Oh hi, it’s October, arguably the best month of the year. It’s still hurricane season (LOL look outside) and, uh, Halloween, which means it’s a horror movie marathon from here on out BBs. OK, so not all the films we’re excited to see this week are spooky, exactly, but all of them are guaranteed to shake you up in some way.

Wolf’s Chalet
Wednesday, Oct. 7, 10 pm at Spectacle: $5 
Any ex-film major and their kin knows a thing or two about the Czech New Wave, from Loves of a Blonde to Daisies and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, filmmakers took advantage of a relative relaxation of the socialist cultural project leading up to the Prague Spring, after which everything went to hell. But, guys, there’s a lot more to Czech Cinema than what went down in the ’60s, promise. Truth, tighter controls yielded more socialist realism than most people can stomach. But while the Communist Party’s control over cinema reigned for a bit longer, Spectacle Theater has plucked out a snippet of the ’80s in which some of those New Wave filmmakers found brand new ways to subvert the Party line, mainly by dabbling in “genre cinema,” e.g. shitty horror films and sci-fi, part of the series Bohemian Delirium: Czech Horror in the ’80s and ’90s. 

Věra Chytilová (Daisies) was blacklisted by the Party for a time, but she managed to make Wolf’s Chalet in 1987, whose major moving parts are teens, the ’80s, a ski retreat, and terrifying snow monsters that, as Spectacle puts it, “assure you’ll never look at a snow man the same way again.”

Additional screenings: Sunday Oct. 11 (7:30 pm), Friday Oct. 23 (7:30 pm), Friday Oct. 30 (10 pm). 

The Fly
Saturday, Oct. 3 and Sunday, Oct. 4, 12 pm at Nitehawk: $11
Classic screams abound in this 1958 horror classic, The Fly. We won’t go into the seriously mind-boggling complexities of what’s sure to be 100-percent real science stuff, instead we’ll just assure you that Vincent Price and his killer mustache are really going for gold in this one. No one does a narrow-eyed, suspicious glance like Mr. Price, no one.

I don’t know about y’all, but the sound of a fly buzzing past makes me think of delicious foodstuffs, and apparently Nitehawk’s on board with this sentiment as well. Get your brunch on between spooks, just be careful not to spill your bloody. That’s sure to elicit some screams.

Narcopolis
Friday, Oct. 2 through Tuesday, Oct. 6 at IFC Center, various times: $14
This film comes from an exotic place called the United Kingdom, and it qualifies as scary because it seems just as likely to be a piece of pro-Drug War propaganda as a legit film. In the not-so-distant dystopian future, all drugs are legalized, safe, and highly regulated, or so it seems. The Big Daddy Pharma Kings are richer than ever and pretty much have an entire police unit at their disposal to ensure they’re the only Narcos in town. Small-time black-market drug dealers are quashed, and for what seems like good reason– their product isn’t guaranteed safe, and can result in overdose and death. So one cop feels like he’s doing the right thing by crushing the little guy and protecting the mega dealers.

But after the cop happens upon a super scary overdose scene, he learns the kingpins have developed a fancy new drug– one they apparently don’t have all the kinks worked out for. Narcopolis might be trying to tell us something: if we legalize weed entirely, we’re doomed to a future as bleak as this one. You’ll never look at your vaporizer the same again.


The Forbidden Room
Wednesday, Oct. 7 through Tuesday, Oct. 20 at Film Forum, various times: $7.50 member, $13 regular 
Blending old-timey film manipulation tactics with new methods of hallucinatory filmmaking, this eye popping, brain exploding feature is not just visually arresting, it’s also a comment on cinema tropes throughout history. Directed by Guy Maddin, who made one of the craziest movies I’ve ever seen, The Saddest Music in the World. Maddin is obsessed with old silent films and has adapted these elements (that used to be commonplace) into modern cinema, making for a really bizarre, disorienting experience of movie watching, to say the least.

My best guess is that The Forbidden Room is loosely about some dudes trapped in a submarine and the aftermath of their escape. Though, narrative isn’t usually what this filmmaker is going for. But one thing’s for sure, Maddin’s films are reliably dense with things you’ve probably never seen or heard before, which makes for a super intense trip. Truth be told, you won’t be needing any drugs for this film.