Theatergoing cinephiles get their own special day this Saturday, September 24, with the first-ever Art House Theater Day. A spiritual cousin to Record Store Day and Video Store Day, it’s an excuse for dozens of indie theaters across America to fly their cinematic flags, unspooling decidedly outside-the-box fare for cinephiles. But the Art House Theater Day flags flying at two of Seattle’s most cherished independent cinemas happen to be freak flags.
In lieu of Fellini, Truffaut, Kurosawa, and other art house staples, the Grand Illusion Cinema and SIFF Cinema are busting out the kinds of archival horror movies that’d never find their way into a mainstream multiplex.
The Grand Illusion Cinema screens Terry Gilliam’s strange and beloved 1981 fantasy epic Time Bandits on Art House Theater Day proper. But one day previous (that’d be tonight, folks), the GI launches its own evil-twin counterpart, Grindhouse Theatre Day, inspired in part by a suggestion from local cinema obsessive Bill Kennedy. The film the GI’s chosen to unleash for their first Grindhouse Theatre Day is I Drink Your Blood, one of the most notorious 1970s exploitation horror classics (scratch that—classicks) and, arguably a penultimate example of grindhouse cinema.
I Drink Your Blood sprang to violent life in 1970. Exploitation producer/distributor Jerry Gross tasked director David Durston with creating an original horror movie without relying on old-guard tropes. Durston found inspiration by drawing from a very real-world disease—rabies—and pushing the violence, nihilism, and queasiness to 11. Released as part of a double-bill with the rather creaky 1964 zombie movie I Eat Your Skin (“2 Great Blood-Horrors to Rip Out your Guts!”), I Drink Your Blood became a massive hit that’s proven to have a life far beyond its ignoble pedigree.
The story revolves around a small satanic hippie cult that wanders into the dying husk of a small town. The disparate handful of misfits raises bloody hell right out of the gate, assaulting a local girl and dosing her grandfather with acid. Grade-schooler Pete, the girl’s kid brother, decides to exact vengeance on the cultists by feeding them meat pies that’ve been injected with the blood of a rabid dog. Needless to say, things don’t turn out well for anyone (feel free to watch the extremely NSFW trailer below if you don’t believe me).
It’s a deeply unsettling artifact of its time, cannily playing on the fear of the counterculture stoked by the then-recent Manson Family murders and the divisiveness of the Vietnam War. The diversity of the principal band of miscreants only amplifies the notion that no racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious group was immune from the metaphoric (and literal) infection thrumming beneath society’s surface at the time.
None of this subtext feels accidental. But Durston was hired to deliver a potent shocker, not a socio-political polemic, and deliver he does. I Drink Your Blood pole-vaults over most of its low-budget liabilities (specifically, some wincingly bad performances and occasionally unconvincing makeup effects) thanks to a pervasive atmosphere of chaos, violence, and decay—and a merciless streak that’d never stand a snowball’s chance in hell of enduring in today’s shiny, focus-grouped cinema climate. The froth-mouthed, wild-eyed homicidal rabies carriers terrorizing the town are equal parts ridiculous and legitimately, under-the-skin terrifying, none more so than gleefully amoral cult leader Horace Bones (played to wild-card over-the-top perfection by Indian dancer/actor Bhaskar).
Phantasm (which screens for Art House Theater Day tomorrow night at SIFF Cinema Uptown) gained its cult following not by reveling in a succession of sledgehammer shocks, but by crafting a sense of surrealism and untethered imagination on a minuscule budget. Director Don Coscarelli’s 1979 genre bow follows Mike (Michael Baldwin), a teenage kid who discovers the gruesome agenda behind the gates of a nearby cemetery overseen by a seriously creepy Tall Man (Angus Scrimm).
Coscarelli was in his mid-twenties when he made Phantasm, and the movie displays the energy of a kid eagerly cramming every cool and crazy idea he’s ever dreamt up into one movie. Car chases, growling demonic hooded dwarves, blazing shotguns, and flying homicidal silver spheres all culminate in revelations literally coughed up from another dimension, but the execution gives this ostensibly goofy movie a hypnotic life all its own.
Coscarelli somehow managed to have his cake and eat it too tonally, with Phantasm deftly balancing dark fairy-tale dreaminess and whiz-bang horror set pieces throughout. There’s a twinge of self-aware humor (manifested most strongly in Reggie Bannister’s pony-tailed, ass-kicking ice cream man sidekick/hero) that surely influenced Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films, offset by a dread of/fascination with death absorbed by young Michael’s world (Baldwin’s conflicted, very genuine performance as a kid still smarting from his parents’ recent deaths feels grounded in reality, even when things get totally unreal).
Phantasm’s inspired a slew of filmmakers over the last four decades, and that’s partially why it’s screening at the Uptown. Current geek icon J.J. Abrams, an avowed fan of the movie, sprung for a spanking-new 4K restoration, and Abrams and Coscarelli will be contributing a Skype Q&A before the movie’s screening tomorrow evening. Hearing them wax rhapsodic and reminisce, respectively, promises to be no earthly end of fun, but I’d almost prefer the Q&A be after the screening. Shutting off the outside world and just going with Phantasm is arguably one of the keys to enjoying it.
