Double Bill! Single admission
October 31 (Monday) 7 pm
Directed by Tod Browning
USA 1935, b/w,
35mm, 61 min.
With Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Barrymore
Recent attempts at blending horror and humor owe a great debt of gratitude to this 1935 Tod Browning classic. Browning, who ran away from home at the age of 16 to join the circus as a clown and contortionist, is best known as the director of such horror staples as Dracula and Freaks. Mark of the Vampire, the remake of his own silent film London After Midnight, but transported to Czechoslovakia, is one of the many collaborations between the director and the legendary Lon Chaney, an actor whose qualities were an eerily good match for a macabre director such as Browning. Add to this mix the considerable talents of Bela Lugosi and Lionel Barrymore, and the careful eye of cinematographer James Wong Howe, and you’ve got this classic chiller.
October 31 (Monday) 8:15 pm
Directed by Werner Herzog
West Germany 1979, color, 35mm, 107min.
HFA Archival Print
With Klaus Kinski, Bruno Ganz,
Isabella Adjani
German with English Subtitles
Nosferatu is Werner Herzog’s homage to F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic version of the Dracula tale. Herzog is not interested in a mere remake of a film he loves: he calls it instead a "rebirth," bringing his own eerie sense of decay, longing, and mysticism to the Nosferatu story. Awash in Wagner, its imagery derived from symbolist paintings, shot through with Teutonic terror and dread, Herzog’s Nosferatu is "a film of astonishing beauty and daring... A tribute to the purity of vision of the silent cinema and also a lament for the loss of innocence." (Kevin Thomas)
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