Repossessed: Reviving Supernatural Cinema from Beyond the Grave

Repossessed: Reviving Supernatural Cinema from Beyond the Grave

"Repossessed: Reviving Supernatural Cinema from Beyond the Grave” is 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.