Our 12th sensational season of BAR TRASH was a DOUBLE FEATURE!, with two separate programmes screening across our venues.
SATANIC PANIC! on Sundays at Finsbury Park Picturehouse and Beer Merchants Tap, served spine-tingling tales of witch hunts, scapegoats and pop-culture hysteria from the 1970s and ’80s, when the world lost its mind and blamed Satan for our sins… Then, in a cinematic hookup for the ages, I collaborated with the amazing Zodiac Film Club to present GIRL TRASH! at Genesis Cinema every Wednesday, a sensational celebration of the femme filmmakers of trash and exploitation cinema!!!
The ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s sought to blame societal shifts on the widespread worshipping of Satan, imagining demonic cults cavorting behind closed doors and sensing the Devil’s corrupting influence in everything from Heavy Metal lyrics, to RPGs and even Saturday morning cartoons. Like now, conservative campaigners sought to stigmatise anyone living beyond the 1950s ‘traditional family values’ they sought to reinstate (single mothers, artists, queer and trans people etc), establishing their reprehensible playbook of witch hunts, scapegoating and blame, fuelled by long-since discredited ‘recovered-memory’ therapies. Of course, all of this served to deflect attention from the invidious power of the one true evil: the patriarchy. Let’s go…
#193: Opening Night — THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN dir Bernard McEveety (1971/USA)
Finsbury Park Picturehouse 18 JAN 2026 [full event info]
A low-budget American horror film about a coven of Satanic witches in rural California, THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN exploits fascination with the occult after ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and publication of William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’. Complete with possessed toys, Satanic rituals, and demonic children, THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN serves as a perfect introduction to the outlandish fever-dreams of the subsequent era’s conservative crusaders. It even credits Anton LaVey — the IRL founder of the Church of Satan — as a creative consultant.
THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN offers a distillation of almost all the visual and thematic tropes of 70s occult cinema, prompting me to give out ‘Bingo or Drink’ sheets to keep track of the mayhem. I also re-created the original theatrical release gimmick that saw audiences given packets of ‘Satan’s Soul Seeds’ on admission. In 1971 these were fava bean seeds, but I swapped horticulture for edible snacks. It took some people the entire season to realise they could eat them!
#195: CHILD’S PLAY dir Tom Holland (1988/USA)
Beer Merchants Tap 25 JAN 2026 [full event info]
Co-written by gay filmmaker Don Mancini — who would go on to control his own franchise until the 2019 reboot — CHILD’S PLAY (1988) is the quintessential ‘terror in the toybox’ film that highlighted our 1980’s obsession with the occult and a subversive presence of Satan in popular culture — everything from toothpaste brands, to rock music, and Saturday morning kids’ cartoons — that put children at risk of being lured away from trad. family values.
Now a much-loved queer media franchise, the original CHILD’S PLAY sows the seed of everything that was to come, veiling its direct link to Satan with voodoo spells (a common feature of similar titles of the era) and introducing Brad Dourif as Chucky (aka Charles Lee Ray) and his arch-nemesis Andy (played here by child actor Alex Vincent).
#197: HEAVY METAL dir Gerald Potterton (1981/Canada)
Finsbury Park Picturehouse 01 FEB 2026 [full event info]
HEAVY METAL is an intoxicating cocktail of the Satanic Panic culture war ingredients, and more, blended together in an otherworldly tale of a glowing green orb from outer space that spreads destruction throughout the galaxy. Only when the orb meets its one true nemesis — warrior goddess Taarna — will goodness return.
Lavishly drawn by a team of animation studios, each eclectic encounter with the orb had a different director. Voice actors include John Candy and Harold Ramis, but the film is mostly celebrated for its soundtrack featuring Black Sabbath, Blue Öyster Cult, Don Felder, and Stevie Nicks alongside a stunning classical score. Co-produced in Canada by Ivan Reitman, HEAVY METAL set the standard for alternative animation, and features plenty of gore amidst its toxic male wish-fulfilment.
#199: Positive East Fundraiser / Double Feature — HARD ROCK ZOMBIES dir Krishna Shah (1984/USA) + PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987/USA)
Beer Merchants Tap 08 FEB 2025 [full event info]
HARD ROCK ZOMBIES: Heavy Metal was huge in the 1980s, but that also attracted the wrath of moral campaigners who blamed it for the fall of civilisation, championing Satan, and corrupting youth. Bands were even accused of hiding covert messages in their music (a technique known as ‘backmasking’). In Krishna Shah’s goofball arthouse zombie-apocalypse melodic-rock musical-comedy (yes, really!) a touring band booked to perform in a small town are murdered by a clan of horrific mutants, whose patriarch is none other than Hitler! When the band is brought back to life, the stuffy townsfolk are forced to overcome their fear of rock music and embrace the hard rock zombies if they are to survive.
