Tonight is Halloween night, and all of Toronto’s repertory cinemas unleash their horrors. Because, you know, it’s fun to sit in the dark with a couple hundred people and wait for something awful to happen.
The Royal lines up Poltergeist at 7 pm, Mr. Vampire 3 at 9:30 pm and Night Of The Creeps at 11:30 pm the Bloor has Shadow Cast performances of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at 7 pm and 10:30 pm, the Revue offers a Hitchcock double-bill of Psycho at 7 pm and Frenzy at 9 pm and the Fox unleashes The Exorcist at 7 pm (in the inferior 2000 reissue, mind) and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare On Elm Street at 9:30 pm.
TIFF kicks off its massive Stanley Kubrick retrospective with The Shining at 6:30 pm, introduced by the late filmmaker’s brother-in-law and longtime producer Jan Harlan. And if you’re looking for something a little less intense, the Lightbox is also showing Andrew Fleming’s kitschy teen-witch thriller The Craft at 10 pm as part of its Back to the ’90s series. Bring friends.
There’s also the regular-release horror of Horns and ABCs Of Death 2, if you’re looking for something a little more recent. But if the weather gets too grim for you, I can also suggest 31 reasons to stay home, nicely compiled by yours truly for John Hodgman’s Scary Movie Club. Hodgman tsk-tsked at my inclusion of Alien and omission of The Brood, but we both forgot one of the most effective creepers of them all: George Sluzier’s The Vanishing, reissued just this month in a splendid Criterion special edition.
Bring it home on Blu-ray if you want to experience genuine dread and terror … or, you know, just leave it out on the coffee table to scare the crap out of the next person who drops by.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
