Four classic horror films are being screened in the National Media Museum over Halloween.
From Thursday, cinema-goers can see:
Thursday 31st October – 8:35pm Italian horror maestro Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977)
American dancer Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) arrives in Germany to train at the renowned Freiberg ballet academy on the same night that one of the students is brutally murdered. Following a series of sinister events Suzy discovers that the academy is actually a front for a coven led by a centuries-old witch, kept alive by satanic rituals and black magic.
Friday 1st November – 8:40pm Lucio Fulci’s zombie tale The Beyond (1981)
In Louisiana a couple inherit a hotel that conceals one of the seven doors to hell, through which the dead may pass into this world.
Saturday 2nd November – 6:00pm, Nosferatu (1922) with live piano accompaniment.
A reworking of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and one of the most potent of all horror films. Real estate agent Hutter’s journey takes him across the bridge into the Carpathian Mountains and the castle of Graf Orlok, from bourgeois morality to an encounter with the sexual power of the unconscious. Few movie monsters have been as memorable as Max Schreck’s Graf Orlok, a shaved, cadaverous two-legged rodent with bat ears and claw-like nails stalking the decks of a ship and Hutter’s Bremen home where his wife awaits her vampire lover.
Piano by Darius Battiwalla, introduction by Keith Withall.
Sunday 3rd November – 8:40pm poetic French chiller Eyes Without a Face (1960)
A plastic surgeon attempts to restore his daughter’s mutilated face with skin obtained from young women abducted by his zombified lover. In between grafts, the daughter flits about the château, eyes peering through the sockets of a molded plastic mask.
On Sunday 4th November, a special event is being held called Jeremy Dyson in conversation with Dr. Mark Goodall. In this screen-talk he will discuss the influence of European Gothic horror on his work and the importance of the notion of the uncanny across art forms such as film, TV and the novel.
Tickets can be booked online: http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/
