Nightbreed

Copies of Us: The Completed Annotated Screenplay will be available for purchase at this event.

Monsters live beneath the surface—but the real villainy remains above—in Clive Barker’s wildly ambitious horror-fantasy, which transforms society’s outcasts into mythic antiheroes. Boone (Craig Sheffer), a tormented young man accused of heinous crimes, is clinically manipulated by his psychiatrist Dr. Decker (played with icy menace by David Cronenberg), who moonlights as a masked serial killer. On the run, Boone discovers Midian—a hidden necropolis beneath a Canadian cemetery, where shape-shifting beings live in secret exile. Reclaimed from box office failure as a cult classic, Nightbreed fuses Hellraiser-level body horror with queer allegory, cryptozoology, and religious subversion to create a blood-soaked parable of persecution and chosen families. Its practical effects and creature designs remain dazzlingly strange, and its subterranean world—labyrinthine, liturgical, and etched with mysterious lore—echoes the Underpass in Us.

Preceded by:
Labyrinthe
Piotr Kamler, France, 1969, 12m
Hand-drawn in ink and meticulously rotoscoped frame by frame, Labyrinthe follows a solitary figure through alien architectures of shadows and mirrored chambers. Polish-born and Paris-based, Piotr Kamler is an experimental animator whose work explores temporal distortions and spatial paradoxes, conjuring here a slow-creeping sense of entrapment intensified by an unnerving soundscape—a clear antecedent to Barker’s nightmarish visions.