After an impressive debut in 2016, the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival is back with more venues and a roster that looks just as intriguing. The event kicks off with a screening and after party at the Alamo Drafthouse Thursday, October 12 and closes with the queer-themed The Book of Birdie at the Wythe Hotel on Sunday, October 15.
There are four LGBT interest features on this year's program. In Rift, ex-boyfriends reconnect at a remote outpost but realize they’re not alone; Icelandic director Erlingur Thoroddsen premiered his massively entertaining Child Eater, featuring a Black gay cop, at last year's festival. Elizabeth E. Schuch's Book of Birdie features an all-female cast and a bonkers premise: a teenager sent to a convent finds a growing obsession with blood and a lesbian love affair. (Did I mention Schuch did the storyboards for Wonder Woman?) Women loving women also figure in 1971's French shocker The Shiver of the Vampires, which boasts sexy Sapphic bloodsuckers in a newly restored print. Finally, a retired therapist and her patient engage in an erotically charged game of cat and mouse in Mexican film Veronica, part of the festival programming sub-section "Fear in Focus: Mexico," which also includes the buzzy found footage chiller 1974 and the crazy-sounding anthology Mexico Barbaro II.
Also noteworthy this year: the outbreak-in-an-office bloodbath Mayhem, starring The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun; "Drunk Ed: Final Girls," a rousing roundtable on the genre's Strong Female Characters, i.e., Scream’s Sidney Prescott and Halloween's Jamie Lee Curtis; and "The Time Has Come to Tell the Tale: Peter Straub in Conversation with Douglas E. Winter." The whole program is the perfect kick-off to the Halloween season.
The Brooklyn Horror Film Festival runs at various venues and times; $13–18. Visit the festival website for more details.