Running until September 29 at pubs, parks, pop-ups and actual picture houses, the Scala Beyond fringe film season "celebrating all forms of cinema exhibition across the UK" continues at London’s Roxy Bar & Screen this evening with a double bill of dark, homegrown magic realism hosted by Savage Cinema. The programme starts at 7pm with 1984’s cult classic The Company Of Wolves, helmed by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Butcher Boy) and adapted from her own werewolf short stories by the great Angela Carter (stayed tuned for a full tQ appreciation of the late writer’s work). Rendering the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale as a gothic set of narratives about female sexual awakening, it’s a vividly realised coming-of-age horror with a fine cast (including Sarah Patterson, Angela Lansbury, David Warner, Stephen Rea, Danielle Dax and an uncredited Terence Stamp) plus some potent lycanthropic effects.
That’s followed by a rare big screen outing for Paperhouse, the 1988 feature debut of director Bernard Rose, who went on to make Candyman. Based on the fifties children’s novel Marianne Dreams, this imaginative fantasy stars Charlotte Burke as a sickly 11-year-old who’s able to enter while asleep her drawing of the titular abode, and interact with the characters she’s sketched there. Needless to say, her dream world soon turns nightmarish. Tickets for the Savage Cinema event are a mere £5 and be purchased from here.
