If you are in the New York City area you may have seen them.  Subliminal messages urging you to be there. In what can be described as a campaign as clever as the film itself, irreverent marketing has popped up all over NYC, telling horror fans to be at the Sunshine Cinema’s screening of The Final Girls, tonight and tomorrow night at midnight.

In the same self-aware tone of the film, a cluster of clever The Final Girls posters have been ingeniously hidden around downtown NYC. Some call attention to the dying trend of going to see smaller movies in an actual theater, while others riff on the current pop culture obsessions. New York commute, bankers with coffee breath, UCB students doing bits in Chelsea,  Brooklynites still trying to finish A Little Life. If you were sharp eyed, you have been keeping an eye out seeing a growing amount of Final Girls visual gags leading up the screenings on Friday and Saturday night.

But in this age of streaming and binging superhero civil wars, the theatrical life of Final Girls came and went and made me sad. But what’s so cool is that this movie seems to be having an afterlife at Midnight Screenings across the country. Cult status is in many ways so much more meaningful than a big box office weekend: it means people really love the movie, and they tell their friends, and it lives on for much longer. I feel so much gratitude for the fans who are adopting this movie, talking about it and passing it around — finding it in the same way I found El Mariachi when I was a kid and someone handed me a VHS promising it would blow my mind. In some circuitous and completely accidental way, we ended up making a movie that can hang with the movies that made us want to be a filmmakers in the beginning — the movies that i never even realized were “cult” movies — but were. 

The screening will be followed by a q and A from the

In our year end wrap up we named The Final Girls our favorite horror film of the year, with good reason. The remarkable thing about The Final Girls is that it is at once a brilliant love letter to a bygone era of slasher cinema, but also a startling refreshing and unique entry into the horror canon. From a mind-blowingly original script from M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller, The Final Girls is the kind of horror film that we’ve so sorely need for years. It dares to do something different, but also serves as a notice to the world at large about why horror fans love these kind of movies in the first place. On top of all that, it’s also undeniably sweet.

Now, stop streaming and start screaming!  Get your tickets for the screening tonight and let’s hear “Bette Davis Eyes” one more time.