About this Event
“Ripping off an audience is much more serious than ripping off a story…but I don’t consider myself a ripoff artist. I consider myself someone who can recognize something that works… I mean talk about rip-off artists, just look at the critics: they always use the same phrase the first guy did…” –William Girdler
In 1972, after cutting his teeth making films in the Navy and directing hundreds of local commercial spots, William Girdler launched a scrappy film studio based in Louisville, KY with the goal of grinding out fast and cheap knock-offs of horror and exploitation features. From the FOXY BROWN-meets-JAMES BOND contours of 1975’s SHEBA, BABY to the “JAWS with claws” of GRIZZLY (1976), Girdler’s films enlivened familiar premises with ingenious low-budget filmmaking, savvy marketing, and the ardor of a self-taught cinephile paying homage to his inspirations.
Of the 9 features he directed before his untimely passing in a helicopter accident, 1974’s ABBY stands as one of his most legendary – and legendarily inaccessible – accomplishments. Equally inspired by the 1973 mega-hit THE EXORCIST as by the surge in Black-led genre films, ABBY casts THE MACK’s Carol Speed in a memorably committed performance as a pastor’s wife possessed by a Yoruba demon. Independently produced, ABBY was distributed by Samuel Z. Arkoff’s American International Pictures, who made over $4 million on the film in a single month before a copyright infringement lawsuit by Warner Bros. forced it out of theatres. Since then, the film has been difficult to see, with no official home video releases and almost all 35mm prints disappearing from circulation.
In this special presentation, Block technician Ben Creech will give a brief introduction to one of grindhouse cinema’s greatest film maudits, outlining the history of Girdler’s unique identity as a regional horror auteur, and delving into ABBY’s fraught legal status. Creech’s talk will explore the numerous horror movies and psychodramas that inflect this supremely enigmatic entry in 70’s independent cinema, while contemplating what made it such an economic threat to Warner Brothers at the time. Following this presentation, audiences will have a rare opportunity to view ABBY (William Girdler, 1974, 89 min) in a 16mm print from a private collection.
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.
Event venue & nearby stays
Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.