Hey there Los Angeles Fright fans! Time for another Friday Night Frights! (like us on Facebook, if you dare!)
This month is Clive Barker month at Friday Night Frights! And to kick things off, this Friday (at midnight of course!) my sinister cohort Sebastian O’Brien and I are showing Candyman — and director Bernard Rose will be on hand for our always delightful Q&A!
Here is the lowdown:
Be it a horde of zombies, or one particularly large mutated lizard, the source of terror in a horror film with an urban setting generally requires a large volume of monster(s) to be effective — but the Big City has its fringes too, often hidden in plain sight. Therein lies the simple genius of Bernard Rose’s urban ghost tale Candyman, which takes the seeds of Clive Barker’s Lovecraftian short story “The Forbidden” and bears horrifying fruit by transplanting it to inner-city Chicago. Rose turns the infamous Cabrini–Green housing project into a world just as removed, mysterious and steeped in folklore as any backwoods or Old World village, as grad student Virginia Madsen’s investigation into a local boogeyman known as The Candyman (Tony Todd, in a chilling, career-defining performance) plays just as much on our dread of the supernatural as it does on our societal dread of the ghetto. With the help of composer Philip Glass, Rose crafts one of the most frightening and overtly artistic mainstream horror films of the modern era, by turns equally Gothic, romantic and bloodily baroque. Come summon the Candyman with us as he was meant to be summoned: on the big screen! “Sweets to the Sweet…”
Dir. Bernard Rose, 1992, 35mm, 99 min.
The show is at midnight. For theater info or ticket purchases go here.
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CONTEST
As always I am giving away some free tickets (each with a +1) as well as a reserved couch for the first place winner. To enter all you need to do is send an email to wormmiller@gmail.com with CANDYMAN in the subject line and tell me your favorite spooky urban legend. Include your full name. I will only be contacting the winners.
Good hunting!
Our next show will be Clive Barker’s Nightbreed!