Scala Forever

Scala Forever

Thundercrack! + talk

Date: Tuesday 20 September 2011

Doors: 6:30pm

Talk: 7pm

Film: 8:30pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Price: £6/£4

Horse Hospital website

Buy tickets

Electric Sheep is very proud to be involved in Scala Forever, the celebration of the legendary Scala cinema organised by the Roxy Bar and Screen taking place across a range of London venues from August 13 to October 2.

In collaboration with Strange Attractor Press, Electric Sheep will present an evening of film and talk on Tuesday 20 September at the Horse Hospital. The event will start with a discussion, hosted by Electric Sheep editor Virginie Sélavy, about the life and times of the Scala with Jane Giles, former Scala film programmer and currently Head of Content at the BFI, horror maestro Kim Newman and Mark Pilkington, publisher of Strange Attractor Press and a regular Scala visitor. This will be followed by a screening of demented horror porno-comedy Thundercrack! (1975, dir Curt Mcdowell, starring and written by George Kuchar).

Doors at 6:30pm, talk at 7pm, film at 8:30pm. Buy tickets

The very exciting Scala Forever programme includes John Waters, Dario Argento, Russ Meyer and Fassbinder nights, a Turkish Grindhouse evening, a Jack Smith programme, a screening of one of our favourite 60s Italian exploitation films The Frightened Woman, and much more! For full details, please go to the Scala Forever website, or find them on Facebook and Twitter.

The Call of the Kosmos: Soviet Science Fiction

Toward Meeting a Dream (USSR 1963)

I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, Friday 15 July, 5-5:30pm, Resonance 104.4 FM

To mark the Kosmos: A Soviet Space Odyssey season at BFI Southbank, Virginie S&#233lavy talks to Russian scholar Sergei Kapterev, from the Institute of Film Art in Moscow, about Soviet science fiction, including the first Russian SF film, Aelita Queen of Mars (1924), the connection between SF cinema and politics, the impact of the space race and the Cold War period, pioneering filmmaker Pavel Klushantsev, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), and Roger Corman’s re-edits of popular Soviet sci-fi films.

This programme coincides with our exploration of Andrei Tarkovsky’s work throughout July.

Sounds of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated

audio As part of the launch of The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology at the Horse Hospital on Tuesday 7 June, DJ Robin the Fog performed a live rescore of Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated (2009), adding a new experimental electronic / musique concr&#232te soundtrack to the animated version of George Romero’s classic zombie film. If you would like to listen to the score while watching the film, it will synch with either the original version of Night of the Living Dead (1968) or the Reanimated (2009) version.

You can also listen to the soundtrack in two parts as a higher quality stream from mixcloud, where there is additional information about the tracks featured in the recording – part 1 / part 2

Additionally, for your listening pleasure, Zo&#235 Baxter has also uploaded the DJ session she performed at the launch party to mixcloud, which includes tracks by Augustus Pablo, Josephine Siao, The Jellybeans and Ella Fitzgerald.

Podcast produced by Alex Fitch

Sci-Fi London: Apocalyptic podcast

The Gerber Syndrome

10th Sci-Fi London Festival

23 April – 2 May 2011

Various venues, London

Sci-Fi London website

To complement our Apocalypse theme this month, you can listen to Alex Fitch’s podcast on the Sci-Fi London website, 3.16 – Apocalypse (cinema) now. In a pair of on-stage interviews recorded at this year’s Sci-Fi London 10 festival, Alex Fitch talks to a couple of filmmakers about their recent takes on the apocalypse in film: Dekker Dreyer, whose film The Arcadian stars Lance Henriksen and Brian Thompson, and mixes the iconography of shamanism with elements of the road movie in a post-apocalyptic setting; and Maxi Dejoie whose film The Gerber Syndrome is an Italian take on 28 Days Later…, using a pseudo-documentary style to follow a member of a biohazard clean-up crew who is scouring the streets looking for the contagious, and is the first overtly political zombie film in a long time. In the latter interview, Alex and Maxi are also joined by Gerber producers Claudio Bronzo and Lorenzo Lotti.

