Obscene Beauty

Blood. Gore. Mutilation. Art. This weekend, new film series Sunday Bloody Cinema will be accentuating the creativity behind taboo films. For curator Lindsey Alloway, "This is not a horror series."

That's why, among terror classics like Cannibal Holocaust, he'll be showing more cerebral but equally disturbing movies such as Ken Park, Salo, and The Man Behind the Sun later in the year. He said, "These films are obviously very taboo, and I think a lot of times the art in these films gets overlooked because of their violent nature."

The origin of Sunday Bloody Cinema was simple: Alloway and his filmmaker friends had been fans of transgressive cinema for years. "When I was eight years old, my grandmother would rent me a different Nightmare on Elm Street every week. Other kids were watching Superman, I was watching Freddy Krueger." Recently, they had bought a projector for his house. "We were going to start having friends over, and then we decided to share that experience."

The series starts this Sunday, Sept. 7, at Red 7 with a double bill of two of the most unnerving creations of the French Extremity movement: 2008 Catholic depravity Martyrs and 2007's groundbreaking maternity shocker À L'Intérieur, known in America as Inside. While Inside is more famous, Alloway said, "Martyrs, in my opinion, is the greatest horror movie that has come out in the last 10 years plus. The way the director was able to combine a monster movie, a slasher film, and a psychological horror is amazing."

Alloway already has the October atrocity lined up: The beyond-disturbing Teutonic necrophiliac grotesquerie of both Nekromantik films. He even knows how it will eventually end: With a double bill of the original I Spit on Your Grave and the infamous A Serbian Film.

Since much of what he is screening is underground, part of the challenge has been finding the films. That's less about format, and more about finding the most complete edit of the movie possible. I Spit on Your Grave was pretty easy, because his mother had bought him a VHS copy when it came out ("Thanks, mom!" he said). But while Cannibal Holocaust is widely available, it's often in heavily edited versions. As for something as extreme as A Serbian Film, he said, "I was only able to read about it, and the only way you could get to see it was almost dubbed with 'screener version' written across it and an X in the corner." Finally, after lots of hunting and comparing run times from Ebay vendors against the Wikipedia page, he found an uncut version. "If you want to know if you have the real one, it comes in a CD jewel case taped to a piece of cardboard. Could it be any better?"

Some of what he is showing has an almost mythical quality, like the legendary Broken film by Nine Inch Nails. Alloway admitted that was the hardest item to find uncut and in high quality. "I'm 32, and I've known about it since I was 14," he said. "It was made around 1992, Trent Reznor has never even admitted that the movie exists. Everybody looked at it and said, 'No, there's no way this is coming out.'" The only way anyone saw it was by tape trading, and even then the quality was so poor as to be unwatchable. Finally, Reznor gave four friends copies of the original, each with different drop-outs. "Apparently one of those four people has put it together so you can finally see it in the quality that it was originally shot."

For Alloway, that's the real point of this all: To show these shunned acts of creation in their fullest form possible, so finally they can be appreciated for more than just shock value. By holding these public screenings, he really hopes to trigger discussion and appreciation of this outsider art. "I like it when people just do what they want to do. I think a lot of these films carry this kind of integrity to it."

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Sunday Bloody Cinema begins Sept. 7, Red 7, 611 E. Seventh. Doors 8pm, admission free, 18+ only. More info on our listings page.