Programmed October 2023

Pre-Code Horror

Featuring a new introduction by critic Imogen Sara Smith With their startlingly perverse themes, lurid psychosexual undertones, and often-grisly violence, the horror films made in the early 1930s before the enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code still have the power to shock. Unbound by any concessions to family-friendly morality and influenced by the heightened visual style of German expressionism, these sordid tales of mad scientists ( Doctor X , Island of Lost Souls ), sadomasochistic satanists ( The Black Cat ), twisted revenge ( Murders in the Zoo , Freaks ), and supernatural terror ( Svengali , Thirteen Women ) brought primal fear to the screen with a daring creativity and explicitness that wouldn’t be seen in Hollywood again for decades. Highlights include a pair of early Technicolor wonders by Michael Curtiz: Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum .