Movie of the week: Night of the Demon (1957)
Dublin’s Horror fans are in for a treat this bank holiday weekend with a host of fright flicks playing in the city.
The Irish Film Institute’s annual Horrorthon plays all weekend, and while I’ve yet to see most of the new releases playing, I can recommend some of the classics making a return to the big screen.
Hellraiser (1987)
Friday’s highlight (and the standout of the festival) is Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 masterpiece Night of the Demon, an atmospheric tale of a visiting American skeptic caught up in British witchcraft. It’s one of the best movies the horror genre has ever produced and should be seen on the big screen.
Clive Barker’s self-directed screen adaptation of his novella Hellraiser plays in a late night double bill with its sequel on Friday too. The movie spawned a series of awful sequels but the original is a great slice of 80s horror.
On Saturday, we have the Vincent Price classic Theatre of Blood, a blackly comic piece of grand guignol cinema with Price as a hammy stage actor exacting gruesome revenge on his critics. That night, the clever low budget sci-fi thriller Coherence screens, one of the cleverest movies to emerge from the independent horror scene in recent years.
Vincent Price is back on screen on Monday in the 1960 Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, House of Usher. Featuring one of Price’s most iconic turns, this is gothic horror at its finest.
The full Horrorthon schedule can be found at ifi.ie/horrorthon
The Lost Boys (1987)
This weekend, Dublin also hosts the Bram Stoker festival, which includes screenings of horror movies in Temple Bar’s Meeting House Square, including the iconic 80s vampire flick The Lost Boys on Sunday evening. Visit bramstokerfestival.com for more info.
There’s terror on offer at The Lighthouse too, with the excellent American Psycho on Monday evening and The Shining (part of their ongoing Kubrick season) on Wednesday.
And not to be left out, the Screen cinema offers you the choice of either Friday the 13th or The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Wednesday evening.
The Babadook
This week’s best new release comes from the horror genre in the form of Aussie supernatural thriller The Babadook, the impressive feature debut of director Jennifer Kent, who shuns the cheap gimmicky scare tactics of recent Hollywood fright flicks in favour of a more old school, atmosphere driven approach.
World War II drama Fury is a hard hitting look at an American tank crew, led by Brad Pitt, in the final days of the conflict. A formulaic ending lets it down but it’s an effective rendering of the horrors of war nonetheless.
This is Where I Leave You is the latest movie to use the tired old storyline of a middle-aged city dweller reluctantly returning to their hometown, just as we saw last week in The Judge. Here, Jason Bateman returns home for his Father’s Jewish funeral and the subsequent week of prayers, reconnecting with an old girlfriend and squabbling with siblings. You could write this one yourself.
Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper reteam for Serena, a mess of a movie that plays like it was chopped down from a longer, more coherent cut. Set in depression era America, the movie juggles several plotlines, none of which are satisfyingly dealt with.
By Eric Hillis
