🗓️ Wednesday, Oct. 14-Wednesday, day, Oct. 28, 2026
📍 SIFF Film Center: 167 Republican St., Seattle
Time to investigate a murder, watch a weird videotape and look twice at that person in your life who’s acting hella shady.
Behold Scarecrowber, the annual film series collaboration between arts nonprofits SIFF and Scarecrow Video that honors the best month of the year with some staff-handpicked glory. It’s charitable, too, as half of the proceeds support Scarecrow (aka the world’s largest publicly available video archive).
“We’ve always had a lot of fun programming Scarecrowber,” Scarecrow’s marketing director Matt Lynch told The Ticket, “This time we wanted to dip into some classics that may be familiar to a lot of fans but aren’t screened as often. Even though these are all well-loved perennials, as they get older, fewer and fewer people may be as familiar with them, and there’s nothing as electric as watching a new audience find an older movie. These are all straight-up bangers.”
Said bangers?
🍿“Deep Red” (1975)
Wednesday, Oct. 14
Few gialli have ever giallo’d harder than Dario Argento’s lunatic murder mystery, a barking mad mix of gruesome kills, off-kilter comedy, ketchup-red set design and the sickest Goblin score that’s not Suspiria. You’ll immediately want to purchase a pair of leather gloves; just, like, try to use them for something other than killing.
🍿“Ringu” (1998)
Wednesday, Oct. 21
Though Gore Verbinski’s Seattle-set 2002 remake is one the few PG-13 horror films that elicits actual, palpable feelings of dread — so many people younger than me say it’s the first movie that scared the sh*t out of them — don’t sleep on Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Japanese-language original. And for what it’s worth, Scarecrow Video itself has a lot of cursed videotapes among its collection; cursed with awesomeness.
🍿“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978)
Wednesday, Oct. 28
Not counting the many rip-offs, homages and a musical comedy version or two, there are four official movies directly based on Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers.” Sure, Don Siegel’s noir-sheened 1956 shocker influenced several generations of science-fiction filmmakers, but Philip Kaufman’s 1978 crack at it, set in a politically and socially volatile San Francisco, is the one that most gets under my skin.
