Capital Celluloid 2012 - Day 250: Fri Sep 7

Death Line (Sherman, 1972): Ritzy Cinema, Brixton 11.10pm
This is one of the highlights of the year (and is also screening on Saturday 8th at 11.10pm). This film is screening as part of Scala Beyond, a six-week season celebrating all forms of cinema exhibition across the UK, from film clubs to film festivals, picture palaces to pop-up venues. You can find more details here at the website.
The event is a Picturehouse Podcast presentation. Here is their Facebook page for tonight's screening and here is their introduction: 'Join Sam Clements and Simon Renshaw from the Picturehouse Podcast for a late-night journey on the London Underground with Gary Sherman's cult horror DEATH LINE (aka RAW MEAT). The boys will be on hand to record a live podcast before the film, and there'll be a heap of prizes to give away throughout the night. DEATH LINE was hailed by Guillermo del Toro as the movie that motivated him to become a filmmaker, and this is a rare chance to see it projected from an original 35mm print onto the big screen.' 

Time Out review:

'One of the great British horror films, Death Line is a classic example of what Hellraiser director Clive Barker calls 'embracing the monstrous'. The film's basic premise is a gruesome one: following a cave-in during the construction of an underground tunnel in 1892, successive generations of plague-ridden cannibals have survived and developed their own subterranean culture. Forced out of hiding by the death of his wife, the sole surviving cannibal begins abducting passengers from Russell Square tube station. The disgust provoked by the corpse-filled underground world inhabited by the cannibal is offset by the tenderness with which he treats his dying wife, and by the unutterable sadness of his lonely plight. The film's great achievement is in eliciting sympathy for a creature whose residual capacity for human feeling amid such terrible degradation is ultimately more moving than horrifying.'

Nigel Floyd

Here is the celebrated long take from this genuine British horror classic.

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