Get ready for your hair to stand on end. The Dryden’s perennial selection of blood-curdling horror movies will be offered Thursdays in October leading up to Halloween. The frightfest begins October 2, when we screen Sidney Furie’s intense thriller The Entity. This story of a menacing invisible mass that repeatedly attacks an innocent woman (Barbara Hershey) will be preceded by two experimental shorts by Peter Tscherkassky that re-edit The Entity to explore an even more visceral sense of horror.

Two Italian occult classics starring actress Barbara Steele are featured October 9, Black Sunday and Castle of Blood. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (October 16) offers the last word in haunted house movies. Wise’s directorial debut, Curse of the Cat People, is the second half of an October 23 double bill of purr-fect chillers from producer Val Lewton’s low-budget unit at RKO Studios, following the original Cat People.

We’ll celebrate the 30th anniversary of John Carpenter’s horror milestone Halloween with a screening on October 30, and on October 31, George Romero’s politically charged Land of the Dead screens in conjunction with the 19th Rochester Labor Series (see related article).