Andrew Scahill and Electra DuPri feel a duty — a calling, even — to get crafty.
“We’ll have a merit-badge-crafting corner for our first film, ‘Troop Beverly Hills,’ ” said Scahill, an assistant professor in the English department at University of Colorado Denver, of his new film series with drag queen DuPri. “There will be gay survival passes, like I Survived Christmas with My Republican Family, or First Time in Heels, and a competition with prizes.”
The Rainbow Cult series, which launches on Tuesday, Aug. 16, at the Sie FilmCenter, is taking an interactive approach to cult-cinema screenings with props, call-backs, singalongs, costumes and live performances.
Scahill, a nationally regarded scholar of horror films, is joining others in the metro area who are eagerly reviving “eventized” screenings, or interactive film parties, in order to reunite audiences who were scattered by pandemic-era shutdowns of public culture. In Scahill’s case, that’s the LGBTQ community he used to see regularly at the Singalong Bingo nights he programmed at The Triangle.
In-person fellowship is crucial for marginalized communities, he said, since little else in the mainstream is made with them in mind.
“It’s about the collective outpouring of emotion,” he said. “That’s a really powerful thing that extends beyond the screen and into our everyday lives.”
That’s why Scahill reassembled a new community of friends in his backyard for outdoor screenings the last couple of years. For others, it’s driven by the weird, wild genre films that are traded as currency among cinephiles, or by a love for midnight screenings of repertory classics with live music and shadow casts, a la the enduring “Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
“Eventized shows were top-of-mind for us when the first-run calendar was really bleak,” said John Smith, senior programmer for the Austin, Texas-based Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, which counts locations in Littleton, Denver and Westminster. “But we were doing automatic spacing because (of COVID), and getting rid of interactive things … like blowing bubbles and spraying confetti. Even though they’re movie parties, we had to consider practical health and safety concerns, and what we’re making our servers clean up afterward.”
First-run titles have mostly returned to cineplexes, along with audiences. This summer’s box office receipts in the U.S. and Canada are down just 12% compared with the summer before the pandemic, CNBC reported. Between May 1 and July 10, theaters raked in $2.27 billion from tickets, compared with $2.58 billion during the same period in 2019 — a remarkable comeback for an exhibitor industry on the brink of ruin.
But even with the help of movies such as “Thor: Love and Thunder” or “Top Gun: Maverick,” art house and independent theaters are still re-training moviegoers to view them as hangouts. Part of Alamo’s strategy has been persuading people who only see one or two movies per year to come back for things they can’t get anywhere else, Smith said.
That means adding personalized introductions and interviews with the cast of “Lord of the Rings,” for example, or having director Ari Aster’s comments lead a special screening of his visionary horror film “Midsommar.”
“We helped carve a theatrical path around Denver for the Indian epic ‘RRR,’ which we’re really proud of,” said Jake Isgar, a San Francisco-based film programmer for the Alamo who pays special attention to the Denver market. “A lot of experiments are hingeing on Denver, because we’ve found so much success programming genre titles there.”
Isgar cited a Sept. 9 live musical performance by The Invincible Czars, at the Littleton Alamo Drafthouse, to back up the silent horror classic “Nosferatu.” It’s already close to selling out. The Czars also play Fort Collins’ Lyric Cinema the day before, on Sept. 8, as part of its national “Nosferatu” theater tour.
These events require a personal touch, said Keith Garcia, artistic director of Denver Film’s Sie FilmCenter. He likes to immediately break the usual “sit down, hush, lights off, movie on” protocol. Sometimes the audience just needs an introduction, whether live or pre-recorded.
“From there you can add whatever you want: quote-along, sing-along, live music, drag performance, examination for a post-film chat,” Garcia said. “It all starts with being allowed to not feel like you’re in church.”
That feeling has often pervaded movie houses, but its gimmicky flipside can be traced back to cinematic carnival-barker William Castle, who rigged seats with electric charges for his 1959 horror film “The Tingler,” and trash-cinema hero John Waters and his Odorama cards for 1981’s “Polyester” (also riffing on Castle), Garcia said.
“Heck, even Hitchcock eventized ‘Psycho’ by demanding that no one was allowed (in) after showtime,” he said. “People wondered, ‘Well, geez, why? It must be special!’ ”
Garcia and the Sie just finished the 12th year of their Sci-Fi Film Series with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and Metropolitan State University of Denver, which combines screenings of science fiction classics with post-film discussion — both cinematic studies and the real science in the film. It complements long-running, beloved Sie series such as Theresa Mercado’s Scream Screen. (Mercado is also curating and hosting a Secret Film Marathon on Sept. 3 there).
Scahill and DuPri are counting on that legacy for Rainbow Cult. Scahill shortlisted dozens of titles for the series — films constantly watched and shared by his queer friends over the years — and came up with crowd-pleasers such as the 1999 comedy “Drop Dead Gorgeous” (he and DuPri are planning a live pageant for it), plus “Clueless,” “Showgirls,” “Zoolander,” “The Apple,” “Waiting for Guffman” and many more. In October, they’re going the horror route, although they haven’t decided yet on “Carrie,” “The Craft” or “Serial Mom.”
“You could pull up ‘Mean Girls’ or ‘Addams Family Values’ any time at home on the couch,” Scahill said. “Even my students say, ‘Why would want to own a film?’ because everything is available all the time. It’s the live element.”
That element is what continues to set screenings of 1975’s “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” for example, apart from other cult movie nights. Over the last four decades, the campy musical has become exemplary of the way audiences take ownership over texts, with amateur shadow casts acting it out underneath the screen, and audiences freely quoting favorite lines.
“People should feel like they’re catching up at these events,” said the Alamo’s Smith, who’s excited for the return of the theater chain’s Graveyard Shift horror series, which also takes place in Denver. “Because they really are.”
