Instagram story viewer> @thebeaconsea> Posts

The Beacon Cinema

@thebeaconsea

15.6K

followers

777

following

A movie theater in Columbia City.

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

A new world is at hand. But we need your help. Become a BEACON MEMBER now!

We're calling on you! Break out of the perpetual undeath of the streaming prison and grasp the movie life with your living hands. Unchained from the walls of the cave, bathe in the enlightened glow of reality's true sun, the Beacon projector bulb. From here, eternity emanates as time itself becomes yours to master. All the movies are yours.

But listen, times are getting tough in the ol' Emerald City. Any arts space that offers something more substantial than overpriced commodities is fighting to hold its ground against an expanding corporate hellscape. And we have to face it; we can't keep running the best cinema in the world without your support.

We are humbled by the outpouring of love we have received since opening five years ago and we want to keep coming up with new ways to sustain the enthusiasm that we have built together. We have vibrant aspirations of more ambitious film programs, special guests, live performances, collective publications, community projects, and physical improvements but we can't realize them without your support. We have such a close-knit community here at Beacon already that it wasn't difficult to come up with a suitable solution. So we have started a cult.

We've found the point where the sky and the Earth touch and we are inviting you to join us there. We are now conferring entry to acolytes who will join us in the revelation of a newly divined membership program: THE MYSTIC ORDER OF THE BEACON. A freemasonry of cinephiles, this is your ticket to somewhere better; a rare opening in the firmament; a chance to step through a doorway into a different reality. This is the esoteric, mystical and universal world of the cinema. Only you can help it bloom.

thebeacon.film/membership by @thebeaconsea

467

15

a year ago

RIDER OF THE SKULLS has 79 minutes and doesn't waste a single one of them. A werewolf! A vampire! A witch! Walking skeletons! The Headless Horseman! A corpse resurrected from its coffin to identify its own murderer! Alfredo Salazar’s glorious 1965 horror-western plays like an entire Saturday matinee serial crammed into a single feature, tearing through three supernatural adventures with barely enough time between monsters to reload.

Holding this magnificent pile-up together is a masked charro dressed in black, decorated with skulls and prepared to confront any supernatural menace in Mexico. The werewolf transforms from man to skeleton to wolf. The vampire turns into a wonderfully handmade flying bat. A cemetery witch summons the dead. The Headless Horseman brings skeleton henchmen. Nobody questions any of this. Why would they?

Part western, part monster movie, part masked-avenger serial, RIDER OF THE SKULLS has the handmade creatures, foggy graveyards and irresistible comic-book logic of a movie dreamed up without anyone around to say no.

"A truly sublime artifact. A precious treasure that approaches embodying my platonic ideal of a certain special kind of movie. More than almost any other movie in recent memory, it felt like something that had crawled out of my monstercozy dreams into actual, factual reality. I was transfixed in a kind of awe." - Claire Diane

RIDER OF THE SKULLS screens Thu, Oct 22 at 7:30 PM! by @thebeaconsea

233

1

4 days ago

we HATE it when a grave's dank darkness smothers the screams of a girl 😤

ISLE OF THE DEAD screens
10/18, 2:00
10/19, 4:30
10/21, 4:30

War, plague, superstition, premature burial and Boris Karloff, all trapped together on a tiny Greek island....

Inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s famously ominous painting, ISLE OF THE DEAD finds producer Val Lewton at his most morbid, surrounding a handful of characters with death and slowly closing off every possible escape.

During the Balkan Wars of 1912, Karloff’s severe General Pherides travels to an island cemetery to visit his wife’s grave, only to discover that plague has arrived before him. The island is placed under quarantine, and as its inhabitants begin dying one by one, an elderly woman insists that disease isn’t the only thing preying upon them. She suspects a vorvolaka, a vampiric creature of Greek folklore. Pherides initially dismisses such beliefs as dangerous superstition, but as the deaths mount and isolation takes its toll, his certainty begins to crumble. Karloff gives one of his richest performances as a man accustomed to commanding soldiers who discovers that neither discipline nor reason can command death.

Lewton and director Mark Robson turn the island into a suffocating chamber of graves, shuttered rooms and mounting fear, where plague and superstition seem to spread together. Patient and dread-filled, ISLE OF THE DEAD saves its most terrible visions for the final stretch, when its restrained study of people under pressure gives way to one of the great nightmares of 1940s horror. Even James Agee, otherwise skeptical of the film, called its final half hour “as brutally frightening and gratifying a horror movie as I can remember.”

Few films in Lewton’s extraordinary RKO cycle stare more directly into the grave. by @thebeaconsea

48

0

4 days ago

"Frankenstein... Wolfman... Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will."

Universal spent the 1930s turning Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man into movie stars. Then somebody had the bright idea to start putting them in each other’s movies. This double feature catches the Universal monster rally at its beginning and its glorious peak: first the movie that brought two horror franchises crashing together, then the one that let Abbott and Costello hang out in the wreckage.

