Taylor to traumatize with thrillers
Never let it be said that the ol’ Avon Theatre isn’t built to spill all the filmtastic goodness one can handle. Upon posting last week about Skip Huston‘s silent film class, I checked out the Cyber-presence of Avon pal Troy Taylor, possibly the area’s best-known author on supernatural events and the otherwise unexplained. He’s released dozens of books through his Whitechapel Press imprint and written many more for other publishers, along with spearheading numerous related activities including the Haunted Decatur tours and ghost-hunter conferences at downtown Decatur‘s other surviving single-screen, the Lincoln Square Theater.
But, who would I find peering back at me through the maze o’ (paranormal) activity that is Taylor’s primary Web site but the immortal Boris Karloff as Imhotep in THE MUMMY (1932). So, I clicked. And I looked. And I gasped, “Ooh!” Seems that Taylor has announced his own six-week course which would run the same evenings as the silent film class, Thursday, August 13, through Thursday, September 17! However, being Troy Taylor and given the time of year this set would lead up to (hmm, Hallowe’en?), you know darn well what that means – supernatural cinema!
Taking a page from the Huston playbook, Taylor will not reveal the movie selections until class is in session but does hint, “The films that will be shown during the class will not be older classic films and will be ‘R-Rated’ or ‘Unrated’ films that may not be for the faint of heart,” per the Web site. He also clarifies for C-U Blogfidential that the non-dueling classes will run simultaneously with the silents in the main auditorium and the spookies in one of the Avon Twins.
Why not plan on sharing a six-pack of the silver screen eerie with your fellow film fans, dear reader? Go right here for registration information.
~ Jason Pankoke
p.s. It looks like the series has been postponed to a future, unspecified date.
[Updated 9/4/09, 02:00 a.m. CST]