IN THE MOUTH OF DARKNESS showcase. An ample tribute to John Carpenter’s genius for the occasion of TODAYS Festival 2016.

The National Cinema Museum is presenting the IN THE MOUTH OF DARKNESS - Tribute to John Carpenter showcase, from Friday 26 August to Sunday 11 September, at the Cinema Massimo. This ample retrospective will take place for the occasion of the second edition of TODAYS Festival 2016 - the showcase bringing the best of Italian and international music to the capital of Piedmont – during which the filmmaker will be the protagonist on 26 August of one of the most anticipated live events of the entire showcase.

The Cinema Massimo will feature a review of his  most famous films during the following days, the ones that contributed to make him an undisputable master of genre cinema. His debut films bear witness to this. Dark Star (1974), which is a forerunner of the determinant postmodern ambience in his later work, and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), a low budget metropolitan western steeped in American Seventies culture, with which he was about to revolutionise all Hollywood genre cinema, after George Romero had re-invented horror with Night of the living dead, eight years earlier.

Carpenter exploits common forms of popular narration, to develop a profound reflection on image and on its ambiguity, in which good and evil blend and overlap, with no definite release, ever. It was thus in Halloween (1978), one of the most successful independent films ever, The Thing (1982), Prince of darkness (1987), They live (1988), Village of the damned (1995) and Ghosts of Mars (2001), just to mention a few of his most significant works.

However, it would be reductive to identify John Carpenter just as a horror or science fiction filmmaker, since his films, which are deeply influenced by westerns, establish themselves as a critical and hyperbolic view on the contemporary world, with all the anxieties linked to present America’s social and racial problems.

This showcase could only be opened, on Friday 26 August at 3.30 p.m., by his debut film: Dark Star. Admission 6.00/4.00/3.00 euro.