A double feature of FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN + ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN screens twice:
Sun, Oct 18 at 5:00 PM
Wed, Oct 21 at 7:30 PM by @thebeaconsea

102

0

6 days ago

Alipato at Muog (2024) Screenings

🗓️ 10/20 7:30 pm and 10/22 4:30 pm

🔗 tickets available via @thebeaconsea

🎥 ABOUT THE FILM:
Farmer-activist Jonas Burgos, son of the late press freedom icon and anti-Marcos publisher Jose Burgos Jr., had just finished a training program on organic farming for members of the Philippine peasant organization Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) on April 28th 2007, when he was brazenly abducted in broad daylight from a crowded mall.

Alipato at Muog (2024), or “Flying Embers and a Fortress”, combines animation and never-before-seen footage of the Burgos family’s relentless search, as filmmaker JL Burgos pieces the stories together to uncover the painful truths about his brother’s disappearance.

🌾 This documentary is a timely examination of the rights abuses that activists and organizers continue to face today in the Philippines under the Marcos Jr. administration, especially as KMP carries out a national month of action in the Philippines for landless farmers annually in October. Join Tanod Lupa at the Beacon for these screenings and discussion on how this relates to our community, as we carry out demands of Justice for the Negros 19 massacre and justice for the rights and welfare of peasant farmers throughout the Philippines. taken in The Beacon Cinema by @thebeaconsea

46

0

6 days ago

132

2

7 days ago

Saturday, 10/17, 10pm!

Jess Franco knows you know these monsters. He just wants to dream about them. So DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN wastes little time on introductions, explanations or even dialogue, and heads straight for the images that make monster movies irresistible. A castle looms through the fog. A coffin opens. Lightning flashes over a laboratory. Howard Vernon’s corpse-faced Dracula rises from the dead. Frankenstein’s Monster stalks the countryside. Beautiful women wander through the night. And just when the dream seems complete, the Wolf Man comes howling into it.

Dennis Price’s Dr. Frankenstein presides over this private Gothic universe, resurrecting and enslaving Dracula, commanding a homemade Monster of his own and sending everyone drifting through castles, crypts and desolate landscapes to Bruno Nicolai’s magnificent score. Franco lets plot dissolve into atmosphere and gives himself over to whatever image fascinates him next, his camera zooming compulsively toward faces, windows, animals and strange details in the landscape. Nothing needs to look realistic to feel uncanny here. A rubber bat is still a rubber bat, but when Franco sends it flapping across a real Gothic landscape, somehow the whole world gets stranger (and better).

This is Jess Franco in concentrated form: cheap and beautiful, crude and hypnotic, made in a hurry by a filmmaker who trusts his own obsessions more than the rules of conventional filmmaking. Part Universal monster rally, part comic book, part lost silent film in delirious color, DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN strips monster cinema down to the things Franco loves most and rearranges them according to the logic of a dream. Frankenstein looks handmade. The bat has a wire. The camera zooms like it’s possessed. The Wolf Man seems to have wandered in from another movie. And the whole thing is beautiful enough to bring tears to your eyes.

“The movie F.W. Murnau might have made if Universal had hired him to direct HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in color." - Tim Lucas

Restoration by @severinfilms by @thebeaconsea

53

0

8 days ago

You gotta BEGOTTEN these tickets!

SCREENING
Sat, Oct 17, 7:00 PM
Mon, Oct 19, 7:30 PM
Tue, Oct 20, 4:30 PM

Easily one of the most singular films in the history of experimental cinema, E. Elias Merhige’s BEGOTTEN is a deeply religious, allegorical nightmare carved onto celluloid, distanced from recognizable place or time and uncovering a visceral, primitivist brutality that may be unparalleled in the history of the moving image.

Despite its near-total lack of cultural reference points, the churning, repetitive, symbolic actions of the entities depicted onscreen—all players from Merhige’s radical Theater of Material troupe—suggest a broad mythology drawn from sources as widespread as ancient Egyptian myth, disparate pagan traditions and Christian allegory. There is no dialogue or traditional narrative, yet BEGOTTEN’s hypnotic aesthetic and the ritualistic actions of its characters—named God Killing Himself, Mother Earth and Son of Earth, Flesh on Bone—are never anything but riveting.

And then there are the images. Merhige’s violently degraded black-and-white photography barely seems photographed at all: figures boil out of fields of grain, bodies dissolve into landscapes, and every frame flickers somewhere between an ancient cave painting, a damaged silent film and a transmission from a civilization that disappeared before history began. Watching BEGOTTEN can feel less like seeing a movie than witnessing some forbidden creation myth that has been dug out of the earth and projected for the first time. Beautiful, repulsive, hypnotic and genuinely otherworldly, it remains one of cinema’s great visions of a world being born and dying before your eyes.

