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An incomplete but completely terrifying list of local theaters' classic horror screenings

William Campbell, Luana Anders and Bart Patton in Francis Ford Coppola's "Dementia 13." (Courtesy Rialto Pictures/American Zoetrope)
William Campbell, Luana Anders and Bart Patton in Francis Ford Coppola's "Dementia 13." (Courtesy Rialto Pictures/American Zoetrope)

It’s the time of year when everyone loves to stay home and watch their favorite scary movies. But let’s face it, they’re always better with a crowd. There’s a collective energy when strangers come together to get frightened out of our wits, an electricity that’s impossible to replicate in your living room. We all have precious memories of spectators screaming simultaneously or of a certain audience member losing it alone. My favorite was a late show of Scorsese’s “Cape Fear” at the long-demolished Assembly Square Mall multiplex, during which one viewer was so traumatized by an early scene in which Robert De Niro bites off a chunk of a woman’s cheek that she spent the rest of the movie shrieking whenever he came within six feet of any of his co-stars, including Nick Nolte. But nothing tops my parents’ recollection of going to see “The Exorcist” when it first came out. They never tire of telling me how it took Linda Blair projectile-puking pea soup for a drunk guy in the front row to realize he’d wandered into the wrong auditorium. “This isn’t ‘Patton!’” the man cried out, “I came here to see ‘Patton!’”

By my count, there are more than two dozen horror films showing this week at Boston-area movie theaters. You can revisit oft-screened standbys such as “The Shining at Kendall Square Cinema and “The Thing at the Brattle, or seek out odder offerings at the Somerville Theatre like “The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane,” a perverse proto-“Home Alone” in which a 13-year-old Jodie Foster tries to fend off Martin Sheen’s creepy child molester while hiding a couple of corpses in the basement. Bingeable events include the Somerville’s Halloween Hullabaloo 2: Electric Boogaloo, programmed by Horror Movie Survival Guide podcast host Julia Marchese, and it wouldn't be spooky season without Coolidge After Midnite’s Halloween Horror Movie Marathon, celebrating its 21st year with 12 hours of vampire flicks for those who still have the fortitude to stay up later than this particular critic. There probably aren't enough evenings in the entire month of October to watch them all, but here are seven scary movies worth going out to see on the big screen.

Night of the Living Dead

Kyra Schon in "Night of the Living Dead." (Courtesy Photofest)
Kyra Schon in "Night of the Living Dead." (Courtesy Photofest)

George A. Romero’s seminal 1968 shocker has spawned so many imitations and homages it’s easy to forget what a pungent, no-frills affair it is. Shot in stark, 16mm black-and-white, the movie constricts the apocalypse to a single farmhouse outside of Pittsburgh, where the cannibalistic walking dead represent a country that at the time felt like it was eating itself alive. What set Romero’s zombie movies apart from most other entries in the genre he inspired was their pointed political outrage. The director knew exactly what he was doing when he made this film’s hero (Duane Jones) a capable and intelligent Black man beset on all sides by the ignorant, the presumptuous and the undead. The film’s cruel and abrupt ending is still shattering and feels even more depressingly plausible today. As Romero’s “Dead” series wore on for five more movies over the next 41 years, his creatures became more pitiable and pathetic while the human characters only grew more irredeemably vicious. Yet even from the beginning, it’s obvious that the real enemy is us. (Screens at the Coolidge Corner Theatre Monday, Oct. 24 and at the Somerville Theatre on Friday, Oct. 28.)

Dementia 13” & “Twixt

Elle Fanning and Val Kilmer in Francis Ford Coppola's "B'Twixt Now and Sunrise." (Courtesy Rialto Pictures/American Zoetrope)
Elle Fanning and Val Kilmer in Francis Ford Coppola's "B'Twixt Now and Sunrise." (Courtesy Rialto Pictures/American Zoetrope)

The cleverest of this week’s double features at the Somerville pairs Francis Ford Coppola’s first proper release with what remains (to date) his last, two low-budget horror films of a peculiar and personal bent. 1962’s “Dementia 13” was the filmmaker’s graduation from the nudie flicks he’d been shooting, going semi-legit at Roger Corman’s exploitation factory. In a possibly haunted Irish castle, an avaricious daughter-in-law takes desperate measures to insinuate herself into the miserable matriarch’s will. Heavily influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, it’s still unmistakably a Coppola movie as it’s all about family. His independently financed 2011 curio “Twixt” never played locally, its initial release thwarted after the film was booed by the cretins at Comic Con. It’s a strange, snickering and sometimes terribly sad picture starring Val Kilmer as an alcoholic horror novelist on a failing book tour roped into a local murder mystery by Bruce Dern’s skeezy sheriff. Whenever Kilmer gets blackout drunk he’s visited by Poe himself (Ben Chaplin) and the victim (Elle Fanning) amid striking, deliberately artificial digital backdrops. Kilmer’s character is grieving the loss of a child in a boating accident while being forced to do work for hire that he hates, so it’s basically about Coppola’s life in the 1980s. Some scenes are silly, some are impossible to shake off, and I see the notorious tinkerer has now tried to retitle it, “B’Twixt Now & Sunrise.” Whatever he wants to call it, this is a film that deserved a better audience. (Screens at the Somerville Theatre on Tuesday, Oct. 25 and Wednesday, Oct. 26.)

