Subversives Drive-In Double Feature: The Love Witch and The Slumber Party Massacre

Join us at the West Wind Drive-in for a throwback evening of subversive cult horror! Recreating the drive-in movie experience from the ground up, the show will begin with the 2016 retro feminist horror film The Love Witch, followed by the iconic 1982 slasher The Slumber Party Massacre.

Combining the style of Italian 1960’s erotic thrillers with overheated Technicolor melodrama, The Love Witch is both a sumptuous retro treat for the senses and an incisive, tongue-in-cheek subversion of the uses of sexualized female bodies onscreen. Written and directed by Anna Biller, The Love Witch follows Elaine (Samantha Robinson), a seductive young witch looking for love who leaves a trail of hapless male victims in her wake. As she’s doggedly pursued by homicide detective Griff (Gian Keys), Elaine’s ever expanding web of love spells and deceit threatens to entangle and destroy them both.

Written by feminist author and activist Rita Mae Brown and directed by Amy Holden Jones (Mystic Pizza), The Slumber Party Massacre is a rare gem: an iconic 1980’s slasher that slyly subverts the genre while also whole-heartedly indulging it, delivering thrills, chills, and gory kills. Two years before A Nightmare on Elm Street ushered in the era of slasher horror punctuated with humorous one-liners from the wisecracking killer, The Slumber Party Massacre delivered an original mix of horror and comedy.

This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center, KCSB, and Magic Lantern Films.

Subversives

Throughout film history and across the globe, filmmakers have resisted social conventions and attracted the ire of governments and censorship boards. The Carsey-Wolf Center’s fall 2020 and winter 2021 screening series will showcase films considered politically, socially, culturally, and ideologically subversive. From mischievous caricatures to biting social critiques, the films in this series invite discussion of the efficacy of subversion and the historical contexts that have rendered these works subversive in the first place.