Movies are Dead: Live!

Join me for two upcoming London screenings of Brian De Palma's BODY DOUBLE and Bigas Luna's ANGUISH

One of the most formative times in my movie-watching life took place just over a decade ago, when I lived quite happily in borderline squalor on Dalston Lane, Hackney. My terrible, overcrowded and filthy flat was just a short five-minute walk through the fish-blood soaked Ridley Road Market to the Rio Cinema; a glorious, Art-Deco styled independent moviehouse, one of very few independent cinemas remaining in London. It was at the Rio that I started going to midnight screenings run by Josh Saco, aka Cigarette Burns, now the Executive Director of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and then the screener of ‘the finest trash in London’. Later on I’d help create trailers for the Cigarette Burns nights, and even helped realise Josh’s idea for a ‘Psycho vs Psycho’ event, where both Hitchcock and Gus Van Sant’s Psychos were screened simultaneously at the Leicester Square Theatre - a total logistical and practical nightmare that took up two months of my life and that no one remembers now that Steven Soderbergh did basically the same thing a few years later.

Nevertheless, thanks to Josh and the Rio Cinema I got to see for the first time, in a beautiful cinema on a massive screen, Abel Ferrera’s Ms. 45, Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery, the Female Convict Scorpion trilogy (as an all-nighter), Ken Russell’s Gothic, Fernando di Leo’s Milano Calibro 9, and of course, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Trudging through fish guts to see these movies at the Rio in the middle of the night was an appropriately sleazy ritual that led to some remarkable, deeply memorable experiences, and it was these viewings in this time period - along with regular visits to London’s rightly beloved premier rep house The Prince Charles Cinema - that cemented my love of cult movies; or trash, if we’re being totally honest here.

It may have become a cliché at this point to talk about how much of a difference it makes to see films big rather than at home, but it being a cliché doesn’t make it any less true. There’s always something particularly interesting about seeing films that made their reputations on VHS in grand cinephile settings like the Rio and the PCC. On the one hand, many cult/horror/exploitation films - some of them immortalised as literal ‘video nasties’ - are undeniably granted a certain scuzzy power when viewed through the low fidelity fuzz of a VHS tape, which at its most effective can lend low budget trash the sense that you might actually be corrupted by viewing it, Ringu-style.

Be that as it may, for films like Hellraiser or The Beyond or Ms 45, seeing them on a big screen does render them entirely differently. The combination of the vast format and the hushed, grand environs of a cinema forces you to engage with the artistry - and make no mistake, there are often remarkable feats of vision and artistry on display in these films - on an entirely different level. As a result, they may feel slightly less dangerous, but their overall magnificence is magnified by an order of, er, magnitude.

Of course, not all movies from the VHS era stand up to this kind of re-evaluation and big screen treatment - the majority, in fact, will wither and die if you attempt it. What Cigarette Burns and the Prince Charles programming team were (are) so good at was cherry picking films from that era that they knew would not only play well in that setting, but play totally differently. This, ultimately, is what cult film programming is all about: not only appreciating great trash, but re-appraising and re-contextualising great trash.

I truly loved and revered these experiences: I made a lot of friends, saw a lot of great films, and had my taste and appreciation for different types of cinema changed forever. That’s why, for a very long time, I’ve wanted to host some screenings of my own, in the hope that I might be able to create more memorable, eye-opening experiences for a new generation of bright eyed and bushy tailed young cineastes, always on the hunt for alternative movie thrills in our great nation’s capital.

Well, thanks to various circumstances coming together very quickly, I’m delighted to say I’m going to be doing just that, with two upcoming Movies are Dead screenings that I am hugely excited about.

First up is Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984), screening at midnight at the Rio Cinema this Saturday, August 26th, and it’s shortly followed by Bigas Luna’s Anguish (1987), screening on 35mm at 6pm at the Prince Charles Cinema, September 21st.

I couldn’t ask for two better screenings to kick off this new endeavour with: two bona fide cult classics, two films that explore the sinister, terrifying power of the cinema and image-making (Movies = Dead), and two films that I couldn’t be more confident will play incredibly well in the Rio and the Prince Charles - my two favourite cinemas.

I didn’t take long to settle on Body Double as the first late night movie I wanted to screen at the Rio. One of the definitive art-genre hybrid movies of the 80s, directed by probably the second most talented pervert in Hollywood history, it’s a box of sordid delights that only improves with each viewing. Appropriate, then, that a film savaged by critics and picketed by women’s advocacy groups on release should now after many years of viewings (and high profile lionisation from renowned cinephile Patrick Bateman) be warmly embraced by this current generation of critics, male and female alike, to the point that it rose up to a staggering no. 30 in Indiewire’s recent best movies of the 1980s poll.

As for Anguish, screening this movie to an unsuspecting crowd is going to be one of the highlights of my year. It’s one of those films that genuinely loses more of its power the more you know about it, so all I will say is that you simply have to come and watch it in a cinema - watching it at home will not be the same experience. If you watch it at home, you’ll kick yourself that you didn’t see it big when you had the chance. Trust me on this. It is a truly unique, mind-fucking slice of art-horror, from a deeply underrated director in Bigas Luna, and I’m delighted to be presenting it in conjunction with the London Spanish Film Festival and the Bigas Luna Tribute. Anguish has been incredibly hard to see in this country, with only a VHS release in the early 90s, so I’m particularly excited to be presenting it in 35mm for what I surmise is the first time in several decades.

So there you have it - I couldn’t be more excited to be back in the world of late-night, cult movie programming. Ticket links are below - I’d love to see you there.

Tickets for Body Double at the Rio Cinema, Saturday August 26th

Tickets for Anguish at the Prince Charles Cinema, Thursday September 21st.