Classic Halloween at the Castle Cinema

David Cronenberg's disturbing cult thriller returns to theaters for its 30th anniversary in a restored 4K version.

The 90s, a modern city with highway ropes and thousands of cars on the streets. Film producer James Ballard (James Spader) one day inadvertently causes a car accident and meets Helen (Holly Hunter), whose husband dies on the spot. The couple starts a romance with each other. While recovering at the hospital, James meets Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a passionate about dangerous collisions, who recreates legendary crashes from the past, including the fatal accident of James Dean. The characters share a fascination with danger and death, immersing themselves in an underground culture where the line between man, body and technology is blurred.

Cronenberg's groundbreaking, controversial work at the time of its premiere received the Special Jury Prize at Cannes “for courage, bravery and originality”. The Canadian master offered a shocking story about adrenaline-chasing, alienated from everyday life characters, who are excited only by risk, and desire becomes for them a path to self-destruction. The cool, metallic, stylized adaptation of J.G. Ballard's novel is a vision that goes under the skin — and deep in our minds — of modernity, in which we need extreme stimuli to feel anything.

Crash, one of the most important cinematic events of the 1990s, is a relentless source of inspiration for films colliding technology with human tissue and futuristic speculation with the weight of matter, led by Julia Ducournau's Golden Palm Titane. There is no need to fasten your seatbelts - frontal collision guaranteed.

Cast: Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu, Gene Bervoets, Johanna ter Steege, Gwen Eckhaus

A cult thriller. Stanley Kubrick called “The Disappearance” (“Spoorloos”) “the scariest movie I've ever seen.”

Shaking horror and anxiety, “Disappearance” is a great Dutch classic that resembles a cross between “Silence of the Sheep” and “Funny Games”. It starts innocently — with a holiday trip. The Dutch couple Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) and Rex (Gene Bervoets) go to France by car. Along the way, they argue and tease, learn French words. At some point, they stop at the gas station. Saskia goes to the toilet - then disappears. Her disappearance will haunt Rex for the rest of his life. We also quickly meet the kidnapper — he is Raymond (the shocking role of Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), an inconspicuous chemistry teacher. Will Rex ever meet the abuser he gradually becomes obsessed with?

The perfect adaptation of Tim Krabbé's novel “The Golden Egg” is a waking nightmare, a narrative puzzle from which there is no safe way out and a philosophical horror played out mainly in sunny outdoors and bourgeois interiors. The independent, low-budget hit of European cinema has a huge following around the world.

Cast: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Margit Carstensen

West Berlin during the Cold War. Mark and Anna go through a marital crisis caused by the man's prolonged absence and the woman's affair. The woman neglects their common child and, falling into more and more extreme emotional states begins, which make it difficult to get along. Mark tries to find out what is causing his wife's strange behavior and save their relationship. Things get complicated when he meets Helen, who looks like his wife.

Andrzej Żuławski's “Possession” was created after the communist authorities interrupted the realization of “On the Silver Globe”. Awarded at the Cannes International Film Festival, the artist's second French film, despite its worldwide fame, never had official wide distribution in Poland. The case of the author of “The Third Part of the Night” was not isolated. Despite the foreign successes of Polish artists (including Skolimowski's “Fucha”, Andrzej Wajda's “Love in Germany” or Żuławski's “Possession”), the domestic audience could only hear or watch them at individual shows, as the communist authorities wanted to punish artists disloyal to the Republic of Poland. People's Day. In the 1980s, the opportunity to watch “Possessions” was created exclusively by Discussion Film Clubs (also as part of reviews of the director's foreign work). For many, “Possession” is considered a cult film.

“Possession has two sources,” Andrzej Żuławski recalled for Film monthly. “The first is related to my personal life. Almost everything that hit the screen really happened to me. The concoction is only the spy profession of the hero and the fantasy layer. However, the shock of a man who, upon returning home, sees the end of what he truly believed in, is taken from my experiences. Even part of the dialogues is transferred alive from what I remembered. The second source of inspiration was Bergman's “Scenes from Married Life”. It's a smart, penetrating film. However, after leaving the cinema, I felt unsatisfied. I saw the realities, but I lacked synthesis. I am different, I believe in fairy tales.”

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Ted Levine, Scott Glenn

35 years since its premiere. The sheep are still screaming... Young FBI cadet Clarice Starling (in this role the sensational Jodie Foster) is tasked with capturing a serial killer called Buffalo Bill. To this end, she is sent to Dr. Hannibal Lecter (the iconic role of Anthony Hopkins) - a psychopath and cannibal imprisoned in a cell who can help determine the identity of the killer. The relationship between Starling and Lecter deviates from a routine acquaintance and is based on a dangerous psychological game. Lecter analyzes Clarice's traumas, for which he offers clues leading to the capture of Buffalo Bill. It has been 35 years since the release of the film.

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Christopher Eccleston, Fionnula Flanagan

In 1945, in a huge, mist-drenched Victorian house, Grace (Nicole Kidman) waits for the return of her husband from the war and alone raises two children suffering from a rare disease: sunlight can kill them. So the house is governed by iron rules — the curtains remain drawn, and no door can be opened until the previous one has been closed. As three new servants stand on the doorstep, and the children begin to talk about the other inhabitants of the house that no one but them sees, Grace's precision-built order begins to break. Because there's someone else in this house. The only question is, who is the guest here?

Alejandro Amenábar's “Others” is a masterpiece of horror built exclusively from the means that today's cinema has almost given up: silence, fog, candle flame and what is not seen around the corner of the corridor. The Spanish-Chilean director (who not only directed and wrote the film, but also composed the music for it) drew on the tradition of Henry James's In the Ticks of Fear and the 1961 classic Innocents to prove that the most effective horror is the one that does not raise its voice. No jump scares, no blood — instead, the stuffy, oppressive atmosphere of a house cut off from the world and Javier Aguirresarobe's photographs in which darkness is a full-fledged protagonist. The effect? A box office hit, eight Spanish Goya Awards (including for Best Film — for the first time ever for an English-language production) and the status of one of the most important Gothic horror films of the last half century.