
In a slightly more family-friendly vein (heh, see what I did there?), the Somerville has paired a double feature of the original “Beetlejuice” with director Frank Oz’s fantastic adaptation of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s off-Broadway musical, itself a re-working of Roger Corman’s 1960 schlock shocker about a bloodthirsty houseplant. Boasting the kind of catchy tunes with which Ashman and Menken were about to revive a then-floundering animation studio called Disney, it’s a sublimely silly send-up of 1950s creature feature tropes featuring hugely charismatic lead performances from Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene, along with scene-stealing special appearances by Steve Martin and Bill Murray.
Oz brought the film to the Coolidge for a screening last year and talked about how he’d originally filmed the stage show’s finale, in which his leads end up eaten by the alien plant. He learned the hard way that the difference between theater and movies is that in a play, the actors come back out for a curtain call at the end and everybody can see they’re okay, whereas in the movies, these people you’ve come to love over the past two hours are just dead and gone. After scoring some of the lowest test numbers in Warner Bros. history, “Little Shop” was hastily re-shot with the ending you’ll see at the Somerville, in which our cute couple lives happily ever after, somewhere that’s green.
“Little Shop of Horrors” screens on Tuesday, Oct. 29 at the Somerville Theatre.