For the first time in a very long time, the Halloween season isn’t hurting for horror cinema, with Crimson Peak and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension haunting the megaplex alongside hybrids like the Goosebumps movie, Hotel Transylvania 2, The Last Witch Hunter and Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse. (Don’t bother with that one, by the way.)
But what if you’re feeling more old-school? Where will you find the vintage stuff? Oh, you adorable naïf. This is Toronto! Our theatres have been waiting for this all year!
The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema goes for tradition, screening The Rocky Horror Picture Show both tonight (Friday October 30) and Saturday at 7 pm and 10:30 pm. All shows will be enhanced by the performers of Toronto Shadow Cast.
A few blocks away, Innis Town Hall will be heaving with a Free Fridays double-bill of Brian de Palma’s glam-horror musical Phantom Of The Paradise and David Cronenberg’s hallucinatory but still distressingly credible Videodrome, courtesy of the cheery elves at CINSSU. Show starts at 7 pm. It’s killer.
Down at the Lightbox tonight, TIFF’s regular schedule includes screenings of the Canadian 3-D horror effort The Mask at 2:30 pm and 7:10 pm and the Austrian chiller Goodnight Mommy at 9:10 pm. But if you want to see something really scary, check out the special presentation of John Carpenter’s lean, mean slasher classic Halloween at 10:45 pm, hopefully in Cinema 1.
And a little to the east, the Market Square Cinema offers a free 11:15 pm screening of George A. Romero’s seminal zombie film, Night Of The Living Dead. (The film is presented with the caution “Graphic Violence, Gory Scenes, Some Monsterism.” I love those guys.)
The Market Square programmers gets the ball rolling early on Halloween proper, with a Saturday morning screening of Laika’s new stop-motion classic ParaNorman at 11 am. (Seriously, it’s great.) The theatre brings out the big guns after dark with The Exorcist at 11:15 pm – hopefully presented in the 1973 theatrical cut, not the amped-up 2000 revision.
And the fine folks at the Carlton Midnight Society have programmed a classic double-bill of F.W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu at 7 pm, followed by The Satanic Rites of Dracula – the last Hammer movie to feature Christopher Lee as the feral Count – at 9 pm.
If you want to spend the bulk of the day in the dark, you have two choices. TIFF offers the Universal manimal classic Island Of Lost Souls at 1 pm, followed by a free screening of Michele Soavi’s Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore) at 5:45 pm and the classic British anthology creeper Dead Of Night at 8:30 pm. (Goodnight Mommy and The Mask are also playing in the building.)
Over at The Royal, it’s a Halloween spooktacular – seriously, that’s what they’re calling it – starting with John Landis’s masterful horror-comedy An American Werewolf In London at 4:30 pm, followed by Tommy Lee Wallace’s occasionally skin-crawling Halloween III: Season Of The Witch at 7 pm and John Carpenter’s science-meets-Satan chiller Prince Of Darkness at 9:15 pm. If you’re looking for a triple bill of unironic ’80s horror, this is your jam. Just mind the spiders.
Sleep tight, kiddies. Best of the season to you.
