Author: Zach Fleming

SATAN’S MENAGERIE

Posted on by Zach Fleming

SATAN’S MENAGERIE
dir. Gary Griffith, 2001
USA. 101 min.
In English with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 8 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 24 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28 – MIDNIGHT

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See – Vampires! Demons! Ghouls! And Satan Himself!

The monsters of the world gather at a one-of-a-kind gathering. Who will attend and what kind of carnage will break out?

Dr. Craymoor (co-writer Thomas V. Powers, doing his best hammy public-access-Vincent Price) is a paranormal talk show host who dabbles in the dark arts in pursuit of fame and riches. We’ll refrain from spoiling the (surprisingly convoluted) plot, but it involves, among other things, a Vietnam vet turned werewolf, a half-man half-amphibian who escapes from a carnival sideshow, and the disciples of a centuries old blood cult called the ‘Sons of Jeramin’.

Not released until the early 2000s and shot in the mid-90s on whatever money one-shot filmmaker Gary Griffith could scrape together (including cash from selling his own comic book collection), SATAN’S MENAGERIE approximates the feeling of channel surfing through B-movies late at night while in the grip of a severe fever.

GAME OF PLEASURE

Posted on by Zach Fleming

GAME OF PLEASURE
dir. Dale E. Frantz, 1998
USA. 63 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 1 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12 – 10 PM
MONDAY, AUGUST 17 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, AUGUST 21 – MIDNIGHT

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Welcome to Pleasure — a sexual experience played at your risk.

Shot on video for the late-90s erotic-thriller market, GAME OF PLEASURE feels like a softcore Existenz for dummies. Writer/producer/star/co-editor Kevin Summerfield plays a hacker, stealing and selling games on the black market, and gets more than he bargained for when he stumbles on a new VR game called ‘Pleasure’, accidentally unleashing the horniest demon in DTV history (Home Shopping Network model turned adult film star Tammy Parks).

Features plentiful nudity, a nifty demon designed by Doug Ulrich (director of SCARY TALES and SNUFF KILLS), tons of shoddy 90s CGI effects and transitions – basically a perfect midnight movie.

DRONECORE MIDNIGHTS

Posted on by Zach Fleming

This July, Spectacle presents three midnight flicks united by a shared frequency: dronecore, the microbudget mode where genre scaffolding quietly collapses into texture and trance. Separated by decade and continent — French suburban gore, American experimental horror, and acid-house sci-fi — Folies Meurtriéres, Lost Prophet, and Suroh: Alien Hitchhiker arrive at the same destination through different doors: a cinema of dead air and degraded image, where obsessions and budget limitations fuse into something genuinely hypnotic.

FOLIES MEURTRIÈRES
dir. Antoine Pellissier, 1984
France. 48 min.
In French with English subtitles.

SATURDAY, JULY 11 – MIDNIGHT
MONDAY, JULY 13 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, JULY 17 – 10PM
SUNDAY, JULY 26 – 5PM

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A crazed killer wanders around killing several young women with various weapons. Is there a motive for these crimes or is it purely for the joy of killing?

A masked killer stalks and murders women in a French suburb. That’s it — no motive, no dialogue, no relief. What Pellissier delivers instead is a slasher boiled down to pure signal: forty-eight minutes of blown-out Super 8, warped synth, and gore effects that feel less like horror movie craft than evidence of something that maybe actually happened. Beautiful, cursed dead air, vibe cinema of the highest order.

Preceded by a screening of


THE CHOSEN ONE OF HELL
dir. Antoine Pellissier, 1985
France. 35 min.
In French with English subtitles.

Two year old little Cindy has been chosen by the devil to become the antichrist.

A short offering from Antoine Pellissier from the year after FOLIES – plays like a cross between a home-video recording of a satanic ritual and a no-budget remake of THE EXORCIST (Friedkin is actually name-checked in the opening credits) featuring a very unbothered toddler. As one Letterboxd user excellently describes it, “Cindy is the chosen one, Satan has a fit, and a priest takes a nap. It’s like discovering Chaucer while inhaling fumes at a gas pump.”

Restorations courtesy of Bleeding Skull.

LOST PROPHET
dir. Michael De Avila, 1992
USA. 74 min.
In English.

