PSYCHO

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

(1960) “Mother’s not quite herself today.” After trysting with her married lover, Janet Leigh embezzles 40 grand and heads South of the Border, but stops for a rest at taxidermy buff Anthony Perkins’ Bates Motel, where guests check in, but… Hitchcock’s legendary, blackly comic shocker (author Robert Bloch’s first ambition was to be a comedian) was shot fast and cheap by the regular crew of his TV series, after original releasing studio Paramount – weary of this hot potato – graciously allowed him to finance it himself. In the wake of its path-breaking promotion (no one was allowed in the theatre once the picture began and viewers were cautioned not to reveal the ending), Psycho packed theatres with white-faced patrons, vaulted its title into the non-Freudian mainstream, turned comfy shower stalls into places of terror, and sent Hitchcock chortling all the way to the bank. By virtually inventing the modern horror film – aided by Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking all-strings score – the Master more than fulfilled his stated 1947 ambition: “I aim to provide the public with beneficial shocks.” DCP. Approx. 109 mins.
12:30, 4:50, 9:15

“NOT ONLY HITCHCOCK’S GREATEST FILM: the most intelligent and disturbing horror film ever made.”
– Peter Cowie

“HITCHCOCK’S BEST FILM! A MASTERPIECE BY ANY STANDARD!”
– Geoff Andrew, Time Out (London)

“Hitchcock went after the youthful horror film audience with a vengeance. Everything from the titillating opening to the notorious slashing shocks and reversals made the film a rite-of-passage smash. It’s a nightmare crystallization of the petit-bourgeois side of Hitchcock’s sensibility. No improper thought goes unpunished.”
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker

“Should be seen at least three times by any discerning filmgoer: the first time for the sheer terror of the experience; the second time for the macabre comedy inherent in the conception of the film; the third for all the hidden meanings and symbols lurking beneath the first American since Touch of Evil to stand in the same creative rank as the great European films.”
– Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice

“Where would we be without Psycho? Fifty years on and Hitch’s delicious nightmare still has much to answer for. It a blazed a bloody trail for the much-loved slasher cycle…it dared to suggest that your star didn’t need to surface from an ordeal smelling of roses (or, indeed, at all.) It combined a knife, a scream, a melon, some chocolate sauce, Herrmann’s greatest score and more than 70 edits to push the envelope of screen violence. It offers perfect case studies of suspense, paranoia and montage for lazy film studies tutors. And, of course, it was the first movie to show a toilet flushing, so we might also credit it with spawning the entire gross-out genre. Pyscho: we salute you.”
– David Jenkins, Time Out (London)

REPULSION

Directed by Roman Polanski
Starring Catherine Deneuve

(1965) When her sister and her sleazy boyfriend leave repressed Belgian ex-pat manicurist Catherine Deneuve alone in their London apartment, strange things start to happen. Barricading herself indoors after an abusive phone call, she catches someone’s reflection in a mirrored door – then the walls tear open, grabbing hands reaching through them, and flies gather in the wake of her would-be boyfriend and buttinsky landlord’s unwanted intrusions. Polanski’s horror classic – and first English-language picture – is that rarity: a portrait of the growth of insanity from inside, sans long-winded Freudian explanations. Deneuve, straight from the slightly more cheerful The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, is blood-curdlingly believable as the repelled-by-sex heroine, the projection of her nightmares onto the white walls of her lair a brilliant metaphor for cinema itseld. With a subtly unsettling Chico Hamilton jazz score, stark b&w cinematography by Gilbert Taylor (Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day’s Night, Star Wars, etc., etc.) and a wordless final shot guaranteed to haunt, Repulsion is an all-too-little seen “masterpiece, with something repulsive for everyone” (David Shipman). 35mm. Approx. 106 mins.  
2:40, 7:00

“Gets scarier after you leave the theatre and discover how much it’s gotten under your skin.”
– Amy Taubin, The Village Voice

“Excruciatingly tense and frightening…If you’re too scared to look you can still hear the slashing sounds.”
– Pauline Kael

“A chic, creepy thriller. The ultimate in arthouse Grand Guignol.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice