Vincent Price and Nazi zombies: The A.V. Club's Halloween-time screening guide
It's not the coolest group costume ever, it's Dead Snow!
More Halloween Guide
Today’s slasher films are to the horror genre what pie-eating contests are to cuisine: Extreme gore tends to be gross or campy rather than frightening, and the absurd quasi-realistic premises make it hard for viewers to empathize. How many Halloweens in a row does a psychotic killer have to rampage through a small Illinois town before everyone just goes elsewhere for the evening? (Then again, they’re Bears fans—they’re used to seeing their loved ones get slaughtered in the fall.) Fortunately for local filmgoers, Halloween week in Madison offers plenty of better opportunities to hunker in a dark room and get a chill from something other than the oncoming winter. Here's The A.V. Club's roundup of big-screen offerings for the season of scare.
International Cinema’s Frigging Frightful Foreign Flick Fest 2009 (Oct. 23 and 24, Memorial Union Play Circle)
The Memorial Union is going for the easy Halloween mark in its MU Movies film series with an Oct. 26 Rathskeller screening of sharp-fingered Freddy Krueger’s 1984 coming-out party A Nightmare On Elm Street. But if you’re thirsty for fresher blood, check out the Union’s International Cinema offerings. IC’s Halloween series includes free showings of Fear(s) Of The Dark, a collection of sinister black-and-white animated shorts by noted French graphic novelists, and this year’s Norwegian release Dead Snow, in which medical students on a ski trip accidentally bring the frozen corpses of a bunch of Nazi torturers back to life. Yes, kids, it’s Nazi zombies—as the movie poster gleefully proclaims, “Ein Zwei Die!”
Geek.Kon’s Geek Theater (Oct. 23-25, Sheraton Madison)
Geek.Kon, an annual fall celebration of geekdom moving this year from the UW campus to the Sheraton, is offering two 24-hour screening rooms at its 2009 event. All but anime fans can skip the convention’s Otaku Theater, but the Geek.Kon Geek Theater has the area’s most extensive lineup of not-so-geeky Halloween horror, from silent shockers like Nosferatu and Metropolis to cult classics Little Shop Of Horrors (the Roger Corman version) and Night Of The Living Dead. Vincent Price devotees won’t want to miss the original 1959 House On Haunted Hill, which shames the 1999 remake of the same name, and 1964’s The Last Man On Earth, which bears about as much resemblance to the 2007 remake I Am Legend as Price does to Will Smith. A badge of honor is awarded for survivors of Geek.Kon’s Saturday afternoon “Iron Butt Challenge,” which entails sitting through three undisclosed B-movies in a row with only a brief bathroom break between each—and if the movies are as awful as the organizers promise, you may need the porcelain idol for something other than the usual functions.
La Cineteca Italiana (Oct. 26, Sewell Social Sciences Building)
For its Halloween treat, the UW Department of French and Italian’s film series is importing Italy’s 2003 release Io Non Ho Paura (I Am Not Afraid), an award-hogging European sensation that never found a wide audience in the U.S. Dealing with a 9-year-old boy’s discovery of a kidnapping victim chained at the bottom of a deep hole in the Italian countryside, Io Non Ho Paura is more about the mood than the blood: “Thriller, horror, somewhere in between,” said Jelena Todorovic, the professor of Italian who coordinates the series. “It was the scariest movie in Italian we could find.” The film will be subtitled in English and punctuated by the tolling of the UW Carillon Tower just outside.
Cinematheque (Oct. 31, Vilas Hall)
Before Nicholas Evans’ The Horse Whisperer and National Geographic Channel’s The Dog Whisperer (each creepy in their own way) came The Bat Whispers, the 1930 early-sound film said to have inspired artist Bob Kane to create the Bat-Man—later Batman—of comics fame. In the movie, though, the caped figure is a killer, not a crusader, picking off treasure hunters in an old mansion like so many fat mosquitoes. What’s more Halloween-y than that? UW’s multi-disciplinary Cinematheque film series screens the bat-action on Halloween night.