“Evokes Alexander Sokurov and Francis Bacon as well as early David Lynch and a great many splatter films. If you’re looking to be freaked out you shouldn’t pass it up.” - Jonathan Rosenbaum

“One of the ten most important films of modern times.” - Susan Sontag by @thebeaconsea

217

0

11 days ago

Join us for an evening with A.S. Hamrah, "the only critic today" (Jean-Perre Gorin), as he presents a screening of Jacques Rivette's four-hour masterpiece L'AMOUR FOU next Friday, 10/9 at 7pm! Hamrah placed the film at #1 on his last Sight & Sound ballot. Come hear him justify that bold decision!

Confined to decades of oblivion after its original celluloid elements were damaged in a fire, Jacques Rivette’s formally brilliant and psychologically lacerating L’AMOUR FOU — among the most important and legendary films of the French New Wave — has been meticulously restored and will be presented by critic A.S. Hamrah in celebration of his recent collection ALGORITHM OF THE NIGHT!

Arguably the most extreme, radical, and essential of the French auteur’s films, L’AMOUR FOU was Rivette’s first feature to introduce the signature characteristics of his visionary cinema, including a durational gamesmanship and reflexive interplays between film, theatre, art, and life.

Narcissistic theatre director Sebastian (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) is staging and rehearsing a minimalist adaptation of Racine’s Andromaque while an independent television crew (led by André Labarthe) shoots a documentary of the preparations in real time, their handheld 16mm footage cut alongside the rest of the film shot on 35mm. Under extreme pressure, Sebastian’s actor wife Claire (Bulle Ogier, never more luminous) buckles and anxiously abandons her role, only to be replaced by his ex, further spurring her jealousy, isolation, and paranoia.

A portrait of mad love and of unbridled and boundless passion that threatens to eclipse (even annihilate) the self, over four hypnotic, spellbinding hours, L’AMOUR FOU weds astonishing improvisation with raw psychodrama, defying the limits of reality as life and art risk dangerously, desirously subsuming one another.

L'AMOUR FOU
Friday, 10/9, 7pm by @thebeaconsea

114

1

16 days ago

It's Valtober. Four films by the immortal horror producer Val Lewton starting this Sunday!

“A light and supple poetry built from the most exquisite interplay of shadow and light, presence and absence, wonder and abject despair.” - Kent Jones

“Like looking through a keyhole and being shocked by a cold fingertip on your neck.” - Barry Gifford

“Few people in Hollywood show in their work that they know or care half as much about movies or human beings.” - James Agee

“Like flowers preternaturally slow to unfold, they seem to be still in the process of revealing their final form.” - Geoffrey O'Brien

“So dreamlike, the essence of mystery.” - Martin Scorsese

10/4 - THE BODY SNATCHER
10/18 - ISLE OF THE DEAD
10/25 - I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE
11/1 - THE LEOPARD MAN by @thebeaconsea

59

0

17 days ago

Bringing a new meaning to "CULT" cinema...

"The first docu-drama by the coo-coo bananas super kitsch Unarius cult. One of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time." - Scumbalina

The Unarius Brotherhood were on a radical mission from the late-‘70s to the mid-‘80s: to spread their “interdimensional science of life” and the principles of reincarnation to the masses via some of most wildly inventive, waaaaay outside-the-box public access TV programming in America. Their cosmic leader, the exuberant septuagenarian Ruth Norman (aka Archangel Uriel), an advanced clairvoyant with a fondness for glittery dresses, rainbow capes and benevolent aliens, permanently altered the minds of tens of thousands across the country — from late-night stoners to seekers leaving behind their lives in order to move to El Cajon, CA, and join the cause.

As part of their outreach, the Unarians created elaborate psychodramatic “documentaries” for the purpose of spiritual healing: films of Uriel and the students channeling and re-enacting their previous lives together on Earth and other planets, no matter how debauched or outlandish — for spiritual healing. Utilizing otherworldly costumes and makeup, guerilla location-filming techniques, elaborate sets and ingenious no-budget special effects, this ambitious collective produced a legacy of some of the most mind-shattering, oddly uplifting gems of American outsider cinema.

The culmination of their philosophy is THE ARRIVAL, filmed on a shoestring budget with a time-bending plot, dazzling optical SFX, and a rousing synth score. THE ARRIVAL stands in luminous contrast to the overall darker, conspiratorial air of Eighties culture—and Unariuns claim the film serves as a catalyst to send viewers into transcended states of ecstasy.

Along with THE ARRIVAL we’ll be screening a 30-minute mixtape of rarely-seen iconic moments from the Unarius archive!

FRIDAY, 10/2, 10PM!!! by @thebeaconsea

299

3

18 days ago

This October's SHADOWLAND series is devoted to Val Lewton, the most auteurist producer of classic Hollywood.

Although he was hired to produce B-horror pictures, Lewton refused to bank on the cheap thrills and chills of monster schlock. Instead, terror arises out of human actions of decades and centuries past. Ancient artifacts, witchcraft and lineages of criminals are haunted by something even more insidious and profound then they entail in these four Lewton produced masterpieces.

THE BODY SNATCHER - 10/4-7
ISLE OF THE DEAD - 10/18-21
I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE - 10/25-28
THE LEOPARD MAN - 11/1-2 by @thebeaconsea

93

3

19 days ago