TUESDAY, JULY 7 – 10PM
SUNDAY, JULY 12 – 5PM
SATURDAY, JULY 18 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, JULY 29 – 10PM

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Unstable man spends the summer in an empty mansion, where he meets punks, serial killers and witches.

‘Lynchian’ is a term that gets thrown around ad nauseam, and frequently incorrectly, but this scrappy thesis film earns it, while carving out its own specific territory – what might be best described as American gothic filtered through the lens of a film student who’s seen too much Maya Deren (complimentary).

Shot on 16mm, edited, and scored by De Avila himself, and it shows (also complimentary). Part experimental horror, part fever dream journal, Lost Prophet is a singularly strange artifact of the early 90s DIY horror boom, the kind of film that could only be made by one person answering to no one.

Restoration courtesy of VHShitfest.

SUROH: ALIEN HITCHHIKER
dir. Patrick McGuinn, 1996
USA. 74 min.
In English.

MONDAY, JULY 6 – 10PM
FRIDAY, JULY 10 – 7:30PM ft Q&A with director Patrick McGuinn
TUESDAY, JULY 14 – 7:30PM
FRIDAY, JULY 24 – MIDNIGHT

BUY TICKETS FOR 7/10 Q&A
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Why must you kill all the heroes?

Paul, a non-believer in life on other planets, late one night discovers a crash-landed and wounded alien. He rescues the being and is initiated into a psycho-sexual metamorphosis.

What starts out feeling like a familiar regional SOV sci-fi flick quickly morphs into something much stranger and more interesting than your average no-budget genre affair. Awash in acid-house pulse and LSD-smeared video, Suroh is queer, strange, and genuinely beautiful — less interested in alien contact as sci-fi premise than as a vehicle for transformation. One of the most unique SOV artifacts of the ’90s underground.

Restoration courtesy of Bleeding Skull. .

THE WORLD DROPS DEAD / WHEN THE MOON RETURNS

Posted on by Zach Fleming

THE WORLD DROPS DEAD
dir. Brandon Colvin, 2025
United States, 70 min
In English

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 – 7:30 w Q&A moderated by Joanna Arnow
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19TH – 7:30PM w Q&A moderated by Brandon Streussnig
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH – 5PM w Q&A moderated by Mark Asch
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21ST – 5PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25TH – 10PM

Q&A TICKETS

REGULAR TICKETS

Claire struggles to cope as the shock of her father’s passing ripples through her small Quaker community. Beset by visions and desperate to reunite with the only person who seemed to understand her, Claire reaches out to her father across the boundary of death.

to be followed by a screening of

WHEN THE MOON RETURNS
dir. Brandon Colvin, 2025
United States, 15 min
In English

Young Deirdre and her clan of druids eke out an itinerant existence in the forest. When the threat of Christianizing forces grows more imminent, a holy sacrifice is made that changes Deirdre’s life forever.

Writer/director Brandon Colvin (A Dim Valley) returns with another daringly poetic microbudget salvo from the American south. With The World Drops Dead and the accompanying animated short, When the Moon Returns, the director has created a cryptic cinematic diptych that fearlessly explores a trinity of interrelated concerns—love, faith, and death.

Part What Dreams May Come, part folk horror, part Clive Barker, part Takeshi Miike, Colvin’s pair of elegant new works represent the most exciting possibilities for contemporary independent film. Minimal yet thematically and visually ambitious, these idiosyncratic and emotionally raw films interrogate the darker sides of the human mind and heart without blinking and without suggesting easy answers. Elevated by Colvin and collaborator Aaron Whitt’s hypnotic score, and given thorny psychological depth by the dense, shadowy foliage of its wooded setting, The World Drops Dead is a film rich with sensorial delights.

When the Moon Returns supplements the feature with its own expressive and implicit mythic connections, turning pagan ritual into hallucinatory psychedelia. It’s a heady and satisfying pair of films that revel in their own esoteric complexities as works of intimate fantasy, love, and grief only possible outside of the mainstream.

