CITY’S FRIGHT NIGHTS COME ALIVE
There’s a multitude of Halloween screenings across the city, including many showings of Scream for its 20th anniversary
Halloween scares: For some, the thought of hundreds of superheroes, princesses and oversized Shopkins ringing your doorbell demanding tiny chocolate bars all night is scary enough. Others turn to the city’s abundance of Halloween screenings for chills and thrills.
The Royal lives large with a Laser Blast presentation of kiddie-horror TV and movie faves (Friday), Phan
tom of the Paradise (Saturday), Beetlejuice (Sunday) and the original 1963 version of The Haunting (Monday).
Meanwhile, audience participation levels at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema may be at an all-time high thanks to a quote-along screening of
Scream (Friday) — celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, which explains its prevalence this week — and the Toronto Shadow Cast’s trio of late-night renditions of The Rocky
Horror Picture Show ( Friday, Saturday and Monday).
The Carlton opts for a ghoulish double bill of Hobgoblins and Ponty
pool on Friday and the more Tiger Beat-ready combo of Idle Hands and
The Faculty on Monday. Along with a run for Scream (Friday-Monday), Cineplex Cinemas Yonge-Dundas has the National Theatre’s London production of Frankenstein directed by Danny Boyle. You even get your choice of leading man in monster makeup — the version with Benedict Cumberbatch as the Creature runs Friday to Monday, while Jonny Lee Miller gets his chance on Wednesday. Other participating Cineplex locations include Canada Square and Empress Walk. Still not enough scares for you?
Scream and Suspiria also play the Free Friday Films at Innis Town Hall on Friday, Bela Lugosi gets busy in White
Zombie at the Revue on Monday, and the Fox has The Exorcist and The Thing on Monday. TIFF Bell Lightbox is surprisingly light on spooks, but the screening of The Bitter Tears of Petra
von Kant (Saturday) is the place to be for anyone brave enough to dress up as Rainer Werner Fassbinder this year. Author: The J.T. LeRoy Story: Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were few American writers as hot as J.T. LeRoy, an ambiguously gendered young West Virginian who grew up in poor and nightmarishly abusive circumstances, but whose vivid, semi-autobiographical writings attracted celebrity admirers like Bono, Courtney Love and Gus Van Sant. Trouble was, J.T. didn’t actually exist — instead, J.T. was an “avatar” created by a woman named Laura Albert, who enlisted her sister-in-law to portray the shadowy author in public. Though the story got trumped up as a literary hoax when reporters revealed the ruse in 2005, a riveting new documentary delves into the murkier matters behind the strangerthan-fiction saga while taking a mostly sympathetic view of Albert, the film’s primary interview subject. Now a writer in San Francisco who publishes under her own name, Albert will do Q & As after the screenings of Author: The J.T. LeRoy
Story on Wednesday and Thursday at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema for Doc Soup.
Little Sister at MDFF: Brooklynbased filmmaker Zach Clark earned some love at the SXSW fest for Little
Sister, a scruffy but endearing comedy that makes its Toronto premiere at the Royal thanks to the indie-cinema boosters at MDFF. Addison Timlin plays a former goth turned trainee nun who returns home to North Carolina, where she contends with some formidable emotional baggage with Ally Sheedy as her mentally unstable mom. That the film’s digressions include a musical number set to a song by GWAR is just one reason to see Clark’s critical darling, which plays Wednesday.
In Brief:
Director Michael Ostroff presents his Emily Carr doc Winds of Heaven at the Revue’s Extraordinary Women series Sunday.
A Hot Docs audience prize winner that just won best feature doc at imagineNATIVE, Angry Inuk plays the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema Friday to Thursday.
Cinefranco continues with a human-rights-and-identity-themed and Francophone-friendly slate at Alliance Francaise until Nov. 1.
The program includes an All Hallows’ Eve free screening of the Quebecois period thriller Wild Run: The Legend.
Mel Brooks and Sarah Silverman talk about the thorny combination of humour and the Holocaust in The Last
Laugh, which plays the TJFF’s Chai Tea and a Movie at Cineplex Cinemas Empress Walk on Sunday.
A new doc about the 2112 trio’s latest and possibly final tour, Rush:
Time Stand Still plays Cineplex locations on Thursday.