Moviegoers on a recent Friday lined up at the theater box office while long-haired rockers with tattoos and horror T-shirts slowly filled the sidewalks. Costumed freaks with masks depicting disfigured faces snuck up behind unsuspecting couples for a quick scare. The haunted house atmosphere had a thrash-metal soundtrack, whether it was played through car radios pulling up to the venue or by the live band inside. The crowd looked like something straight from a metal show in the 1980s, but the show went down in 2024 at Guild Cinema in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill neighborhood. The film enthusiasts, who would have scoffed at a stuffy foreign film crowd were gathered to see a screening of the 1982 Spanish cult slasher Pieces (Mil Gritos Tiene la Noche or “The Night Has a Thousand Screams”)
The event was a product of a horror film superfan and the owner of the Guild, partially aimed at attracting energetic crowds with more diverse tastes. The recurring collaboration uses live performances to entice ravenous fans of gore and deafening music.
Aaron Barreda, the mastermind behind the themed night, along with Kief Henley, owner of the Guild, hosts the quarterly crossover event. Barreda says one of his goals is to expand audiences.
“If I can turn literally one person on to a movie that they’ve never seen before that they fall in love with, and if I can make them laugh, then my job’s done,” he says.
Art house theaters such as the Guild might elicit images of artsy film snobs, but lately, according to Henley, there seems to be a surge of interest in the macabre.
“Horror is kind of hot right now,” he says.
But Henley isn’t complaining.
“It’s probably the times we live in,” he says. “They have that term ‘elevated horror,’ and to me that’s just horror that has something to say. It has subtext, like Night of the Living Dead or like [David] Cronenberg films where it’s not just about scaring the shit out of you or creeping you out.”
But, he says, horror doesn’t necessarily need to have subtext to draw crowds because “Sometimes we just like to see some good trash.”
Barreda got his horror fix in the 1980s by renting movies from now-defunct brick-and-mortar video stores. He remembers watching classics like the Friday the 13th franchise on a VCR with his sister in a room adorned with posters of bands such as Iron Maiden.
“I think that’s probably a lot of ’80s kids’ experiences,” he says.
Barreda went on to create and host the AndroidVision podcast, which screens gruesome underground horror films and adds post-film twisted humor and commentary. The events at the Guild, Barreda says, are a toned-down version of what he offers online.
“We have a good following, but we’re not for kids,” Barreda says about the podcast.
What truly sets these shows apart from regular movie screenings, are the bands. The horror shows begin with local acts, and the performances merge music and film
Heavy metal and horror go hand-in-hand according to the two collaborators. Henley says the genres have a lot in common.
“There’s that tie-in, there’s that sort of aggression, that sort of fear,” Henley says. “That intensity of emotion that you find in horror movies you find in a lot of metal music. So it’s kind of a natural companion. It’s sort of a parallel aesthetic.”
January’s event featured thrash-punk locals Visions of Death and the pitch-black rock and roll rollercoaster film Trick or Treat.
Moviegoers that night wore clothing and costumes that would match the garb of metal maniacs attending a Judas Priest show. Studs, spikes and band patches quilted the punk rockers’ denim vests. Fast guitar riffs and brutal vocals coming from the amplifiers were in sync with the montage of bloody violence projected on the big screen. The noise and imagery that filled the theater could have been used interchangeably at a stadium rock concert.
Barreda booked the band Suspended to front the April gig. He praises the band for being “the kindest, sweetest girls,” but also because they’re the hardest all-female band in New Mexico “playing heavy metal, ripping your face off, [and] not for a fucking gimmick.”
The event has giveaways with prizes such as T-shirts and posters, but this time the grand prize was something that reflected the host’s twisted sense of humor: An issue of Playgirl magazine featuring Christopher George, the lead actor in Pieces, lying on a bear skin rug, eating a watermelon with a buck knife.
Henley says he expects future events to bring new blood into theaters and to sharpen the palates of fans hungry for a different type of movie experience.
“You treat these things as gateway drugs, so to speak,” he says. “You like this? Well guess what, man? It gets even better, or it gets even weirder, it gets even wilder.”
AndroidVision presents: Re-Animator
July 13, 10:30pm
$10
Guild Cinema
3405 Central Ave. NE