Friday Night Weird Gives Chills in June at the Dairy Arts Center

Halloween season is far away as summer cranks up to full blast, but the Boedecker Theater iatn the Dairy Arts Center is bringing a refreshingly icy touch of fear to Boulder this June with a screening of Black Christmas.

The spooky ’70s gem comes courtesy of a new cinematic partnership between the Dairy's cult film series Friday Night Weird and local horror convention Colorado Festival of Horror, which takes place in September.

"With June, we're nearly halfway to the Christmas season," says COFOH co-founder Daniel Crosier. "We figured we'd get playful and add a menacing feature to acknowledge that fact." He's found collaborators eager to spread festive fear in Shay Wescott and Jack Hanley, the film-loving pair that helms Friday Night Weird.

By day, Wescott is the Dairy's development manager, but on Friday nights, she becomes the "Queen of the Weird," presenting the staff-favorite series with local film expert and co-host Hanley. They're both longtime figures at the theater, where they've filled a variety of positions. Each came to the theater simply as a cinéaste, but soon worked their way into more permanent roles.

"I actually started at the Dairy as a volunteer," says Wescott. "I learned I could stay to watch the movie when I volunteered, and have basically been here since." Hanley had a similar experience: "I came to an art-house screening nearly fifteen years ago," he remembers, "and chatted for what seemed like hours. ... I knew then that they were never getting rid of me."

They're both proud champions of Friday Night Weird, which began in 2015 as an effort to draw younger viewers and "make Boulder weird again" by offering a diverse lineup of cult films throughout the year. As the title suggests, it has a fun, fluid definition of the genre that allows the programmers to flex their creative muscles.

"The name has really grown on me in how literal it is," says Wescott. "As someone who was often made to feel weird, especially in my taste in art and film, I think there is a sense of reclaiming that. I want people to feel like 'weird' is not a dismissive term, but a celebration of outsiders."
Hanley adds that cult films must be both controversial and demanding of occasional re-appraisal, but their longevity comes from creating worlds all their own. "Roger Ebert once famously said that they are not merely films, but subcultures," he notes.

The series also embraces a mix of first-run and repertory features. "Prior to the pandemic, our programming was much more evenly split between [the two]," says Wescott, adding, "It feels important right now...for audiences and artists to show new films that otherwise would not play in a single theater in our city."

However, mainstream cinema overlapped with much of Friday Night Weird's programming this year, culminating in a unique awards season. "This was a really cool year in terms of some 'firsts,'" says Wescott. "[We] had our first Best Feature-winning film with Everything Everywhere All at Once, and another of our most popular films in the series, Triangle of Sadness, was nominated, so that sense of legitimacy feels like it's catching on."

But Friday Night Weird also wants to play the older cult classics, which is where the festival partnership comes in. COFOH has been a previous collaborator, Crosier notes.

"Jack Hanley has been an exciting presence for the last two years at COFOH alongside paranormal investigator and co-host Bryan Bonner," he says. "Jack and Bryan have been hosting screenings, Q&As...and panel discussions. Jack is a wealth of horror knowledge."

The convention experiences were the beginning of a beautiful friendship. "After meeting and being instantly welcomed into the horror-con family, we were hooked," says Hanley. "It was instantly clear that our own film program shared that demographic."

He and Crosier also share a deep love of the legendary Black Christmas, the 1974 Canadian horror flick directed by the idiosyncratic Bob Clark (he also directed the non-horror A Christmas Story). The film represents a landmark moment in the genre for horror historians like Hanley.
"It's not just a brilliant film far ahead of its time," says Hanley. "There remains a central debate about which film was the first true slasher film that launched the subgenre...[and] we will make the argument that it was Black Christmas."

The film concerns a labyrinth-like sorority house on the verge of Christmas break, which becomes the hunting ground for a hidden killer. It boasts a great cast (Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon) and a series of genuinely disturbing scares that still possess the power to shock modern viewers. Shot in and around a bleak Toronto, it is — in a word — cold.

"There's nothing more terrifying than the potential everyday monsters in society," says Crosier. "Horror films like Black Christmas reflect that."

Black Christmas plays Friday, June 2, Boedecker Theater, Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut Street, Boulder. Get tickets here.