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
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
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
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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. .