DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Devil’s Night falls on a Friday this year, so why is it that the studios aren’t taking advantage? There’s not a single horror movie being released wide this weekend, which leaves us with nothing but a couple of holdovers from the previous weeks for anyone looking for cinematic scares. The AFI’s always excellent Halloween on Screen series has plenty of great repertory to offer of course, including tomorrow’s annual Nosferatu screening, but that’s really about all that’s going on in the metro area.
There is, however, an option for those willing (and able) to wander a little farther afield. The Library of Congress has an excellent Devil’s Night program on tap with a double feature of classic horror. First up is Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, the landmark Italian vampire/witchcraft blend that served as the bridge between the mannered Gothic horror of the early 20th century and the gore-fests that would come to define the genre. That’s followed by the occult classic The Wicker Man. If you’ve only ever seen the hilariously awful Nicholas Cage remake, you owe it to yourself to wipe that from your mind with the genuinely unsettling 1973 original, shown here in a rare print from the LOC’s vaults.
The only problem? Those vaults, and the gorgeous new theater the LOC built to go along with them, are located in a vast complex in Culpeper, Virgina, a two hour drive from downtown in the best of situations, and plenty more than that on a Friday evening. Which is great for providing a massive space to accommodate the LOC’s important task in preserving film history, not so great for actually presenting those films to the nearest population center. For those of you who live and work in the outer VA suburbs, or anywhere between Chantilly and Charlottesville, it’s a fantastic place to see a movie. And their programming, as it was when they were screening at the Pickford theater in D.C., is still diverse and consistently great. But for those of us inside the beltway, or without a vehicle, it’s just not a viable option. While the Pickford wasn’t the greatest place to see a movie, it was at least accessible. The LOC still includes a link to the Pickford schedule on their site, but it hasn’t been updated since they quietly ended screenings there in the spring. I’m told by an LOC employee that the Pickford is a “thing of the past.”
It’s really a shame that one of the greatest film archives in the world has intentionally rendered their regular peeks into their collection inaccessible to most of the metro population they once served. Hopefully they’ll realize that and re-institute D.C. screenings; but that probably depends on how much they hear from you.
View the trailers for Black Sunday and The Wicker Man.
Tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater in Culpeper, VA. Free.
