Event Details
Date & Time:
Thu October 1, 2026
7 PM
Audience:
Open to the public
Details:
COLD HANDS (1991) - The Lost DIY Horror Films of Kip Hanks
COLD HANDS (1991)
(Kip Hanks, 1991, 60 min, U-matic to digital)
THE DUST (1986)
(Kip Hanks, 1986, 24 min, 16mm)
“Make room Brian DePalma and John Carpenter, you’re the greatest but I’m coming up. Kip Hanks, Pensacola FL.” Thus reads a classified ad in a 1986 issue of Fangoria, the same year the 22-year-old Hanks debuted THE DUST, a 25-minute, 16mm horror comedy made with a grant from the American Film Institute. With memorable creature effects and locations, THE DUST was a promising entry in the decade’s avalanche of independent regional horror films; with his shot-on-video follow-up, COLD HANDS (1991), writer-director Hanks matured, building on THE DUST’s death-and-resurrection themes to craft something ambitious, personal, and chilling.
COLD HANDS tells the story of a woman (Marianne Walters) whose husband dies in a horrific traffic accident, only to find herself attracted to a mysterious stranger (Kip Hanks) who claims to be the same man in another body. Uncharacteristically for a shot-on-video horror, COLD HANDS is played straight, pitting romance against supernatural suspense as it builds to a shocking climax that opens more questions than it answers.
After a 15-minute digest version of the film enjoyed a single broadcast on a local Pensacola station, COLD HANDS appears to have disappeared without so much as a public screening. Hanks passed away in 2008 with his most significant work unseen and unseeable. Fast forward to 2025, when Block Cinema ordered a pair of purportedly blank U-matic tapes on eBay for testing purposes. What arrived was nothing less than the master copy of COLD HANDS – a discovery that coincided uncannily with our discovery of a print of THE DUST in the collection of nearby venue Chicago Filmmakers. Designated by fate, circumstance, or some unknown force to resurrect Hanks’ work, Block Cinema is proud to present the first ever public screening of a new digital preservation of COLD HANDS, reunited with its sibling THE DUST in 16mm.
With an introduction by Block Cinema curator Michael Metzger, and a post-film discussion with independent filmmaker and Northwestern professor Spencer Parsons.
ABOUT THE SERIES
Presented as part of “Repossessed: Reviving Supernatural Cinema from Beyond the Grave,” a series of three films about possession and resurrection whose eerie afterlives invite us to think about film preservation as a kind of séance. From the lost shot-on-video horror of Florida Panhandle triple-threat Kip Hanks, to the surreal Detroit-set reverie of Black film pioneer Richard D. Maurice’s ELEVEN P.M. (1928), to Louisville maverick William Girdler’s drive-in doppelgänger to one of the biggest hits of the 1970s, these films were made by defiantly independent filmmakers working far outside the studio system. Each of these remarkable films, surviving in only one or two known copies, might have died with their creators; instead, the strange forces of fate and the passions of obsessed (or possessed) collectors have conspired to keep them alive. For each of these extremely rare screenings, a Block Cinema team member will provide an extended introduction to the mysterious circumstances behind the film’s death and resurrection, inviting audiences to approach the projection as a communion with the dead.
Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu