Our first themed season, Grindhouse, debuted in 2023 as a celebration of classic 1970s-era grindhouse cinema.

All aspects of the Marathon presentation and format for this season were carefully crafted to reflect the aesthetic, tone, and ambience of the grindhouse experience.

Concept

Presentation

Schedule

Splatterhouse Spectacular

History

Infamous for primarily screening low-budget horror, splatter, and exploitation films aimed towards an adult audience, the “grindhouses” of the 1970s were viewed by many as a cheap, lowbrow alternative to mainstream Hollywood. Named after the “grind policy” of film programming, which involved constantly screening films all day at cut-rate ticket prices, these theaters churned out screenings of poor-quality (and some would say “low artistic merit”) films back-to-back-to-back all day, print quality be damned.

Over time, grindhouses began to be associated with “lower-class” audiences and developed a stereotype as disreputable places. Those willing to overlook this stereotype, along with the low budgets and poor print quality, would discover a unique niche of cinema filled with films that push the boundaries of conventional storytelling, bring awareness to taboo subjects, and celebrate an excess of style.

I Spit on Your Grave, Dir. Meir Zarchi, 1978

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Dir. Tobe Hooper, 1974

Dawn of the Dead, Dir. George A. Romero, 1978

Aesthetic

As grindhouse developed into a genre of cinema all its own, grindhouse films also developed a unique aesthetic that goes beyond just having a overused & damaged print. These films commonly feature bright & garish colors, over-the-top practical effects and stunts, a frenetic editing style, and exaggerated sound effects all coming together on an absolutely filthy print to present audiences with a uniquely raw, gritty, and often fun-as-hell cinematic experience.

Additionally, the low budgets for these films meant that filmmakers had to get extremely creative in order to achieve their vision. This resourcefulness and sheer passion for filmmaking often carries over into the final product, infusing it with a sense of authenticity and charm; for these reasons, many grindhouse films proudly wear their low budgets as a badge of honor.

The idea to build each season of the Marathon around a single theme, starting with Grindhouse, evolved quickly into an entire overhaul of the presentation format; namely that it never really had a standard format to begin with. Or, well, any organization at all really; we were just doing this for fun by ourselves in a living room every October.

While the Marathon itself was inspired by 35mm-only repertory theaters such as the New Beverly Cinema and the Vista Theater, we really didn’t want to just copy their formats & show styles and call it a day. Frankly put, that wouldn’t be creatively fulfilling or any fun at all. As repertory theaters are often popular due, in no small part, to the nostalgia they can conjure of a movie-going experience long since past, we decided that was the direction we wanted to go when building the new format.

Given that plenty of theaters had the 1970s and 1980s cinema vibes covered (and the general age range of all us spooky dorks) we decided tap into our own nostalgia and model the new presentation format after the experience of seeing a movie in the 1990s and 2000s at the sunsetting of the 35mm era.

Preshow

Shorts

Ads & Trailers

Bumpers

Feature

Preshow

The Preshow was honestly the part of the Marathon that got the biggest rework with Grindhouse. First, the Countdown to show start and the Preshow got combined into one piece. No idea why we didn’t just do that in the first place, but hey, live and learn. Additionally, we trimmed the length of this new Preshow down to about 15-20 minutes.

Thanks to starting planning for the season far, far earlier than prior years we also had time to craft a unique, tailor-made Preshow for each night inspired by their respective aesthetics.

It was also decided that Preshows would not stick to any one format, but rather follow whatever format felt right at the time; these included virtual DJ sets, ambiance videos, an existential crisis of cosmic proportions captured on video, that sort of thing.

Designed for use on Fear Street: 1994

Shorts

In order to help spice things up, we also elected to expand our pre-feature shorts. Sticking to our new philosophy of building the best pre-feature playlist possible to thematically match each presentation, rather than strictly show Halloween episodes of television shows only, we also decided to include short films, web content, and creepy television in general.

All of this means there will likely be more types of shorts included in the future; whatever fits best for that night’s film is what gets selected, no matter the format, theme or type of short.