CRITICAL FAILURE: ROLE-PLAYING HORROR

Posted on by Zach Fleming

Remember when rolling a twenty-sided die and eating pizza with your pals in your mom’s basement was literally perceived as performing witchcraft and ritual sacrifice, or at least worthy of a wedgie from your classmates? Tabletop role-playing games—and the Hasbro-owned DUNGEONS & DRAGONS more specifically—have reemerged over the last decade into a multi-billion dollar industry with the largest number of players the hobby has ever witnessed along with a seemingly endless stream of podcasts, video games, films, shows, and enclosure of the creative commons to cash in.
With role-playing experiencing a much deserved embrace among millions of people as a unique form of community and creativity, as corporate exploitation simultaneously riddles it hollow with meaningless products and online services, it’s hard to fathom a time when D&D was effectively culturally outlawed during a wave of evangelical moral panic that reached its heights in the mid-80’s and stained its reputation for generations.
In an urgent attempt to encourage that role-playing become evil again (i.e., a child-endangering, pornography-promoting, demonic cult practice), and to rally against this consumerist holiday season, Spectacle presents four D&D-adjacent horror-fantasy films from around the globe (or at least from Canada, Michigan, Florida and Chile) that traverse the years of the Satanic Panic. Featuring chopped up geeks, vampire freaks, and a role-player from beyond the grave!

KNIGHT CHILLS
dir. Katherine Hicks, 2001
USA. 82 min.
In English.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17 – 10 PM

ADVANCE TICKETS

Role-playing with a vengeance

John is an avid role-player. He has feelings for fellow RPer Brooke. But when Brooke makes it clear the feelings are far from mutual, John, in despair, takes his own life. In the wake of this, his friends and fellow gamers are stalked by a mysterious black knight.

One of the all too rare SOV features directed by a woman, KNIGHT CHILLS is a solidly crafted supernatural slasher (not to mention a Christmas movie!), featuring one of the more convincing losers to ever grace the screen.

Its full of lovely details that DnD players will appreciate the hell out of, some of the most useless cops in cinema history (redundant, I know) and ingenious low budget effects, KNIGHT CHILLS is due for a reappraisal.

Screening from a new remaster from the original SVHS master tapes.

 


ETERNAL BLOOD aka SANGRE ETERNA
dir. Jorge Olguin, 2002
Chile. 107 min.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 3 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 6 – 5 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14 – 10 PM

ADVANCE TICKETS

It’s the Essence of Life…and Death.

Carmila is introduced by ‘M’ to a sinister role-playing game called “Eternal Blood”. Once settled in an abandoned house, the group meets Dahmer, a young man who practices vampirism rites and who begins to influence young people, or perhaps… turn them into vampires.

Goth teens in Chile play a vampire themed role-playing game that starts to bleed (hehe) into real life. Or does it? The only film of the series to include the internet – feels like a snapshot of a very specific time in early-internet-end-of-mall-goth culture.


SKULLDUGGERY
dir. Ota Richter, 1983
Canada. 95 min.
In English.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 1 – 5 PM
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 5 – 7:30 PM
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9 -10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – 5 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21 – 5 PM

ADVANCE TICKETS

It started as a game… until death started playing!

Adam is cursed: one of his ancestors played a game and fell victim to a sorcerer or possibly Satan. The curse manifests through Adam and the game, making him attend a strange amateur theater where immensely talentless people try to do farce and a janitor wanders around with a game of Tic-Tac-Toe on his back.

The oldest, and potentially the most bizarre of the series – features an incredible original song, a really strange sense of humor and pacing, some uncannily creepy moments, periodic cutaways to someone finishing the easiest puzzle to ever exist, and a horrendous puppet – not to mention some of the worst in local theater that Canada has to offer.

Also one of those movies where everyone inexplicably wants to fuck the bland pro(an)tagonist. An all around blast!

 


WAY BAD STONE
dir. Archie Waugh, 1991
USA. 84 min.
In English.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 2 – 10 PM
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13 – MIDNIGHT
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15 – 5 PM
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20 – 5 PM

ADVANCE TICKETS

39 Gruesome Deaths!

A band of adventurers steals an enchanted stone, and earns a wizard’s desperate revenge. The wizard must summon all his old fighting comrades to get the artifact back – before its evil dooms their world.

Shot on video in Florida, featuring a cast of Renaissance Faire performers who the film was specifically written for, clearly thrilled able to flex their stunt skills while spilling as much blood and guts as possible – also features a non-zero number of actual swords and weaponry used in fight scenes – not to mention a killer theme song.

