DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Dawn of the Dead / Suspiria Double Feature
After an intro week that featured but one title (the original Swedish version of Let the Right One In), the AFI’s Halloween on Screen series gets underway in earnest tonight with a screening of a masscre-flick spoof, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, that also serves as the kickoff event of the separate Spooky Movie Film Festival (which, if you have easy access to Fairfax’s Cinema Arts Theatre, where the rest of that festival takes place, has plenty of worthwhile scary programming of its own). The rest of the AFI’s Halloween schedule includes the annual Nosferatu screening and Shaun of the Dead — but Saturday night’s program is the real standout, when the theater presents a horror double feature, matching up two rarely screened and undisputed classics.
First up is George Romero’s original 1978 Dawn of the Dead, the director’s 10-years-later follow-up to his genre-defining Night of the Living Dead. I’d argue that not only is this an even better film, but probably the best thing Romero has ever done: never has his tendency to weave social commentary into his films — in this case a decidedly anti-corporate, anti-consumerist bent — been so clear or so well integrated into the shambling of the undead: the film takes place in a Pittsburgh mall that a group of survivors use as a bunker against the zombie hordes, as well as a kind of post-apocalyptic materialist playground. Not only is this one rarely screened, but more importantly, the version being shown at the AFI is Romero’s preferred edit of a film, a version that perfectly balances the gore with character development and subtext. Watching the large number of substandard versions the film has been cut and re-cut into over the years is a lesson in the power of editing as the final determinant of story.
One of the men doing that substandard re-cutting was Italian horror master Dario Argento, but we’ll cut him some slack since the deal he brokered to get European editing rights to the movie was also what helped Romero get the film made. One of the reasons Argento was able to help out was the success of the film he himself made the year before, which forms the second, midnight-movie half of this double feature. Suspiria marks the point when Argento broke with the more prescribed templates of the giallos — gruesome Italian crime flicks — that he’d been making up to that point, and struck out into highly stylized, surreal, and supernatural territory. Suspiria, the story of a young ballerina newly arrived at a dance school with sinister secrets, is as staggeringly gorgeous to watch as it is genuinely chilling.
View the trailers for Dawn of the Dead and Suspiria. And, if you’re really bored at work, check out the Suspiria trailer a second time, this time with commentary from Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim director Edgar Wright.
The pair screen together at the AFI this Saturday night, with Dawn (in it’s only screening) up first at 9:45 p.m. and Suspiria following at midnight. For a complete listing of the rest of the AFI’s Halloween on Screen offerings, check the schedule.