Ads & Trailers

The updates to our advertisements and trailers, along with the entire playlist format in general, are where the 90s cinema nostalgia really came into play.

Before we mostly stuck to ultra-retro advertisements from the 1950s-1970s, along with whatever trailers matched the film being presented. For Grindhouse, we were lucky enough to obtain 35mm scans of 1980s and 1990s advertisements and trailers (shoutout to 35mm Movie Trailers Scans and Jonathan Froes for uploading their massive libraries!), which really did a lot of the legwork towards capturing that specific feel for the presentation.

Luckily, our head programmer was a 35mm projectionist in the early 2000s and still remembered the exact playlist order that was used during that time, so we replicated that exactly; except instead of five trailers we elected to just run two, just to help streamline everything and shave some time from the overall presentation.

Bumpers

Along with a massive amount of advertisements and trailers, we were also able to acquire a great deal of Coca-Cola, Dolby Digital, and THX bumpers. Adding these bumpers to the playlist in the appropriate spots acted as the final polish on the 1990s and 2000s cinema vibe. We also, for the first time, cut a custom Feature Presentation bumper for Grindhouse, which ran on double-feature nights only.

Film Nerd Moment™: Why would we use both Dolby Digital and THX logos on the playlist, if they’re both sound formats? Because they actually apply to two different aspects of sound presentation, rather than being two different versions of the same thing!

Dolby Digital is a format for sound encoding, which is used to encode the soundtrack for a film and decode it through processors to play audio back through speakers. THX, on the other hand, is a format of sound processing after the audio has been decoded. For theaters, it is also a specific format of loudspeaker setup.

So, Dolby encodes and decodes the sound, which is then picked up and processed by THX and played over loudspeakers. Two totally different things!

Feature Presentation

Compared to the rest of the overhaul the Marathon received with Grindhouse, the main event was actually pretty straightforward: take a film with the right vibe and feel for the theme, and treat it to look like a print you’d find in a grindhouse cinema.

First, a subtle 35mm grain was added to the film’s digital file in order to replicate the look and feel of the actual 35mm scans used for the trailers, bumpers, etc. Next, we overlaid a scan of transparent 35mm film that had acquired mild dust and damage. This gave the film a very authentic look and feel of a 35mm print playing on a silver screen, but it wasn’t quite Grindhouse yet. In certain sections we added additional damage and dirt to the film to really add to the “overplayed” look you’d find in a grindhouse, but never so much to make it feel intrusive or distracting.

Finally, to help bring it all together, we exported the treated film at 24 frames per second, the framerate of 35mm film, instead of the 30fps standard that digital video uses, which gave a subtle choppiness to the playback and helped sell the “gritty & raw” grindhouse feel.

Pre-Treatment

←

Post-Treatment

→

Like the rest of the changes that came along with Grindhouse, the schedule and film selection process received a bit of a revamp.

As the implementation of a seasonal theme added focus and direction to all the other aspects of the Marathon, the film selection process was much, much easier; rather than having a massive pool of films to decide on, we instead only had to focus on “does this feel like it could play in a grindhouse theater, or would it benefit from the grindhouse treatment?” From there we refined our selections further by asking ourselves, which ended up becoming our new mantra behind everything, “but would it be fun?”

That probably would have been good enough, but the schedule needed something else to really embody the Grindhouse theme. We had been toying with the idea of doing double features on the weekends for a few years now, but never really felt like it was the right time to try it out, and Grindhouse was the perfect opportunity to give it a shot.

After all, what’s a grindhouse theater without a double (or triple) feature?

A quick note before we get into the schedule: though AI art creation was used in the creation of our posters for Grindhouse, we have taken a firm “no-AI” stance going forward.
No amount of creative freedom and ease-of-use is worth risking the livelihood of creators and contributing to the death of the creative arts. and we will be creating all posters by hand for all future seasons (unless we somehow end up with a buttload of money to pay artists).
They will probably be hilariously terrible but, at long as we have fun doing it, who f**king cares?