Late Nights at the JBFC

By Andrew Jupin, Senior Programmer

You might notice that there are films showing up in our schedule that are only screening late at night. We started this last month with a week of late-night screenings for the fantastically entertaining, Polish mermaid musical, The Lure. If you missed it, I can’t recommend it enough; you should look for it to be released for home viewing soon from Janus Films. On the heels of that run, the next late-night title coming to the Burns is the debut feature from Julia Ducournau, Raw, which we open this Friday night.

Odds are you have heard whispers about this film on various blogs and film sites. In a nutshell, it’s the excellently reviewed, coming-of-age French horror film about a young vegetarian who gets hazed her first week of veterinary school and slowly becomes a cannibal. Like all great horror films, Raw uses the genre to create an allegory for something much bigger. In this case, cannibalism stands in for maturity, sexual awakening, etc. There’s a lot going on in the film that catapults it far beyond just some gross horror picture. Oh, but make no mistake—Raw gets gross; that’s part of the fun.

Indeed, this is not a film for everyone. Among the whispers, you may have also heard that this was the film that had people fainting in the aisles, requiring ambulances and medical technicians to rush to the auditorium at the Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness screening. Well, I’m here to tell you that I was at the screening those people were writing about and at no point did that actually happen. But what a marketing ploy! That said, it’s an incredibly intense film (at parts) and not something you should see alone—like I did! But it’s also quite beautiful and incredibly well made. It’s one of the best debut features I’ve seen in recent memory. This isn’t some pointless, low-budget, incompetently made horror film, so many of which we see released and instantly relegated to the bowels of Netflix or Amazon Prime. No, friends, this is the real deal.

Raw isn’t screening as part of a new series or anything like that—some JBFC members will recall I used to curate a monthly series called “After Dark” where we showed a lot of cult and horror films. This isn’t that. Instead, these late-night titles are simply new releases that are better served hitting the screen late at night—and they also won’t all be horror. Some films are just made to be seen after the sun goes down, and I know a healthy portion of our audience, and many more people still finding our cinema every day, are itching to see stuff like this on the big screen.

So keep your eyes peeled and your mind open—there are some interesting things coming to the JBFC late at night…