The Big Scream

This season, the gaping hole left in the New York film scene by the two-year absence of the Two Boots Pioneer Theater seems to have shrunk. Arthouses around the five boroughs have significantly stepped up their respective games, especially thanks to some new faces and freshly scrubbed old ones. Williamsburg's mysterious new Spectacle Theater, on South 3rd Street, has suddenly appeared and is already showing up the more established midnight movie programmers at the IFC Center and the Landmark Sunshine. The theater’s website is currently a bit of a mess, so you'll have to guess what films are showing for the "Halloween Horror Marathon," starting on the night of Oct. 29 and ending late on the night of Oct. 31, based on the films' synopses. Stand-out titles include Luci Fulci's Boschian cheapy The Beyond, Tobe Hooper’s seminal slasher The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the offbeat but much-beloved—in some circles—sequel Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

Brooklyn’s ReRun Theater has also put on a considerable festive display this year. Earlier this month, programmer Aaron Hillis screened JT Petty’s S&Man, an interesting though not wholly successful fauxcumentary and chased it with Simon Rumley’s brutal revenge thriller Red, White & Blue. For the weekend of Halloween, the ReRun will celebrate with a Glass Eye Pix retrospective. Glass Eye is the brainchild of New York-based filmmaker Larry Fessenden (Wendigo, The Last Winter) and has showcased such talents as Glenn McQuaid, director of Hammer Studios and comic book pastiche I Sell the Dead, and Ti West, whose ’80s slasher homage House of the Devil is probably the studio’s most famous title. Be sure to check out a West double feature of House and The Roost, West’s worthy micro-budget creature feature.

Vaunted repertory theaters like the Film Forum and the Walter Reade Theater have exciting offerings this year too. The former just wrapped up a week-long run of Kuroneko, director Kaneto Shindo’s period ghost story and will celebrate Halloween with Hitchcock’s Psycho, which turned 50 earlier this year.

Special attention should be paid to the Walter Reade’s fourth annual “Scary Movies” program however as its programmers have done an exceptional job of highlighting a number of exciting obscure titles, like haunted house movie supreme The Legend of Hell House and Jack Cardiff’s Freaks-inspired The Mutations, (starring Donald Pleasance). “Scary Movies 4” also highlights a number of contemporary films, like festival favorites Stake Land, a new grizzly vampires-as-fundamentalists chiller, and The Loved Ones, the Australian answer to Prom Night. Severance director Christopher Smith also gets special attention with screenings of his two most recent films, Triangle, also known as the “TimeCrimes on a boat” film and Black Death, or, “the Medieval Wicker Man.”

There are several other terrific options available to adventurous fun-seekers around town. 92YTribeca will screen Dracula Has Risen from the Grave on 35mm Oct. 30. Grave is the first of the Hammer Dracula movies to be shot by regular Lynch cinematographer Freddie Francis.

Francis also unofficially co-directed The Day of the Triffids, screening at MoMA on Oct. 30 and 31. Shot in gorgeous CinemaScope, Triffids is an adaptation of John Wyndham’s classic man-versus-nature novel. Apart from writing several other striking stories, like The Chrysalids, Wyndham also wrote the script for the original Village of the Damned. Unless you really can’t bear to miss Frank Darabont’s pilot episode of The Walking Dead, which is really good incidentally, you have no reason to stay home this Sunday.