End of the Wicked, End of the Road

Kings of the Road (Axiom)

I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, Friday 17 June, 5-5:30pm, Resonance 104.4 FM

To celebrate the publication of The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, a collection of essays that explores the darker side of cinema, the book’s editor Virginie Sélavy will talk to two of the contributors: Jason Wood will discuss the endings of road movies and Nicola Woodham will talk about End of the Wicked, a Nollywood film about child witches.

Nicola Woodham is a writer and filmmaker who has written broadly on Nigerian evangelist horror films. Jason Wood is the director of programming for Curzon cinemas and the author of several books on cinema, including The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema and 100 Road Movies.

To buy The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology (price £13.99), please go to our publishers’ website, Strange Attractor Press.

Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, which Jason Wood discusses in his article and in the radio show, is available on DVD from Axiom Films.

Electric Sheep Anthology Launch

Night of the Living Dead: REANIMATED

Date: Tuesday 7 June 2011

Doors: 7pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Price: free

Horse Hospital website

We will be celebrating the publication of our first book, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, a collection of previously unpublished essays on the darker side of cinema, on Tuesday 7 June at the Horse Hospital. Please come along to toast the book with us, all welcome!

The event will start off with a panel discussion on apocalyptic cinema at 8pm, featuring writers and illustrators who have contributed to the Electric Sheep anthology, including Electric Sheep assistant editor Alex Fitch, writer and musician Frances Morgan (former publisher of Plan B Magazine), graphic artist and film writer Mark Stafford (Cherubs!) and Jim Harper, author of Flowers from Hell: The Modern Japanese Horror Film.

This will be followed at 9pm by a screening of Night of the Living Dead: REANIMATED (2009) with a live DJ soundtrack by Robin Warren (Resonance FM). NotLD: REANIMATED is an experimental collective reinterpretation of George A. Romero’s classic zombie film by various artists, animators and filmmakers, using mixed media including puppetry, CGI, hand-drawn animation, illustration, acrylics, claymation, etc.

+ DJ sets by Frances Morgan and Zoe Baxter (Lucky Cat, Resonance FM)

Watch the trailer of Night of the Living Dead: REANIMATED:

For more information on the next projects of the people behind NotLD: REANIMATED and open calls for international artists, illustrators and animators please go to the Unseen Horror website and the Facebook page What is the Use of a Book without Pictures.

Secret Societies – part 1

From Hell

audio In connection with the East End Film Festival’s Secret Societies day of screenings, Virginie Sélavy hosts a discussion on Jack the Ripper and the Freemasons in cinema and the links between crime and the occult with guests Mark Pilkington, Strange Attractor Press publisher, and Richard Bancroft, contributor to both Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor.

This programme was first broadcast on Friday 22 April, 5-5:30pm, on Resonance 104.4 FM. Podcast produced by Alex Fitch.

The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology

The End: cover

We are very excited to announce that the first Electric Sheep anthology will be published on 16 May 2011 by Strange Attractor Press. From the gutter to the avant-garde, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology brings together a mind-bendingly eclectic programme of films, authors, artists and directors to create a unique new vision of cinema past, present and future.

Follow Electric Sheep into the darkness and you’ll find Bill Morrison’s chemical ghosts, the bad girls of 50s exploitation films, apocalyptic evangelical cinema, the human centipede, Spanish zombies, Japanese nihilists, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s lost masterpiece Inferno, Ingmar Bergman’s visions of the end and David Lynch’s soundtracks of decay.

Contributors include Jack Sargeant, author of Deathtrippping: The Extreme Underground; Jason Wood, author of The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema; James Rose, author of Beyond Hammer: Contemporary British Horror Cinema; Greg Klymkiw, producer of Guy Maddin’s Careful; Frances Morgan, former editor of Plan B Magazine; Jim Harper, author of Flowers From Hell: The Modern Japanese Horror Film; as well as the Brothers Quay and Peter Whitehead among many others.

To buy the book from Strange Attractor Press, go to the Strange Attractor website.

A must-read for all film lovers and those who like to wander off the beaten cultural track!

Take a look at some sample pages:

Launch party on Tuesday 7 June at the Horse Hospital, London – all welcome to join us and celebrate! More details soon.

Contents
A Feast of Skeletons
Darkness Audible
Final Cut