Preview: Fantastic Films Weekend, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, Bradford
This time it really is grim up North
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Your support makes all the difference.If you're the kind of person who enjoys watching films called Horror Express or The House that Dripped Blood then you should be planning a trip to Bradford. The movies in question, about a zombie-infested train careering across Russia and a malevolent haunted house (both starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee), will be screened as part of the city's fifth Fantastic Films Weekend.
This annual festival is devoted to horror, science-fiction and fantasy cinema, and this year includes a rare screening of the Italian horror film Strip Nude For Your Killer. "The title says it all," says the festival director, Tony Earnshaw. "It probably hasn't been seen on a UK cinema screen for 30 years."
The stock of films in the NMPFT's vaults is continually being added to, and wherever possible the classics are shown in new prints. Among the films on offer are the 1959 version of The Hound of The Baskervilles, also with Cushing and Lee; White Angel, a British serial-killer movie from 1993; and FW Murnau's 1922 silent classic Nosferatu.
The film-makers Robin Hardy, director of The Wicker Man, and Robert Fuest, director of The Abominable Dr Phibes, will be turning up to talk about their careers. According to Earnshaw, "Hardy may be best known for one film, but he doesn't tire of talking about it!"
The director's lesser-known The Fantasist, the story of an Irish woman who becomes the target for a serial killer, gets a screening, as does Fuest's sci-fi movie The Final Programme (about the search for a microfilm design containing the blueprint for the perfect human being), and his And Soon the Darknessabout two girls on a sinister cycling holiday in France).
The festival opens with Demi Moore's new film, Half Light. "It is a creepy, supernatural chiller set in the wilds of Scotland," says Earnshaw, "about a grieving mother who begins to receive messages from her dead son."
16 to 18 June (0870 701 0200; www.nmpft.org.uk/fantastic)
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