Capital Celluloid - Day 245: Sunday September 4

Black Sunday (Bava, 1960) & Horror Hospital (Balch, 1973):
Roxy Bar & Screen, Borough, London Bridge, 3pm

This is part of the Scala Forever season, a programme of 111 films and events at 26 venues through to October 2 that will celebrate the wonderful Scala cinema at King's Cross which closed in 1993. Here is an article I wrote in the Guardian on the history of the cinema and the season and here are the details of all the movies and special events on offer, via the Scala Forever website.

The event is organised by the Classic Horror Campaign, a pressure group aiming to bring back regular screenings of horror films to terrestrial television. Here is their Facebook page.

Here is the Time Out review of Black Sunday:

'A classic horror film (from a story by Gogol) involving Barbara Steele as a resurrected witch who was burned to death in a small medieval town and seeks revenge on her persecutors. The exquisitely realised expressionist images of cruelty and sexual suggestion shocked audiences in the early '60s, and occasioned a long-standing ban by the British censor.' David Pirie 

Here is the trailer. 

Here is the Time Out review of Horror Hospital:

'Anticipating the day of the video nasty, Balch - who had collaborated with William Burroughs on Towers Open Fire and The Cut-Ups - here twisted the conventional elements of the horror movie to a new level of grotesquerie. The plot concerns a mad Pavlovian doctor, whose body is a hulk of third-degree burnt tissue, boring holes in young persons' brains in an attempt to master their minds. The object is somehow to persuade beautiful ladies to fuck him, appearances notwithstanding; but despite turning into mindless zombies, they are still resistant to his charms. Hence much frustration vented by scything heads off with a Boadicea chariot of a Rolls-Royce, Cocteau-like biker henchmen given to beating people up, and mutant dwarves chopping skulls with hatchets or burning flesh with cigarettes. All of which takes place in a charming castle masquerading as a health farm. Cliché after cliché is ruthlessly hammed into a telling stomach-gripper: one for sophisticates of undergrowth horror of the Chas Addams variety.' John Du Cane

Here is the trailer.