A shockingly cohesive and well wrought fantasy action mini-epic that the director affectionately referred to as a “home video that got out of hand”.

Screening from a new remaster courtesy of BLEEDING SKULL.

BUGGED

Posted on by Zach Fleming

BUGGED!
dir. Ronald K. Armstrong, 1996
USA. 82 min.
In English.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2 – MIDNIGHT
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7 – 10PM
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – 10PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 7:30PM

TICKETS

They Exterminate You!

Exterminators unwittingly create monsters by spraying crickets with a genetic mutating agent.

A wildly underrated mid-90s horror-comedy gem, BUGGED! was a passion project from writer/director/editor/star Ronald K. Armstrong. A huge fan of Troma films, he pitched the idea of a movie about killer crickets that would be told from a Black perspective to Lloyd Kaufman, and luckily for us, Troma decided to produce.

Shot by S. Torianno Berry (director of Spectacle favorite THE BLACK BEYOND) and starring an entirely Black cast, BUGGED! feels like a shockingly charming low budget cousin to GHOSTBUSTERS, featuring effective and goopy practical effects alongside genuine laughs and a refreshing lack of self awareness or irony that ruins a lot of Troma originals.

In a just world, this film would have led to bigger and better films for Ronald and his team, but at least we’ll always have BUGGED!

THE JAR

Posted on by Zach Fleming

CHARON / THE JAR
dir. Bruce Toscano, 1984
USA. 88 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1 – MIDNIGHT
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6 – 10PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21 – 10PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25 – 10PM

TICKETS

THE JAR … it blows the lid off of terror!

A Motorist who comes upon an auto accident finds a bottle at the scene. The bottle contains a demon who proceeds to possess him.

For years only available in a terribly degraded and cropped pan-and-scan edit that made the visuals near indecipherable, THE JAR was regarded (if at all) as a complete failure, an artifact reserved for MST3K-riffing and not much else.

Thanks to a new remaster from TerrorVision, THE JAR can finally be seen for the unnerving art-house horror freakout it is, more than deserving of its own cult following. Despite its budgetary limitations, it manages to pull off a uniquely dreamlike and unsettling tone, falling somewhere between ERASERHEAD and JACOB’S LADDER.

NIGHT FEEDER

Posted on by Zach Fleming

NIGHT FEEDER
dir. Jim Whiteaker, 1988
USA. 94 min.
In English.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – MIDNIGHT
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 – 10PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 10PM
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 26 – 10PM

TICKETS

Fear chokes the free-wheeling underbelly of San Francisco’s punk scene as a killer stalks the night to feed an unspeakable appetite. A writer probes the gruesome murders and the story hits close to home, as the web of death devours neighbors, friends, and lovers.

A scuzzy late 80’s SOV curio that clumsily teeters between police procedural, domestic melodrama, and splatter horror, NIGHT FEEDER exists on its own wavelength – and is absolutely worth seeing with a crowd. Do yourself a favor and go in as cold as possible (early VHS art gives away a lot more than the movie does).

THREE WORKS OF HOMEMADE CINEMA BY COURTNEY BUSH

Posted on by Zach Fleming

Join us for a one-night special event featuring 3 short documentaries by Courtney Bush, followed by a Q&A with poet Ari Lisner.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – 7:30PM

TICKETS


PARIS J’I DON’T HATE YOU AS MUCH AS I DID WHEN I WAS 21
dir. Courtney Bush, 2024
USA. 54 min.
In English.

~One day, a woman crosses every bridge on the Seine with her best friend, Anne-Louise.~

As much a documentary as it is a video diary or a poetic essay, PARIS J’I DON’T HATE YOU AS MUCH AS I DID WHEN I WAS 21 finds the filmmaker-poet-comedienne traversing the titular city while examining her friendship and her own changing relationship with Paris through lenses of literature (Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) and pop culture (The Sopranos) which deal in their own ways with the anxiety and emotion induced by the city and the overpowering aesthetic institution of “Paris.”

Screening with


HELL: A FILM ABOUT BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI
dir. Courtney Bush, 2024
USA. 18 min
In English.