Fright Night

Still from "Fright Night."(Courtesy Photofest)
Still from "Fright Night."(Courtesy Photofest)

Played by the less-than-endearing William Ragsdale, teenaged Charley is a horror movie nut who strongly suspects that his suave new next-door neighbor (Chris Sarandon) might be a vampire. Maybe it’s the coffin Charley saw being delivered late one night, or all the dead sex workers that have started turning up around town since he moved in. Or it could be that the guy keeps turning into a bat. But whatever the evidence, nobody’s gonna believe a high schooler with a hyperactive imagination, which is why Charley winds up enlisting the assistance of a washed-up old actor (Roddy McDowall) working as a late-night creature feature host on local TV. A sleeper hit in the summer of 1985, “Fright Night” affectionately teases the tropes of old vampire movies while working as a surprisingly scary example of the same. Writer-director Tom Holland (not the Spider-man guy) gets witty performances out of Sarandon and especially McDowall, whose name “Peter Vincent” is a fond tribute to Hammer horror icons Peter Cushing and Vincent Price. As is his hambone acting. (Screens at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Saturday, Oct. 30 and at the Somerville Theatre on Monday, Oct. 31.)

Angel Heart

Still from "Angel Heart." (Courtesy Rialto Pictures/Studiocanal)
Still from "Angel Heart." (Courtesy Rialto Pictures/Studiocanal)

Director Alan Parker’s scandalous supernatural thriller stars Mickey Rourke at his most magnetically disheveled, playing a slightly shell-shocked private eye hired by a pony-tailed, long-fingernailed eccentric (Robert De Niro, doing a droll impression of his pal Martin Scorsese) to track down a missing pop singer who doesn’t want to be found. Soaked in sweaty, overheated atmosphere, the case takes him from Harlem to New Orleans, where our detective falls for a willowy voodoo priestess played by Lisa Bonet. Their graphic, blood-soaked nightmare sex scene was all anybody was talking about back in 1987, initially earning the film an X rating and so upsetting America’s champion of morality Bill Cosby that he fired Bonet from his top-rated television show. “Angel Heart” is scary as hell but also something of a hoot, with a mordant sense of humor and some of the genre’s greatest character names. (The crooner is called “Johnny Favorite,” De Niro plays “Louis Cyphre” and there’s a jazz musician named “Toots Sweet.”) Even the title turns out to be a terrible pun. (Screens at the Somerville Theatre on Sunday, Oct. 30.)

Evil Dead II

Bruce Campbell in Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead II." (Courtesy Rialto Pictures/Studiocanal)
Bruce Campbell in Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead II." (Courtesy Rialto Pictures/Studiocanal)

The zaniest zombie movie ever made, Sam Raimi’s live-action cartoon subjects star Bruce Campbell to a dazzling array of indignities after his would-be romantic weekend getaway is foiled by reading from a book of the dead that unleashes all sorts of interdimensional uglies, including an extremely ornery tree. The relentless, whiz-bang, “anything goes” energy of the film is a high that generations of gorehounds would wind up chasing for the rest of their moviegoing lives, as even Raimi’s studio-financed follow-up “Army of Darkness” couldn’t summon a fraction of the rascally ingenuity these hungry young filmmakers found out there in the woods. Campbell’s got a chiseled smirk out of a 1950’s cigarette ad, and the movie’s most memorable sequence is a one-man-show in which he does battle with his demonically possessed right hand, eventually taking a chainsaw to the unruly appendage and trying to tame it with a heavy hardcover of Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.” The splattery slapstick and stop-motion shenanigans are sublimely silly, with even the shotgun gross-outs all in good, groovy fun. (Screens at the Brattle Theatre on Monday, Oct. 31.)

Halloween

Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter's "Halloween." (Courtesy Photofest)
Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter's "Halloween." (Courtesy Photofest)

Accept no substitutions, sequels or reboots. John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece is the ultimate slasher movie and an exercise in pure craft. Nobody needs a convoluted mythology for Michael Myers and attempts to explain the monster only diminish him, which is why in the original picture he’s credited only as The Shape. “Halloween” is a favorite of both the Film Comment set and the Fangoria crowd because, at heart, it’s a minimalist art film, with Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey charting vectors of screen space in a doom-laden grid of leafy sidewalks and manicured lawns. It’s a movie about mood and movement, exploring all the foregrounds and backgrounds of widescreen real estate. And boy does the big guy move *slowly*. That’s what’s so agonizing about the suspense scenes. There’s also the unnerving blankness of that Shatner mask he’s wearing, impossible to read and incapable of expression. The monster merely is. (Screens at Cinema Salem from Friday, Oct. 28 through Sunday, Oct. 30 and at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Monday, Oct. 31.)

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Sean Burns Film Critic
Sean Burns is a film critic for The ARTery.

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