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The Machine That Kills Bad People:
Messiah of Evil + A Field Guide to the Ferns
Institute of Contemporary Arts
Messiah of Evil, Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, USA 1974, 90 min.

A horror double bill for Halloween.

A woman arrives in a sleepy seaside town after receiving unsettling letters from her father, only to discover that the town is under the influence of a strange cult that weeps tears of blood and hungers for human flesh. The first feature by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, the husband-and-wife team that also wrote American Graffiti with George Lucas, Messiah of Evil is an unsung classic of 1970s American horror which has achieved cult-like status since it was first released in 1974 – and then re-released under a variety of titles including Dead People, Night of the Damned, Return of the Living Dead, and Revenge of the Screaming Dead.

Basma Alsharif’s “horror nature film” A Field Guide to the Ferns blurs apathy and violence. Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust is revived deep in the New Hampshire woods whilst bombs fall over Gaza. “Primitive savagery meets the brutality of the modern world in Ruggero Deodato’s timeless slice of visceral horror” (Basma Alsharif).

With a newly commissioned text by artist and filmmaker Morgan Fisher, who was an editor and performer in Messiah of Evil.
Programme
A Field Guide to the Ferns, Basma Alsharif, USA / Palestine 2015, 11 min.
Messiah of Evil, Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, USA 1974, 90 min.

The Machine That Kills Bad People is, of course, the cinema – a medium that is so often and so visibly in service of a crushing status quo but which, in the right hands, is a fatal instrument of beauty, contestation, wonder, politics, poetry, new visions, testimonies, histories, dreams. It is also a film club devoted to showing work – ‘mainstream’ and experimental, known and unknown, historical and contemporary – that takes up this task. The group borrowed their name from the Roberto Rossellini film of the same title, and find inspiration in the eclectic juxtapositions of Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking New York film society Cinema 16.

The Machine That Kills Bad People is held bi-monthly in the ICA Cinema and is programmed by Erika Balsom, Beatrice Gibson, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Ben Rivers. 
 
06:50 pm
Wed, 06 Nov 2024
Cinema 1
Ticket information
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Cinema 1
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