In this darkly comic exploration of a small area of Biloxi, Mississippi, the filmmaker braids together local legend, a murder scandal from the 80s, and strange occurrences related to the BP oil spill and Hurricane Katrina (including a mysterious visit by the actor Kirsty Alley) as an attempt to approach her complex relationship to her hometown.

And


A DISORIENTING VIDEO OF SCOTTISH SHEEP
dir. Courtney Bush, 2024
USA. 5 min.

In English.

See title.


Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the author of the books Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022), I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023), and the forthcoming A Movie (Lavender Ink, 2025). Once her homemade cinema pieces have been projected as light at least once, which symbolically completes the cycle and makes them “real movies,” they can be found on Youtube.

AN AUTUMN EVENING WITH VADIM KOSTROV

Posted on by Zach Fleming

Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love —but the greatest of these is love.

In July, September, and December of 2023, Spectacle watched the seasons pass across nine features made over the course of the first few creatively explosive years of Russian expat Vadim Kostrov’s forays into his unique approach to personal filmmaking. While unable to travel to the United States during these screenings, Kostrov generously stayed up into the wee hours in his current home of Paris to call in the theater and discuss a stunning bouquet of work that captured the atmospheric shifts and burgeoning lives of idealistic young artists, mostly within his alpine-industrial home city Nizhny Tagil.

Just after one year in which we held screenings of Kostrov’s second piece in his incomplete seasons tetralogy, FALL, it comes with great delight to announce that the filmmaker will make his first —and no doubt far from last— in-person appearance at the goth bodega to present three pivotal and seasonally-aligned short films.

STILL FREE (set in the late summer) along with I SAW and THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN (both in the fall) represent various departures, epilogues, and transitions in the life of Kostrov and the friends that make up his pool of subjects and collaborators.

This will be the United States premieres of I SAW and STILL FREE, and the world premieres of THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN and LIGHT, a new music video by Kostrov that will finish the program.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 7PM w/ Q&A

TICKETS

STILL FREE
Dir. Vadim Kostrov, 2023.
Russia. 31 min.
In Russian with English subtitles.

Not dissimilar from Kostrov’s stellar feature-length couples portrait, ADA AND MAXIM, the diary footage shot in 2020 that makes up STILL FREE is another example of Kostrov’s ability to provide a welcoming gaze on the idealism of young romance, this time between Katya and her boyfriend Kostya, who will soon leave to join the Russian military from their town of Svobodny (which translates to English as “Free”). While the former film spotlights pockets of warmth in a desolate winter, STILL FREE plays as an inverse, a harbinger of war and upturned lives for those in front and behind the camera, amidst the crowded revelry of late summer beach-going.

I SAW
2022. Russia.
29 min.
In Russian with English subtitles.

An epilogue of sorts to the NARODNAYA trilogy, I SAW features an always welcome return for Kostrov mainstays Gosha Gordienko (seen over the course of seasons in ORPHEUS, SUMMER, NARODNAYA, AFTER NARODNAYA, and COMET) and Matvey Bedin as they piece together a new song for their band, Lazy Comet, in a dimly natural lit apartment. As with all of Kostrov’s work, the mundane and the divine are one and the same, as a home studio crossfades into a spread of autumnal hues.

THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN
(LE DERNIER REGARD DE L’AUTOMNE)
2023. Russia.
25 min.

Shot in the Urals during fall 2021, THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN comprises the last images Kostrov filmed in the region before leaving Russia in March, 2022. Edited after his move to Paris, the film takes on the quality of a solemn departure as locations and landmarks that have appeared in previous work are shadowed in the dark oranges and yellows of sunset. Perhaps classifiable as one of Kostrov’s landscape films, it stands out because of its unsettled framing. No longer on a tripod, the camera trembles in the filmmaker’s hands, his breath interwoven with the sounds of the environment.

LIGHT
2024. Russia.
5 min.

A brand new video featuring an ethereal rock composition played by Lazy Comet, originally set to vocals and lyrics written by Kostrov in summer 2020. Guitarist Gosha Gordienko and bassist Shamil Sayfotdinov stoically gaze upon, and approach, the blazing horizontal light of an Ural sunset in the fall of 2021.

Total running time: 90 min.