american werewolf in london, whitley bay film festival
A slightly (!!) belated second post on the Whitley Bay Film Festival – the showing of American Werewolf in London in the Spanish Dome in Whitley Bay.
I was bit excited about this for two reasons. Firstly, I had never been inside the Spanish Dome, and this was a rare opportunity to do so before re-development takes place. The sense of excitement was heightened by the advance email information for the venue, warning that this was a construction site, that there was only temporary seating and so customers were advised to bring a cushion, and there was no heating or toilet facilities. This should have put me off, but as I said, this was a rare event. Definitely not your standard multiplex experience.
I wasn’t disappointed.
(except with myself for forgetting my camera and thus only having photos from my smartphone)
The films were being shown up inside the wonderful old dome itself.
The organsisers had also made considerable efforts to dress the venue to make it ‘habitable’:
So, downstairs was an improvised seating area with bar, popcorn and merchandise as well as two areas to view local films, old and new….calling the bar the Slaughtered Lamb was a very nice in-joke for the evening’s entertainment. Upstairs, the seating came in the form of deckchairs:
I said that there were two reasons for getting excited. The film itself was everything I remembered – well, what I remembered was principally the graphic scene of transformation to a werewolf. What came flooding back were all the memories that I associated with seeing this film the first time around…
…Stoke in the 1980s. The age of videos. The summer holiday spent at a friend’s house watching horror movies, drinking out a bottle silvered with milk bottle tops in order to resemble a prop out of the Lost Boys. Sharing a copy of Fangoria and our favourite quotations:
A naked American man stole my balloons.
