SAN FRANCISCO: The annual "Shock It to Me" horror film festival--or, as its promoters prefer to call it, "a bonafide Horror Convention in a theater setting"--is running at the Castro Theater this weekend, today through Sunday. The special guests scheduled to be in attendance include Sid Haig, a favorite actor of Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie, who co-starred with Lon Chaney, Jr. in Friday night's big feature, Jack Hill's 1964 Spider Baby. The movie itself is an unclassifiable blend of spook show, camp comedy, and homegrown American low-budget weird; it opens with Lon, Jr. singing the title song and just rolls on from there. Also on hand: Kathryn Leigh Scott and Lara Paker, stars of the late-'60s "gothic" daytime soap opera Dark Shadows, which made a sex symbol of Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), a lovesick 175-year-old vampire in a Beatles wig that had been through the wash a few too many times. The festival will be showing both the movie spin-offs from the Dark Shadows TV series, as well as the original Night of the Living Dead and the first of Hammer Film's revivals of the classic Universal movie monsters, Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein. Plus the fest's "infamous Zombie-Eating Contest" and the promised giveaway of "a real dead body to a 'lucky' member of the audience each night." We don't know the details, but if this were a movie, it would probably mean that somebody was going to get to drive home with Sid Haig in the trunk of their car.
NORTH CAROLINA: The programmers of the Escapism film festival, running this weekend (today through Sunday) at the Caroline Theater, boldly step up to the challenge of finding a way to make people scared even when they're in Durham, North Carolina, A.K.A. God's country. (Some of you folks who've never been there may think that I'm kidding. I weep for you.) The lineup this year has quite the international flavor, including the fast-becoming-legendary Australian-exploitation-movie doc Not Quite Hollywood, the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, Takashi Miike's self-explanatory Sukiyaki Western: Django, and the French sci-fi film Eden Log. There's also "the U.S. Theatrical premiere of 1989’s [straight-to-video] The Punisher (in an uncut, director’s edition to boot!)" Dolph Lundgren fans will want to line up for that one, though they risk being run over by people who hate Dolph Lundgren's guts and are in an MST3K-kinda mood.
WASHINGTON, D.C.: "Spooky Movie: 2008", the third annual "Washington, D.C. international horror film festival", has begun and runs through October 20, at Cinema Arts Theatre and additional locations. Unlike other Halloween festivals that pile on the fondly remembered scare classics, this one concentrates on the new and the unknown, including lots and lots of independently produced short films. That tends to mean a lot of amateurishness, but it can also mean a lot of fresh ideas from people with their own, deeply personal notions about what's scary--and besides, if you have to see amateurish festival films, amateurish horror films can be more fun to watch than any other kind. There are also documentaries on William Castle and the mythology of the snuff film. Plus, this evening's "Grindhouse Night" festivities will be hosted, live, by "Count Gore de Vol", in a heartening show of confidence that the recent sex scandal will not endanger his bid for re-election.
LOS ANGELES: There actually are a few theaters in the country that aren't showing horror films this weekend. "Spotlight on Miklós Jancsó", from October 17 through October 24 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gives viewers a rare chance to see four films by the Hungarian master in all their CinemaScope glory. The program opens with the director's first international success, 1965's The Round-Up, and includes 1967's The Red and the White, 1968's Silence and Cry, and the 1971 Red Psalm, rated by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as perhaps the greatest Hungarian movie of all time.
CHICAGO: Last but not least, the 44th Annual Chicago International Film Festival opens today and runs through October 29. Things kick off tonight with The Brothers Bloom, writer-director Rian Johnson's follow-up to his Dashiell-Hammett-High-School first feature, Brick; it stars Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel Weisz. It's followed tomorrow by a "Black Perspectives Tribute" event honoring Sidney Poitier and Jennifer Hudson.