Halloween night film marathon – Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art

As part of Every Film is a Ghost Story film review, we invite you to a Halloween night film marathon. Although ghosts are a natural and probably the most common theme of horror cinema, they will not star in the presented films. Those stories are not about ghosts, but they are very much “ghostological”. The spectres here are the media themselves, such as VHS, which – though seemingly dead – cannot rest in peace and return with an aura of nostalgia for times when everything seemed more carefree.

• directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, UK 2021, 84’
  • Prano Bailey-Bond's debut opened the Midnight section of this year's Sundance Film Festival and, like Hereditary, The Witch, It Follows or The Babadook previous years, it was hailed by critics as the discovery of the year. Like Ari Aster or Robert Eggers, Prano Bailey-Bond balances fiction, reality and film genres, skilfully combining horror and psychological thriller with elements of a dark fairy tale. Fascinated by the phenomenon of video nasties, the director takes us into the peculiar world of the VHS era, where reality blends with the visions of a mind falling into madness. The author of the set design, which visually enraptured both viewers and critics, is Paulina Rzeszowska from Poland, previously nominated for a British Independent Film Award for her work on Saint Maud.
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• directed by Steven Kostanski, Canada 2020, 95'
  • Have you ever wondered what E.T. would be like if we replaced the friendly alien with a raging muscle man eager to destroy humanity, and the touching bits with hectolitres of blood? No? Neither have we, but we still have the answer.
    • Psycho Goreman is a 90s-spirited love letter to practical special effects, bloodbaths and ultimate cinematic insanity. Director Steven Kostanski (The Void) has let his imagination run wild and created the film we all wanted to see as kids: a bloody, vulgar and utterly unhinged story of an alien driven by lust of destruction, who arrives on Earth and falls into the hands of a little (but equally nasty!) girl.
  • Psycho Goreman will also be the first film to be officially released on videotape in Poland in twenty years.
• [Grzegorz Fortuna]