Seeing a horror movie with an appreciative audience is lots of fun.
The Fright Night series of screenings at Arc Cinema, National Film and Sound Archive will have an added attraction: entertainment from host and drag artist Venus Mantrap, also known as Sam Townsend.
"Venus Mantrap is a character I constructed a number of years ago," Townsend, a horror aficionado who also teaches ceramics, said.
"I had my drag debut in 2006 in Canberra."
Developing his drag persona over a number of years in Canberra and Lismore, Townsend grew in confidence and performed more as Venus Mantrap, "an alter ego, a persona I get to step into," he said.
"Physically and socially a lot more daring."
Townsend successfully pitched the idea of horror and horror-adjacent film screenings hosted by Venus Mantrap to the archive.
He said he especially liked movies that commented on the period in which they were made.
"The Truman Show is celebrating its 25th anniversary," Townsend said of the "horror-adjacent" movie starring Jim Carrey as a man who does not know his entire life is in a constructed world as a 24/7 reality TV show.
Townsend saw it as part of a "techno terror" trilogy along with Videodrome and Robocop and said it was prescient as a comment on our reality-TV dominated world.
He was excited to discover the archive had a 35mm print of Scream (1996) which it will screen along with the most recent entry in the series, Scream VI (2023), which moves the action from its small-town setting to New York City.
"It reignited the slasher film genre that had all but died out by the mid-1990s," Townsend said.
The original film - in which a group of teenagers are stalked by someone wearing a Ghostface costume - worked on different levels, he said, being a self-aware, self-referential horror movie that was well written, well directed and scary as well as funny.
"I remember seeing it for the first time at a sleepover on VHS ... I'd never seen anything like it before," Townsend said.
The last in the series is the horror comedy An American Werewolf in London (1981).
It tells the story of two young American tourists in Britain ignorant of local lore who are attacked by a werewolf - one is bitten and undergoes the agonising transformation into a lycanthrope himself, the other is killed and becomes a gradually decomposing zombie.
"I grew up with this as part of my home video library," Townsend said.
He first watched it "too young... I was eight or nine at the time - not recommended."
While Townsend doesn't want to reveal too much of what Venus Mantrap will be doing, part of it will be providing an introduction and context.
It sounds like while he will be in drag, each night won't be a drag.
The Fright Night screenings at Arc Cinema, National Film and Sound Archive are: The Truman Show (Friday, September 22 at 8pm), Scream and Scream VI (Saturday, October 28 at 7pm) and An American Werewolf in London (Friday, November 24 at 8pm). See: nfsa.gov.au