PRINCE OF DARKNESS: Written, co-scored and directed by John Carpenter, PRINCE OF DARKNESS follows a group of quantum physics students who are asked to assist a Catholic priest in investigating an ancient cylinder of liquid discovered in a monastery, which they come to find is a sentient, liquid embodiment of Satan (or worse…). Starring cult icons Donald Pleasance and Victor Wong, the film also sees Alice Cooper return to BAR TRASH after an earlier appearance in Spanish werewolf movie, MONSTER DOG (1984). Here, ‘The Godfather Of Shock Rock’ appears as a ‘Street Schizo’, a mysterious zombie harbinger of the coming apocalypse.
DRINK BEER / DO GOOD: For every pint of a special SATANIC PANIC! beer our wonderful hosts at Beer Merchants Tap donated £2+ to help us raise funds for POSITIVE EAST, East London’s HIV and sexual health charity.
#201: RIVER’S EDGE: 40TH ANNIVERSARY dir Tim Hunter (1986/USA)
Finsbury Park Picturehouse 22 FEB 2026 [full event info]
True-life horrors like self-professed teenage Satanist and Heavy Metal fan Ricky Kasso’s murder of fellow teenager Gary Lauwers added to the furore of the Satanic Panic. Lauwers’ unreported death — and how Kasso took other teens on ‘corpse tours’ to visit the abandoned body in the woods — shocked the nation, inspiring several film and stage adaptations, and ‘State of the Nation’ TV specials. Tim Hunter’s RIVER’S EDGE addresses a different real life killing — of Marcy Conrad — but features very similar circumstances. Regarded by Marc Spitz (Salon) as “the darkest teen film of all time”, RIVER’S EDGE explores the dissolution of family, proliferation of drug use, and disaffection of youth from the coldest and clearest of perspectives.
#203: THE ZODIAC KILLER dir Tom Hanson (1971/USA)
Beer Merchants Tap 01 MAR 2026 [full event info]
The ‘Summer of Love’ came crashing down at the end of the 1960s, as the Manson Family killings and unsolved atrocities by the still-unknown Zodiac Killer festered paranoia about something dark lurking at the heart of American communities. By the start of the 1970s, these fears had started to manifest themselves in popular culture as a deep-rooted fascination with the occult and Satanic worship, inspired by Ira Levin’s novel ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1967) and then William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’ (1971).
Directed by Tom Hanson, who had previously owned a chain of Pizza Man restaurants, THE ZODIAC KILLER reimagines the crimes of the then-active Zodiac Killer in hopes of luring the madman out of hiding. During theatrical screenings, Hanson and his team constructed in-cinema traps to catch the killer. These included stooges hidden around the foyer (including one in an ice-cream freezer) and a raffle with a motorcycle as a main prize. Audience members had to fill in response cards that were immediately ‘assessed’ for handwriting similarities to the Zodiac Killer’s taunting letters.
#205: RED SONJA dir Richard Fleischer (1985/USA) with Loose Willis for International Women’s Day
Finsbury Park Picturehouse 08 MAR 2026 [full event info]
Dungeons & Dragons emerged from the nether worlds of “wargaming, Tolkien fandom and medievalist role-playing” (Gavin Baddeley, ‘Dicing With the Devil’) in 1974 to become a cultural phenomenon less than a decade later. That success put it in the firing line of the ongoing ‘Satanic Panic’ culture war that saw moral campaigners label the game as anti-religious, responsible for promoting demon worship, and worse… The 1979 disappearance and subsequent death of teenager James Dallas Egbert III was inaccurately blamed on the corrupting power of D&D, but in fact Egbert lost his own personal battle against queerphobia, family pressure to achieve at college, and drugs.
With decent big-screen D&D adaptations rarer than the Brass Horn of Valhalla, we threw ourselves deep into the practical magic of 1980s sword-and-sorcery epics with Richard Fleischer’s RED SONJA, the third in a series of adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s work by mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s CONAN films came first). Danish model Brigitte Nielsen was cast as Red Sonja after a ‘down to the wire’ hunt to find a suitably ‘Amazonian’ performer, joining Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hamilton, and Kathleen Turner as one of the era’s few female action cinema leads.
Together, we raised funds for volunteer-operated support line, Strut Safe.
