A series recreating the matinees of yesteryear, with weekly action-packed movie serial episodes plus classic (but secret) features. All on 16mm film!

This year our series is compressed into a single month, offering up a buffet sampler of serial thrills and matinee fun. We call it the To-Be-Continued Edition.

Each week: a single episode from a different serial, each in a different genre. Plus, a secret feature in the same genre as that week’s serial episode.

Not one of the serial episodes has ever been shown in the 17 years of the series! From opening recap to astounding cliffhanger, you’ll plunge headlong into a thrilling adventure-in-progress, dodging punches and explosions just like the on-screen heroes!

The features are all A-list classics, not to be missed! Superhero action, exotic adventure, western drama, and alien invasions await you!

• Jan. 4: Superheroes with Captain America (1944), plus ???
• Jan. 11: Adventures with Darkest Africa (1936), plus ???
• Jan. 18: Westerns with The Devil Horse (1932), plus ???
• Jan. 25: Sci-Fi Invasions with The Purple Monster Strikes (1945), plus ???

Second show added by popular demand!

Cellist Lori Goldston performs an original live score for Carl Dreyer’s 1932 uncanny masterpiece, presented on 16mm film.

One of cinema’s most poetic nightmares, Vampyr is a waking dream of hauntingly beautiful and unsettling imagery. A drifter arrives at a small village inn, discovering a family beset by mysterious forces, living shadows, and a malevolent old woman. Reality and nightmare blur as vampiric dread stalks the village, the family, and the drifter himself.

A critical and box office failure that derailed Dreyer’s career for a decade, today it is hailed as a unique and influential treasure, beloved by directors like Del Toro, Tarkovsky, and Polansky.

Classically trained and rigorously de-trained, semi-feral spirit Lori Goldston is a cellist, composer, improvisor, producer, writer, and teacher. Her voice as a cellist is full, textured, committed, and original. A relentless inquirer, her work drifts freely across borders that separate genre, discipline, time, and geography.

“Vampyr is as close as you get to poetry in film. It’s truly a meditation on life and death and the beyond.” Guillermo del Toro

“A triumph of the irrational, Dreyer’s eerie memento mori never allows either protagonist or viewer fully to wake up from its surreal nightmare.” Anton Bitel, Channel 4 (UK)

“This horror classic is an original experimental masterpiece… Some of the most expressive horror films can be traced back to Dreyer’s oneiric chiller.” Glenn Erickson, TrailersFromHell.com

“A genius of a both diabolical and mysterious kind bursts forth in these muted, oppressive images — as the juice seeps from an overripe fruit.” Marcel Carné

Rock Hudson is a revelation in this sinister, science-fiction-inflected dispatch from the fractured 1960s. Seconds, directed by John Frankenheimer, concerns a middle-aged banker who, dissatisfied with his suburban existence, elects to undergo a strange and elaborate procedure that will grant him a new life. Starting over in America, however, is not as easy as it sounds. This paranoiac symphony of canted camera angles (courtesy of famed cinematographer James Wong Howe), fragmented editing, and layered sound design is a remarkably risk-taking Hollywood film that ranks high on the list of its legendary director’s achievements.

Please note: This is the original US theatrical version from 1966, which is seven minutes shorter than the modern version widely available in digital formats. Despite the shorter runtime, we ultimately decided that seeing the movie projected via a rare 16mm print would make for a more unique viewing experience, and we believe this format serves to enhance Howe’s dreamlike black-and-white photography.

Part of the Grand Illusion Cinema’s Farewell to 1403 series.

“At its best, it is brilliant and combines sophisticated horror with intellectual excitement and all kinds of speculations about the American cult of success and pursuit of happiness.” Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard

“John Frankenheimer’s Seconds will linger a lot longer than the title suggests in the mind of anyone who chooses to watch it. In fact, it might be one of the most haunting American films to come out of the 1960s, or any decade for that matter.” Wael Khairy, RogerEbert.com