Halloween cinema: Night of the Living Dead + Eraserhead
PRESENTED BY FED SQUARE
A night for the classic horror fans out there – this Halloween we’re serving up zombies and body-horror with a duo of old-school, cult-status midnight movies from two masters and mavericks of the form: George A. Romero and David Lynch.
This Halloween, we’ve got a trick-or-treat double-bill of low-budget, high-concept, genre-defining horror, from two writer-director greats.
From the father of the modern zombie film, first up is George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead – a film that Franken-birthed the modern zombie film, giving us reanimated corpses, survivor lore and lots of gore.
Then, we’re backing it up with the debut feature from the master of the psychological, sinister and surreal, David Lynch’s Eraserhead.
Grab a deckchair or BYO camping chair or picnic rug, bring some treaties and a fellow horror fan and settle in for a night of gore, ghouls and beautifully creepy horror-dreams.
Tuesday 27 October, 8pm | 1hr 36 mins | 1968 | USA
Made on a budget of under $125,000, George A. Romero’s original 1968 Night of the Living Dead is widely credited with inventing the modern zombie horror genre. In this original of the series franchise, a group of seven are trapped in rural Pennsylvania farmhouse, as throng of terrifying corpses reanimated as flesh-eating ghouls close in on them.
Tuesday 27 October, 9:40 pm | 1hr 29 mins | 1977 | USA
Written, directed and produced by the late filmmaker and director David Lynch as his debut feature, Eraserhead is a psychological and surreal Kafkaesque body-horror about one man’s fear of fatherhood. Henry Spencer is an isolated man, in a decaying industrial landscape, whose life becomes dominated by a strange and unsettling newborn. Visually striking and lauded for its dark, ambient soundtrack and densely layered sound design, the film is now widely acclaimed by critics. In 2010, the Online Film Critics Society ranked Eraserhead number 2 in a list of top 100 directorial debuts, after Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.