Tuesday, October 31, 2023 at 7:30pm
Peggy Ahwesh's The Scary Movie + Carlos Enrique Taboada's Even the Wind Is Afraid
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
The Scary Movie, Peggy Ahwesh, 1993, 16mm, 8 mins
Even the Wind Is Afraid, Carlos Enrique Taboada, 1968, digital projection, 90 mins
A cult classic of Mexican horror, Even the Wind Is Afraid unfolds amidst the shadowy grounds of an elite girls’ school. One of the students is plagued by vivid nightmares, and she soon finds herself among a small cohort, alone on campus over the holiday break. Despite being watched over by a magnificently stern headmistress, a few of the teens slip away to investigate an abandoned tower nearby, where they encounter a supernatural visitor from the not-too-distant past. Even the Wind Is Afraid would be the first in a popular trilogy of terror by Taboada, films that reinvigorated the genre for Mexican audiences by transposing the superstitions of yesteryear onto contemporary settings. Even the Wind Is Afraid presents a visual environment that is at once Gothic and Pop, where vengeful phantoms and howling storms and all the trappings of nineteenth-century spooky stuff commingle with candy-colored outfits and groovy coiffures.
This evening’s feature is paired with Peggy Ahwesh’s The Scary Movie. The work stars Martina and Sonje, two kids who don monster drag while Ahwesh’s camera creeps around. Tinfoil swords and rubber hands point toward Freudian freakouts; canned haunted-house tracks of screams and maniacal laughter accompany mock-gruesome close-ups of children playing dead. The anarchic potential of the slumber party is here distilled to a potent eight minutes. Sometimes the best way to watch a horror film is to rip it apart at the seams.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.