01.11.24, 20:30, Night of the Horror, Infestation

With a thousand eyes and countless legs, a new Night of the Horror crawls out of its slimy egg sac. This year, we wriggle into a coldly delineated straitjacket with the theme Infestation. For this triple bill around nightmares in small corners, we embrace the disgusting world of arthropods and gastropods (or insects, spiders and other dirty friends for those afraid of syllables). Aside from a resurgence of domestic horror, we bring mostly phobia fodder that crosses the artificial boundaries between the human body and the natural world with grotesque verve.

20:30 The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986, USA & Canada, 96', 35mm)
English spoken, Dutch-French subtitled

We start with the queen bee among insect films, David Cronenberg's The Fly. In this body horror transformation trip, Cronenberg corrupts the physical perfection of a young Jeff Goldblum with the DNA of a weekday housefly. Slightly based on Die Verwandlung (1915), the film is Kafka on crack, but also an existential fever dream that detunes both viscera and grey matter.

22:30 Vermines (Sébastien Vanicek, 2023, France & USA, 106')
French spoken, Dutch subtitled

Following the chain of nature, we next snare you in the web of Vermines. In this French-made action-horror hit, an apartment complex in the banlieues is besieged by a race of rapidly reproducing monster spiders. Faced with this itchy evil, the local residents end up in a claustrophobic bloodbath where their intimate knowledge of the building means their only chance of survival.

00:30 Slugs (Juan Piquer Simón, 1988, Spain, 92')
English spoken, not subtitled

Finally, we close with a masterpiece of slow cinema. Slugs shows the most unhurried massacre in film history in which the stampede of mutant killer slugs devours a village at their own pace. Part degoutant, part hilarious, this mollusc-rich whirlwind offers midnight mania of the highest order. No eye socket is safe from the sinister slime trails Slugs leaves on the subconscious.

This evening will be introduced by KASKcinema programmer and happy arachnophobe Lennart Soberon.