Film Society of Lincoln Center will celebrate Halloween with the fifth edition of our popular Scary Movies series October 27 – 31. In addition to a roster of cult favorites, such as Roger Corman’s House of Usher (based on the story by Edgar Allen Poe) and the Steven Spielberg-produced Poltergeist, several new releases are coming to New York for the first time. Among the most talked-about are Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and Ti West’s The Innkeepers.
Kill List blends a gritty British crime thriller with psychological horror film. Two veterans of the Iraq War turn to contract killing to ensure their financial security, and encounter a client with sinister demands. Fantastically frightening and entertaining, the film is also a commentary on class and social mores in contemporary Britain. It has opened to high praise in its home country. The Financial Times writes, “What’s indisputable is that Kill List, outside of genre’s confines, is a revelatory cinematic achievement and the most original, unsettling and cerebrally menacing British film to emerge so far from this young and troubled decade.” Noel Murray of the AV Club predicts that “this is one movie people are going to flinching at and talking about for some time to come.”
The Innkeepers, whose director Ti West (House of the Devil) will be on hand to introduce the film and do a Q&A, is a classic supernatural story about a haunted, small-town inn. Variety calls The Innkeepers “a deliberately paced, dialogue-heavy ghost story in the style of Eisenhower-era B-pics.”
Stuart Gordon, an American horror legend, will be present for a Q&A after the screening of his cult classic Re-Animator (1985). He is also the director of the acclaimed one-man play Nevermore, starring Jeffrey Combs. The play will have its first New York performance after a screening of another of Gordon’s works, the episode “The Black Cat” from Showtime’s Masters of Horrors.
Other films in the series include Scott Lebrecht’s twist on the vampire genre, Midnight Son (2011), six scary stories in The Theatre Bizarre (2011), and many more. You can read the full lineup here.
