Actress Tippi Hedren starred in the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller ‘The Birds” which will be screened Saturday night at the Utah Theatre as part of the Downtown Logan Hocus Pocus Witches Dance and Halloween Festival.
LOGAN – The Utah Festival Opera & Musical Theatre will proudly provide the finale of this year’s Downtown Logan Hocus Pocus Witches Dance and Halloween Festival on Saturday night.
The climax of that event will be the screening of three classic Halloween horror films at the Utah Theatre on Center Street, according to UFOMT managing director Gary Griffin.
Those films will be Nosferatu, The Birds and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. They will be shown with starting times at 7 p.m., 9:30 p.m. and midnight respectively.
The Downtown Logan Hocus Pocus Witches Dance and Halloween Festival is a daylong event on Oct. 30 sponsored by Logan City on Center Street between Main and 100 West streets.
The festival will feature a daytime treat walk for youngsters, a costume contest, live music, a pumpkin decorating contest, the city’s traditional Witches Dance and finally the horror movie showings at the Utah Theatre.
Nosferatu is a silent expressionistic horror film directed by F.W. Murnau in 1922. Ironically subtitled A Symphony of Horrors, the plot of Nosferatu was obviously copied from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. It stars Max Schreck as a vampyre seeking a new home and pursuing the wife of his real estate agent.
All but a few copies of Nosferatu were destroyed after Stoker’s heirs sued the filmmaker. Griffin says that the silent film will be accompanied by Mike Ohman on the theater’s Wurlitzer organ during the Friday night screening.
At 9:30 p.m, the Utah Theatre will present the Alfred Hitchcock classic The Birds.
Universally recognized as one of Hitchcock’s most unusual thrillers, the firm is loosely based on a disturbing short story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier. Tensely scripted by novelist Evan Hunter, The Birds depicts a series of violent and unexplained bird attacks on the people of a California fishing village.
The film co-stars Tippi Hedren, Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and Veronica Cartwright.
The theater’s final showing of the evening will be the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight.
That 1975 musical comedy is a spin-off from a stage production of the same name with music and script by Richard O’Brien. Both productions were parodies of schlock science fiction and horror movies of the 1940s and 1950s.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show stars Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon and Barry Boswick with narration by Charles Gray.
“Audience participation will be allowed (during the screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show),” Griffin says. “Cult members will know what that means.”
Tickets for these films can be purchased at the door of the Utah Theatre or online at https://theutahtheatre.org.