Scream at Streams

There’s a chill in the air and a pumpkin on every street corner. It’s time for Halloween. The season of fright has found its way to Film Streams. The art house theater begins its “Film Screams” series this week.

We wanted to do a horror series for October. A bunch of people brought it up and we got really excited about it,” said Rachel Jacobson, Executive Director of Film Streams. “The thing is that I’m terrified of horror films. I have bad nightmares. So it is a huge block in my film knowledge so I don’t know any horror films at all, as far as what’s great or what the classics are. I mean I sort of know just based on research and stuff, but I haven’t seen any of them.”

Enter Andrew Bouska, Film Streams associate manager and resident horror aficionado. “I think I’ve always been into them. It seems that a lot of the films that I liked are influenced by horror films,” said Bouska. “So then I went back. Something that is very fun about horror films is that they are fantasy, monsters and stuff, old Universal horror films.”

Jacobson asked Bouska if he would be interested in curating the series. Bouska put together a list of 50-plus films and from there narrowed the list down based on availability and his own desire for the series.

“I kind of see this series as a defense of the genre,” he said. “I think a lot of times people don’t give it the credit it deserves. I don’t know if credit is the right word, but people seem very dismissive of horror films. Horror films as a genre have always been present and there is a lot of history in there, a lot of firsts.”

Four weeks and eight films mapping the history of horror will fill the Film Streams theater throughout October. Week one launches this Friday with the silent film “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” a film about the deranged doctor and his faithful, sleepwalking wife and their connection to a string of murders in a small German mountain village.

Perhaps the preeminent piece of German expressionist art, “The Cabinet” is thick in symbolism and mise en scene. Produced in 1920, the German film compensated for its lack of a lavish Hollywood budget with lavish style and creativity. Dark, wildly non-realistic, absurdist sets were created, intended as an external representation of the psychological layers of the film.

“I knew from the beginning that I wanted to start with a silent movie and kind of move throughout the decades,” said Bouska. “So I chose ‘Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ because that is probably the most important, the most influential, and not just in a horror genre – noir films, anything Tim Burton – were influenced by ‘Cabinet.’”

The premiere of ‘The Cabinet’ will also feature the musical accompaniment of local artists Orenda and Todd Fink (Azure Ray, the Faint) and Ben Brodin (Mal Madrigal), who have created an original score for the film.

“There are two different recorded scores that have been played with the film, one with a symphony and one with a jazz band. We didn’t even listen to it. We didn’t want to because we didn’t want to be influenced. We started from scratch,” said Orenda Fink of creating the score. “We have the whole living room set up with musical equipment so that we can watch the TV and work. It has been fun. We turn off the lights and light candles.”

Vibraphone, pump organ, trumpet, cello, vocals, recorded and electronic sounds have all been used to create the creepy accompaniment.

“It’s a demented dream world,” Fink said of the film. “But in a weird way it is very fashion forward. It should be fun.”

Along with “The Cabinet,” Film Screams will also premier “The Bride of Frankenstein,” in a first week of horror classics. Week two features two adaptations, “The Innocents,” Truman Capote’s take on the Henry James classic “Turning of the Screw,” and “Les Diaboliques,” the French thriller that preceded “Psycho.”

Week three, Bouska describes as “horror movies for people who don’t like horror movies.” “The Raven,” the campy Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Peter Laurie romp and the John Landis directed “American Werewolf in Paris” are the viewing selections. The series ends with week four, which Bouska calls a hodge podge. “Eyes Without a Face” and “Evil Dead II” are on the roster.

“I think Andrew did a fabulous job of curating and he did a great job of doing a mix of different a really wide variety of visions of what a horror movie is,” said Jacobson. “Its and interesting representation of the history of horror films the way it worked out.”