october on the rooftop

Houston's rooftop cinema reveals spooky and thrilling October lineup

Rooftop Cinema Club Houston night skyline

Thrills (and maybe some chills) await in October on the rooftop.

Photo by Rooftop Cinema Club Houston

October sees Houston temps drop from scorching to bearable, and that means a flurry of fall outdoor activities. In keeping with the season, Rooftop Cinema Club is celebrating its first year in Houston with an October lineup that boasts Halloween favorites, drive-in classics, and showcases of women in cinema.

Fans looking to get some spooky thrills under the night sky can look for horror and fantasy classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street (35th anniversary), Texas Chain Saw Massacre (45th anniversary), Beetlejuice, and more at Rooftop’s BLVD Place location. Tickets are on sale now.

Cinephiles will delight in a special night of drive-in classics celebrating two memorable 1950s and '60s sci-fi and horror films: Blob and Village of the Damned on October 19. To set the scene, the club rooftop will step back in time with a special vintage décor, audio experience, and more.

In addition to the Halloween classics, October will celebrate women in film in front of and behind the camera with a lineup that features Bette Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker in Hocus Pocus on October 4, October 20, and an Open-Captions version on October 30.

Look for Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and Stockard Channing in Practical Magic on October 12 and Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her on October 18. October also sees films honoring Hispanic Heritage Month with Selena on October 5, Coco on October 13, and Mi Familia on October 15.

To paraphrase ’80s icon Ferris Bueller: Tickets move pretty fast: If you don’t stop and look, you could miss them.

Prices start at $17 per person for a one-person lounge seat. A single-person seat with the addition of bottomless popcorn is $20. Tickets for couples, or a roomier love seat, plus bottomless popcorn, are $24 per person. New for spring is a student discount ticket starting at $15.30, with valid ID required the night of the event.

As always, the cinema will serve up movie grub from Good Dog Houston, which offers three dogs: the Picnic Dog, the Uptown Dog, and The Dude. Additional fare includes fruit and cheese plates, Frito pie, and chili cheese nachos. Adult beverages include a full bar with craft cocktails, local beer options, and an assortment of wines.

Here is the full October movie lineup. Doors open each night at 6:30 pm. Double screenings continue throughout the month on Friday and Saturday nights. The venue will be closed on Mondays.

October 1 – Beetlejuice
October 2 – Rocketman (2019)
October 3 – Mean Girls
October 4 – Halloweentown and Hocus Pocus
October 5 – Dirty Dancing and Selena
October 6 – Casper
October 7 – Closed
October 8 – Grease (Sing-Along)
October 9 – Pretty Woman
October 10 – Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
October 11 – Booksmart (2019) and Aladdin (2019)
October 12 – The Craft and Practical Magic
October 13 – Coco
October 14 – Closed
October 15 – Mi Familia
October 16 – Bohemian Rhapsody: Sing-Along
October 17 – Rocketman
October 18 – The Princess Bride and Death Becomes Her
October 19 – The Blob (1958) and Village of The Damned (1960)
October 20 – Hocus Pocus
October 21 – Closed
October 22 – Beetlejuice
October 23 – Poltergeist
October 24 – The Witches of Eastwick
October 25 – A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Scream
October 26 – Tales from The Hood and The Exorcist
October 27 – Halloweentown
October 28 – Closed
October 29 – The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
October 30 – Hocus Pocus (open captions)
October 31 – Halloween (1978)

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Rooftop Cinema Club is located at BLVD Place above Whole Foods, 1700 Post Oak Blvd. For tickets and information, visit the official site.

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Movie Review

Camp Miasma puts a comedic twist on the classic slasher movie

Photo courtesy of MUBI

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

The horror genre really ramped up in the 1970s and ‘80s, bringing the slasher subgenre that gave audiences new visuals of gore, but also a reliance on sexism and homophobia that would come to define the era. The new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma wrestles with that legacy in ways that are funny, thought-provoking, and downright strange.

Kris (Hannah Einbinder) is a queer filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the moldy IP that is the Camp Miasma franchise, one that was fresh in the 1970s but which numerous shlocky sequels have rendered irrelevant. In an attempt to get to know the property better, Kris has scored a meeting with the reclusive Billy (Gillian Anderson), the star of the original film who has shunned the public eye for decades.

Turns out that Billy lives deep in the woods at Camp Rivoli, which served as the location for the first film. As Kris tries to get to know Billy and convince her to be a part of the new film, she starts to fall under Billy’s spell and the lore of the franchise as a whole. That includes believing that the movie’s villain, Little Death — a transgender person who has an air conditioning vent as a head/mask — may not just be a character created for the movies.

Written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), the film at first feels like it’s going to go the straight-up comedy route, with comic explosions of blood, a strange fascination with candy brands, and a production design that does nothing to hide that the two main actors are on a movie set with painted backdrops. This is backed up by Kris’ phone conversations with her girlfriend, Mari (Jasmine Savoy Brown) and her agent (Sarah Sherman), as well as numerous other details.

But the film starts to go down the surreal route the longer Kris stays at the camp with Billy, especially when they sit down to watch the original Camp Miasma. An extended sequence shows a good amount of that film-within-the-film, demonstrating why Kris and Billy have a love/hate relationship with the property. For Kris, though, the lines between the film and the real world start to blur, and Schoenbrun uses a variety of out-there elements to drive the point home.

The final act of the film can barely be described as Kris goes deeper down the rabbit hole, with Schoenbrun using her film to comment on the horror genre as a whole, its treatment of women and LGBT people, the movie industry, and more. All the while the “camp” of Camp Miasma maintains a presence, with candy wrappers showing up everywhere and the tongue-in-cheek references to Little Death (the French term La petite mort, which means “the little death,” is a euphemism for orgasm).

Einbinder, an Emmy winner for Hacks, is the perfect person to inhabit her role. Her established real-life and fictional personas color everything she does in the film, with her enthusiasm and curiosity shining through. Anderson leans heavily into another reference — Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard — to create a character that is as mysterious as she is alluring. Supporting actors like Brown, Sherman, Patrick Fischler, Dylan Baker, and Eva Victor keep the movie at the right pitch all the way through.

While other films have made fun of horror movie tropes before, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finds a wholly unique way of doing so. It’s a funny and daring trip into the psyches of two women who may be victims of their own obsessions, and of the movies that made them that way.

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now playing in select theaters

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