Bust out your 1920s outfits, give it a spooky twist, and get ready for a unique multidisciplinary evening of films, music, improv and much more!
Saturday, October 26
The Old Fire Hall
Doors @ 7:30pm
Tickets $30
Discover short horror silent films from the early 1900s while kick-ass musicians Andy Slade, and Olivier Clements improvize a live soundtrack and as top notch improv actors make up the dialogue before your eyes.
The amazing Tara Kolla will be outfitting our 1920s horror photobooth with spooky props! We will be serving tasty drinks! You can win prizes from many local businesses including flights from Air North!
Open Pit Theatre has a TON of exciting projects coming down the pipe - including Look Up at Pivot, and our first international tour (details coming soon!!).
We will be presenting excerpts from the following silent films:
THE HOUSE OF GHOSTS (1906)by segundo de chomón
La Maison ensorcelée also known as The Witch House) is a 1906 French trick film directed by Segundo de Chomón. The film features stop-motion animation and is considered one of the earliest cinematic depictions of a haunted house premise. Two men and a woman stop at a small house in the woods. Inside, they experience numerous instances of paranormal activity, including disappearing furniture; a stereotypical ghost; movement of cutlery and food on their own; ball lightning; unexplained tilting of the entire home; and a grotesque being with claw-like fingers that attempts to eat the trio.
THE WOLFMAN (1941) by Curt Siodmak
The title character has had a great deal of influence on Hollywood's depictions of the legend of the werewolf. The film is the second Universal Pictures werewolf film, preceded six years earlier by the less commercially successful Werewolf of London (1935).
After this movie's success, Lon Chaney Jr. would reprise his role as "The Wolf Man" in four sequels, beginning with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943.
THE CABINET OF DR.CALIGARI (1920) BY Robert Wiene
Arguably the first horror film. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, tells the story of an insane hypnotist who uses a somnambulist to commit murders. Themes include irrational authority (preluding the Nazi Party), the destabilized contrast between sanity and insanity, the subjective perception of reality, and the duality of human nature. Features a dark and twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles.
THE MAN WHO LAUGHS (1928) by Paul Leni
An adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name (also wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables). A melodrama, at times even a swashbuckler, but so steeped in Expressionistic gloom that it plays like a horror film. Plot centres around Gwynplaine, the son of an English nobleman who has offended the king. The monarch sentences his father to death and calls upon a surgeon to disfigure the boys face into a permanent grin, “to laugh forever at his fool of a father." His wide and mirthless grin inspired the Joker character in the original Batman comic book series.
THANK YOU to our main event sponsor: Jazz Yukon
And to our Make a Plane Game sponsor: AirNorth
This event is a fundraiser for our mighty theatre company! We've got some REALLY exciting projects coming up and could definately use a hand making them happen.