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This HALLOWEEN SEASON, join Dumpster Raccoon Cinema as it celebrates one of cinema’s most chilling films and one of its greatest queer icons – THE BABADOOK!! Widowed young mother Amelia (Essie Davis) is exhausted and struggling, as her young son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) presents with increasingly erratic and troubled behavior, staunchly refusing to perform the normality and simplicity she craves (“why can’t you just be normal???” she exasperatedly, and iconically, bellows into the backseat, amid one of Samuel’s characteristic behavioral fits). These behavioral issues – and her own grief – begin increasingly to centralize around a strange imaginary friend of Samuel’s, whose pop-up book and malignant presence (and outré sense of style) seems to have found its way unbidden into their home – THE BABADOOK.
Filled to the hat-brim with eerie atmospherics and wall-to-wall in-camera practical effects, THE BABADOOK swiftly joined the pantheon of horror classics – and then, just as swiftly, became a tongue-in-cheek queer icon, gleefully embraced by the babadiscourse as a dadaist symbol of Pride antics and rainbow-flag-waving, Love-Is-Love jubilation. But behind this goofy ironic internet reclamation was a trenchant and incisive reading of the film’s incisive and thorough interest in monsterity, otherness, and the difficulties and joys of raising a child who doesn’t quite fit in, and an embrace of the Other as a part of ourselves we must come to grips with and even learn to love.
With special ultra-spooky LIVE PERFORMANCE, queer Halloween video preshow by host Anthony Oliveira, and cocktails by the Shameful Tiki Room – sponsored by Bay Street Video!
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Revue Cinema, 400 Roncesvalles Avenue,Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Tickets
