To the traditional sounds of Halloween – screams of terror, groans of pain, revving chainsaws, retching in the aisles and the like – come some more tuneful emanations this hallowed eve. Film-plus-live-music events are this season’s must-have, it seems. The perennial Chills In The Chapel, at Islington’s Union Chapel, has been doing this for a while. This year it brings electronic composer and John Carpenter collaborator Alan Howarth to preside over doomful synth accompaniment to Escape From New York (Fri), and a medley of clips from the Halloween franchise (31 Oct). In a similar vein, Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin perform their score to a screening of giallo classic Profondo Rosso live for the climax of Sheffield’s gruesomely varied Celluloid Screams horror festival this Sunday. Goblin are also backing Profondo Rosso in Manchester (1 Nov), as well as Dawn Of The Dead in Cardiff (Wed) and Birmingham (Thu). Following this theme, on Friday, Rich Mix in Shoreditch presents Morricone Giallo!, a live audiovisual show. Or for even older-school scares, Birmingham has Lon Chaney’s Phantom Of The Opera with accompaniment from a guitar quartet. Inverness’s Eden Court will be live-scoring Häxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages as part of its Screamathon, or if you can wait until 1 November, London’s Troxy is cranking up its newly restored Wurlitzer organ to accompany the 1920 silent version of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde.
If endurance horror marathons are more your thing, there are options for that, too. Frightfest has that rarest of things, a Halloween daytime event at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, with six new titles, including 1970s-set comedy Lazer Team (from the people who brought you Turbo Kid) and the world premiere of Belly Of The Bulldog, from Nick Gillespie. The PCC also has an all-nighter of horror classics on Halloween proper, as does Notting Hill’s Electric Cinema. The Regent Street Cinema has a similar deal, too, plus live music from Those Unfortunates, not to mention a morning screening of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride with art activities for kids. Outside London, a highlight is Derby’s annual Dead & Breakfast all-nighter, which has horrors old (The Thing), new (the Fulci-esque We Are Still Here) and trashy (80s spoof Student Bodies).
For something more intrepid, Nomad Cinema sets up in the middle of Hyde Park on Friday for isolation horrors including The Shining and Cabin In The Woods. There’s a handful of free, Bechdel Test-approved women-led horrors as part of the London Fields film festival next weekend (Scream, The Craft and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night). On Halloween night, Barrow’s Signal Cinema has a double bill of John Carpenter’s 70s classic Halloween and the supremely scary It Follows in the abandoned building next door. And the Everyman in both Leeds and Muswell Hill have special screenings of The Exorcist with additional “ouija board experience”, if you dare…
