The horror double bill is a time-honoured tradition as established and beloved as a screening of It’s A Wonderful Life at Christmas, or throwing plastic spoons during a screening of “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”, The Room.
Some of you will remember the BBC’s much-loved Horror Double Bills: seasons of classic horror movies broadcast during the summer scared the pants of the British public from 1975 – 1983. I don’t- heck, I’m much too young for that. How dare you?- but I have been to many’s a wonderful double-bill of horror (or more than- triple bills, quadruple bills) running deep into the night in The Cameo in Edinburgh, or The Glasgow Film Theatre.
This Hallowe’en at An Lanntair we’re bucking the trend a little by screening a cult horror film with a new release- but we have made our choices very carefully.
Don’t Breathe, Fede Alvarez’s critically-acclaimed new horror film, begins with a group of thieves who break into a blind veteran’s house in the hopes of using the huge settlement he won after his daughter’s death to escape their hum-drum lives. Wes Craven’s absurdly creepy The People Under the Stairs follows a young boy- nick-named Fool- living in poverty who ventures into his landlords’ home planning to steal their rumoured fortune to pay for his mother’s potentially life-saving surgery.
Both Fool and the young thieves in Don’t Breathe get much, much more than they bargained for when they encounter the occupants of the homes they target. Quickly, they find themselves trapped and apparently doomed in their would-be victims’ houses of horror.
Two very similar premises, really, that spin out in incredibly different ways. Don’t Breathe, the first film of the double bill, is dark, tense, and full of dread. The People Under the Stairs is strange and unnerving and the reasons for its status as a cult horror among both fans of Craven’s work and those who aren’t familiar with his films are evident immediately. See them both for the price of a single film on Saturday 29 October and get your spook on!
Get your tickets now – http://lanntair.com/events/event/halloween-double-bill/