Henry Spencer has a room, a girlfriend and a newborn baby. None of them offers much comfort. Outside, machinery groans; inside, the infant cries and a woman in the radiator promises that everything will be fine.

David Lynch’s handmade first feature turns the terrors of parenthood, sex and responsibility into an entirely private industrial universe. Stark monochrome images and Alan Splet’s enveloping sound make the nightmare physical. Horrifying, oddly tender and very funny in places you may not expect, ERASERHEAD remains an experience that resists explanation and rewards surrender.

Introduced by Dominic Hicks and presented on 16mm with a reel intermission and programme notes.

Fashion designer by day, China Blue by night: Joanna Crane has built two lives to keep desire at a manageable distance. A private investigator and a deranged preacher are about to tear down the partition.

Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins go gloriously for broke in Ken Russell’s neon psychosexual fever dream. Pop-art colour, outrageous religious imagery and Rick Wakeman’s electronic score turn an erotic thriller into a furious comedy of repression and hypocrisy. Lurid, funny and unexpectedly vulnerable, it makes respectable behaviour look like the strangest fetish of all.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.

Three blackmailers think a married businessman is an easy payday. Harry Mitchell has other ideas. As their demands turn murderous, he starts learning what frightens each of them—and how to turn one predator against another.

Roy Scheider and Ann-Margret give this filthy Los Angeles thriller its battered heart. John Frankenheimer brings muscular precision to Elmore Leonard’s world of sleaze, crooked bargains and professional criminals making very amateur mistakes, with John Glover a wonderfully poisonous adversary.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.

Presented by Julien Allen.

A rented room, a ventilation grille, a stranger’s therapy session: Marion’s carefully ordered life begins to unravel through something she was never meant to hear. Listening to another woman’s unhappiness, the philosophy professor starts recognising the silences and compromises in her own.

Gena Rowlands makes this reckoning quietly shattering, finding tiny fractures beneath Marion’s formidable composure. Woody Allen’s intimate chamber drama, with Mia Farrow, Ian Holm and Gene Hackman, turns overheard words and unreliable memories into a devastating question: what if the life you have explained so well is the one you have failed to understand?

Presented by Agnė Qami of discreet.cine.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.

A cruel headmaster has made enemies of both his wife and his mistress. Together they devise the perfect murder. Then the body disappears—and the most frightening question becomes whether their victim is really dead.

Henri-Georges Clouzot turns damp corridors, a neglected swimming pool and two extraordinary performances into an almost unbearable machine of suspicion. Simone Signoret’s steel meets Véra Clouzot’s mounting terror in a thriller that understands how guilt makes every ordinary sound threatening. Go in knowing as little as possible; leave the secrets in the cinema.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.

Dracula needs a brain for Frankenstein’s monster. Unfortunately for baggage handler Wilbur, his is just the right size. With the Wolf Man trying to intervene and Bud Abbott refusing to believe a word, Lou Costello faces the worst delivery job in cinema.

The joke works because the monsters mean business. Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and Glenn Strange bring the genuine Universal Gothic atmosphere; Abbott and Costello supply exquisite double takes, verbal traps and escalating panic. A gloriously unlikely meeting of old Hollywood’s great comic and monstrous bodies.

Presented on 16mm with a reel intermission.