Published on 10/14/2007

For fans of the macabre, an "Octoberfest" has nothing to do with drinking beer ...

Horror Film Fests in Full Swing Around the Nation

This is the time of year that horror fans experience both a heady embarrassment of riches and unparalleled cultural attention—it's our March Madness or running of the bulls. For the rest of the year, you tell a non-fan that you’re driving 40 miles to see a zombie movie at a midnight screening, you get, at best, a bemused smile—in October, you get "Can I come, too?" Indeed, for this one month, the rest of society seems not only to share our fascination with the macabre, but to be openly celebratory about it, with no sideway glances or condescending chuckles.

To cater to this annual hunger for horror by the public, theater programmers around the country typically pull out all the stops. So no matter where you live, there's apt to be some classic horror fare showing on a big screen near you. And while this results in a happy opportunity for self-indulgence, it’s also worth noting that such creativity in programming is a testament to the commercial strength and authentic love-of-movies of our country’s remaining independently-owned theaters.

For example, in the Dayton/Columbus area alone, several theaters are offering "scarathons" lasting between six and sixteen hours in length. Each seems to have its own flavor, some emphasizing the black-and-white period, others post-1980 films, and still others a mixture of eras. Also in the beloved Midwest, the incongruously named Hollywood Boulevard Cinema in Woodridge, Illinois is hosting its annual Hitchcock fest, complete with appearances by Tippi Hedren and Veronica Cartwright of The Birds (1963). The theater will be following up these treats next weekend (October 19-21) with an all-new event featuring classic Universal horror from the '30s; Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man are among the titles that will be screened. Appearances by the descendents of Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaney will highlight the event. (Personal request to all programmers reading this: I’d love it if James Whale’s subversive, under-appreciated The Invisible Man (1933) were included more often in this canon—far fewer people, I think, have seen it in theaters than some of these other films.)

Of course there are also plenty of well-known fests geared more toward the hardcore fan. This weekend Los Angeles has been hosting Screamfest, with its mix of new features and shorts as well as older films in interesting presentations. Located in the heart of Hollywood, Screamfest is screening both Romero’s new Diary of the Dead and 1982’s Friday the 13^th Part 3—in 3-D, with cast member appearances. From the 16^th through the 21^st, Philadelphia will be the site of the second annual Terror Film Festival. This event is distinguished by its focus on indies and lesser-known filmmakers, its screenwriting competition, and a definition of terror that goes beyond the horror genre to include thrillers and even sufficiently dark dramas.

The greatest horror movie marathon I've personally experienced took place twenty or more years ago, at the Thalia on Manhattan’s West Side. Something shifted for me then, although it’s hard to say exactly what. The screenings occurred over something like 20 or 24 continuous hours, and I think I was there for sixteen or more of them. I recall feeling like a zombie myself when, at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, there was maybe one other moviegoer sitting in the popcorn-strewn wasteland that the auditorium had become; that was also around the time that the theater began to cheat a bit, re-screening something it had shown the previous afternoon, probably under the assumption that no “surviving” audience members from that long-ago era were still in attendance.

The well-curated program featured a few expected classics such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), but also a number of obscure early talkie whodunits with macabre elements, oddball exploitation flicks, and overlooked gems such as The Sadist (1963). Case in point: this was the first time I saw Dwight Esper’s transcendently awful Maniac (1934). For those too young to recall, this was a time when, even if these films existed on VHS, they were available only from some mail-order house where you'd be lucky to get a sixth generation dupe if you decided to purchase them. There was no Netflix or streaming public domain videos on the Web. Yet here were all these exemplars of the truly weird getting the big screen treatment, so for me it was as if an entire world of the imagination opened up that no one had ever told me about.

Well, here's to hoping that the door to that same world swings wide for you during this special season…

(And if you have any special memories of horror marathons or fests, past or present, please share them here with other fans. Thanks!)

(Sources: The Herald News, Dayton Daily News)