#207: God-Fearing / Double Feature: SATAN WAR dir Bart LaRue (1979/USA) + THE BURNING HELL dir Ron Ormond (1974/USA)
Beer Merchants Tap 15 MAR 2026 [full event info]
SATAN WAR: When newlyweds Louise and Bill Foster move into a new house, they’re confronted by a supernatural entity. And things only get worse from there… A D.I.Y. answer to THE AMITYVILLE HORROR from Texas actor Bart LaRue, SATAN WAR (1979) is an unforgettable Satanic panic artefact and plays like God-fearing community-theatre Christians have remade POLTERGEIST (on a micro budget with very little light — it’s a dark film in more ways than one — and LOTS of ectoplasm). Never legitimately released until its blu-ray debut in 2025, “SATAN WAR floats across the screen in a black cloud of pummelling synthesisers, hallucinogenic visuals, and unsettling themes” (AGFA).
THE BURNING HELL: Ron, June and Tim Ormond — a Nashville father-mother-son trio — cranked out a wild bunch of movies over 30 years, from westerns and exploitation films to evangelical Baptist extravaganzas made on a shoe-string far away from the Hollywood mainstream. With their entire back-catalogue destroyed in a flood (true story…), three collaborations with Baptist preacher Estus Pirkle remain unscathed. One of them, THE BURNING HELL (1974), is a true believer’s horror film featuring plenty of gore, face-eating worms, and the righteous word of God.
#209: 976-EVIL dir Robert Englund (1988/USA )
Finsbury Park Picturehouse 22 MAR 2026 [full event info]
In 976-EVIL, high school underdog Hoax (Stephen Geoffreys, FRIGHT NIGHT) is stuck in his humdrum hometown life, fending off leather-jacketed bullies, avoiding his overbearing mother (Sandy Dennis), and dreaming of a date with trailer park temptress Suzie (Lezlie Deane). But when his cousin Spike (Patrick O’Bryan) introduces him to a new-fangled technology — premium phone lines — his life takes a sudden turn for the Satanic, hooking him up with a hideous demonic force. Now there’s more than just a phone bill to pay for anyone who crosses the neighbourhood nerd!
With a great screenplay by Brian Helgeland (LA CONFIDENTIAL) and stunning practical effects by Kevin Yagher (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET), our screening of 976-EVIL is also a celebration of a ‘fallen’ queer icon, Stephen Geoffreys. Finding a unique solution to career longevity, Geoffreys worked his way from Tony Award nominee to cult film stardom in queer horror classic FRIGHT NIGHT through a series of hardcore adventures (VIRTUAL STUD, LEATHER AFTER MIDNIGHT and HUNK HOTEL) before finding his way back to low-budget horror. One of horror cinema’s true demon twinks.
#211: SILENT RAGE dir Michael Miller (1982/USA) from vintage VHS
Beer Merchants Tap 29 MAR 2026 [full event info]
In the 1980s, a series of unfounded accusations of abuse were levied against childcare workers across America. Amplified by irresponsible press reporting, entitled policing, and coercive interview techniques — and entrenched by an unquestioning position of ‘we believe the children’ — dark and entirely fictitious conspiracies of child abuse, Satanic sacrifice and cannibalism sent innocent kindergarten workers to prison and destroyed lives.
The epicentre of the furore was the McMartin Preschool in California which saw members of the owning / operating family falsely accused in 1983 of hundreds of acts of abuse against children in their care. By the time the case collapsed in 1990 without a single conviction, it became the longest and most expensive series of criminal trials in American history, a destructive wildfire akin to the Salem witch trials three centuries prior.
Allegations ranged from the deeply disturbing to the frankly preposterous, with co-operative children claiming to have seen witches fly, travelled in a hot-air balloon, and abducted through underground tunnels. When shown a series of photographs by defence lawyers, one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers. Obviously, this was another falsehood, but the accusation still made the national news headlines. We told you it was complicated!
#213: Closing Night: THE DAY OF THE BEAST aka ‘El día de la bestia’ dir Álex de la Iglesia (1995)
Finsbury Park Picturehouse 12 APR 2026 [full event info]
Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia’s second feature, THE DAY OF THE BEAST delivered one of the greatest horror comedies of all time as a Catholic priest joins forces with a heavy metal fan, and the host of a popular occult TV show to kill the Antichrist on Christmas Eve. The only way they can prevent the coming apocalypse is by committing as many sins as possible in order to earn the trust of Satan himself.
Marketed as a “Satanic Comedy”, THE DAY OF THE BEAST won 6 Goya Awards (Spain’s Oscars) including Best Director, and will be shown in its original Spanish language with English subtitles. Part of an informal trilogy with the director’s other two breakthrough films — violent post-apocalyptic comedy ACCIÓN MUTANTE (1993) produced by legendary provocateur Pedro Almodóvar, and gonzo action-crime-horror PERDITA DURANGO (1997), the continuing misadventures of Sailor and Lula from WILD AT HEART — THE DAY OF THE BEAST might just be your next favourite (Anti)Christmas movie for those cosy nights to come.