10/6/2019

Exhumed Films Presents: The Masters of Horror Marathon

Five classic horror features!

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Doors at 11 AM, show from 12pm to 10pm

Kick off the Halloween season with a celebration of five of our favorite horror directors , filmmakers who forever changed cinema with their shocking, groundbreaking visions. Our all-day marathon features  some of the greatest achievements in horror movie history, presented here in 35mm for a rare theatrical event. Join us to honor the art and influence of some of the finest--and most provocative--filmmakers in the realm of genre cinema.

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE
1974 / 35mm / Dir. Tobe Hooper / 83 minutes
Tobe Hooper’s shocking, brutal film THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE terrified audiences and outraged critics upon its initial release. In the decades that have followed, however, the movie that was once deemed “despicable” and “vile” has been rightly heralded as one of the most influential horror films of all time.  A group of teenagers on a road trip pick up a hitchhiker, who soon proves to be much more bizarre and frightening than expected. Before long, the young people find themselves in the clutches of a cannibalistic clan, and the movie goes from being unsettling to outright horrifying. Come see who will survive, and what will be left of them!

IT’S ALIVE
1974 / 35mm / Dir. Tobe Hooper / 91 minutes
Aided by a simple-but-effective advertising campaign, New York independent filmmaker Larry Cohen’s IT’S ALIVE was a low-budget box office success when it was released just a few weeks after TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. Unlike the grim Grand Guignol of Hooper’s film, IT’S ALIVE bears a sly, satirical tone that permeates much of Cohen’s work. A young couple is horrified when their newborn baby is born as a monstrous mutant. And despite the family’s best efforts to control and contain him, Junior soon makes it perfectly clear that he’s interested in eating more than just baby food! Frightening and funny at the same time, IT’S ALIVE also features early effects work from Rick Baker, who created and puppeted the infamous infant.  

THE BROOD
1979 / 35mm / Dir. David Cronenberg / 92 minutes
The theme of killer children continues in David Cronenberg’s unsettling portait of broken families, THE BROOD. The iconoclastic Canadian filmmaker had already established himself as a unique voice in genre cinema with his previous works SHIVERS and RABID. With THE BROOD, Cronenberg continued the fascination with “body horror” that has so defined his career. The plot concerns a man engaged in a custody battle with his mentally ill ex-wife, who is under the care of a controversial, mysterious psychotherapist. When their daughter comes home from a visit with the mother bearing cuts and bruises, the man tries to cut off all contact between his wife and their child. Soon after, though, a rash of violent attacks from unseen assailants threaten the safety and the sanity of both father and daughter. THE BROOD is dark, disturbing, and uncompromising, and is also one of Cronenberg’s finest films.

THE THING
1982 / 35mm / Dir. John Carpenter / 109 minutes
Thanks to box office blockbusters like HALLOWEEN, THE FOG, and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, John Carpenter was annointed as the new king of genre cinema during the late ‘70s/early ‘80s. But in 1982, Carpenter’s remake of a 1950s sci-fi classic was met with hostile reviews and mediocre box office. Despite the initial response, THE THING has since been reevaluated and recognized as perhaps the greatest modern-day monster movie, thanks in no small part to the stunning special effects work of Rob Bottin, which still holds up nearly 40 years later. Like the movie and the novella it is based on, THE THING concerns an American research base in Antarctica that is infiltrated by an alien presence which has been thawed out and revived from its millenia-long hibernation. The evil E.T. has the ability to infect and take the form of other living creatures, which leads to paranoia and chaos amidst the team of scientists and technicians as they struggle to determine who is still human and who has been turned into  a “thing.” 

HELLRAISER
1987 / 35mm / Dir. Clive Barker / 94 minutes
In the mid 1980s, British author and artist Clive Barker was described as the “future of horror” by no less an authority than the most successful horror novelist of all time, Stephen King. Frustrated as he watched several of his screenplays bastardized and turned into to mediocre (or worse) feature films, Barker decided to take on the directorial chores for his next big-screen attempt. The result was the now-classic HELLRAISER, an adaptation of the author’s own novella, “The Hellbound Heart.” Full of perverse imagery and a stunningly original take on traditional movie monsters, HELLRAISER was an auspicious cinematic debut for Barker and a welcome respite from the repetitive slasher films which glutted the horror genre in the 1980s. The story involves a sadist whose pursuit of pain and pleasure leads him to an alternate dimension where he is tortured by the Cenobites, a group of supernatural, self-mutilated “demons.” Back on Earth, the man’s brother and his family are drawn into a hellish fate--both willingly and unwillingly--as they confront secret passions and make dangerous alliances while trying to stay out of the grip of the sinister Cenobites!