Special Events and Series
We’re Moving!
Our lease was not renewed in 2025 and we have moved out of 1403 NE 50th. Plans are underway to relocate the cinema and we need your help to build an even grander Grand Illusion!
Now Playing
Coming Soon
Demons – 4K Restoration
- Monday, May 19, 2025, 7:30pm
Screening location: Here-After (21+) – alley entrance, 2505 1st Ave, Seattle
A beautiful restoration of the cult classic horror movie in honor of its 40th anniversary!
Welcome to the most life-enriching Italian terror-party of 1985. Produced by Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA) and directed by Lamberto Bava, DEMONS follows a panorama of punks, preppies, and ne’er-do-wells as they get trapped in a movie theater and possessed by gut-shredding Satanic demonoids. Featuring songs by Mötley Crüe and Billy Idol, gloopy effects, and the iconic Geretta Geretta in a lead role, this is the most fun you’ll ever have in a movie theater while watching a movie about beasties on the loose in a movie theater.
Please note: Here-After is a 21 and over establishment. The entrance is via the alley in back of The Crocodile building. Get there early to order tasty beverages from the bar and delicious food from Tat’s Deli!
“Demons is a monument to the horror genre’s potential for Grand Guignol beauty.” Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine
“This is a classic party movie that you have to watch with friends and a load of beer because you will not be bored at all… Bava’s horror film is a cinematic masterpiece, pure and simple.” Felix Vasquez, Cinema Crazed
Meditation, Creativity, Peace
- Wednesday, May 28, 2025, 7:00pm
Screening location: Here-After (21+) – alley entrance, 2505 1st Ave, Seattle
Free screening! RSVP via the “Buy Tickets” button.
MEDITATION, CREATIVITY, PEACE follows David Lynch on a 16-country tour of Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America to spread the word about the individual and global impact of meditation. With equal parts wit and passion, the documentary shows Lynch’s commitment to Transcendental Meditation as a way of changing the world, starting from within.
The film also offers rare insight into Lynch’s creative process through interviews and revealing moments from the tour.
The feature will be preceded by a special half hour compilation of clips and shorts! And be sure to arrive early to claim your seat, grab a tasty beverage from the bar, order delicious food from Tat’s Deli, and enjoy a pre-show full of David Lynch-directed music videos!
Part of To Live Is To Dream: A Northwest Tribute to David Lynch.
Please note: Here-After is a 21 and over establishment. The entrance is via the alley in back of The Crocodile building.
“[Meditation, Creativity, Peace] will surely interest Lynch’s most devoted fans, whose number is not trivial, and is an intriguing present-day look at a practice whose popularity peaked when the Beatles discovered it.” The Hollywood Reporter
Hundreds of Beavers
- Thursday, Feb 27, 2025, 8:00pm
- Thursday, Mar 27, 2025, 8:00pm
- Thursday, Apr 24, 2025, 8:00pm
- Thursday, May 29, 2025, 8:00pm
Screening location: Central Cinema – 1411 21st Ave, Seattle
A dam good time at the movies! Fifteenth encore screening!
Our friends at Central Cinema are generously helping us keep the beavers gnawing away while we search for a new home. 60% of ticket sales go to our relocation fund!
In this 19th century, supernatural winter epic, a drunken applejack salesman must go from zero to hero and become North America’s greatest fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers.
Created by Mike Cheslik and Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, the duo behind the modern cult hit LAKE MICHIGAN MONSTER (2018).
Named one of the 10 best movies of 2024 by Ty Burr of The Washington Post and Amy Nicholson of The Los Angeles Times.
“Starts strange, gets stranger, and yet remains resolutely adorable… embraces the defiant glee of art cinema and distills it into something so thoroughly pure and sincere that it is surely hard not to fall in love with it.” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Alliance of Women Film Journalists
“It’s sure to develop a significant cult following with its unique mix of silent-era slapstick, animation elements, theme-park-style critter costumes, and general air of inspired absurdity.” Dennis Harvey, Variety
“Steroidally swollen with gags and smarts.” Guy Maddin
Desert Hearts
- Tuesday, Jun 3, 2025, 7:15pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
40th anniversary of Donna Deitch's landmark classic!
Deitch’s swooning and sensual first narrative feature, DESERT HEARTS, was groundbreaking upon its release in 1985: a love story about two women, produced and directed by a woman. In this 1959-set film, adapted from a beloved novel by Jane Rule, straitlaced East Coast professor Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) arrives in Reno to file for divorce, but winds up catching the eye of someone new: the younger, free-spirited Cay (Patricia Charbonneau)--touching off a slow seduction that unfolds against a breathtaking desert landscape. With smoldering chemistry between its two leads, an evocative jukebox soundtrack, and vivid cinematography by Robert Elswit, DESERT HEARTS beautifully exudes a sense of tender yearning and emotional candor.
“Desert Hearts remains one of cinema’s greatest lesbian love stories.” Heather Hogan, Autostraddle
“Startlingly intimate and unabashedly erotic.” Michael Rechtshoffen, The Hollywood Reporter
“When is a film not just a film? When it’s a cultural and sociological icon like Desert Hearts.” Lydia Marcus, The Advocate
Lucky
- Monday, Jun 9, 2025, 7:15pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
Starring the legendary Harry Dean Stanton and featuring a supporting performance by David Lynch, LUCKY follows the spiritual journey of a 90-year-old atheist and the quirky characters that inhabit his off-the-map desert town. Having out-lived and out-smoked all of his contemporaries, the fiercely independent Lucky (Stanton) finds himself at the precipice of life, thrust into a journey of self-exploration, leading towards that which is so often unattainable: enlightenment. Acclaimed character actor John Carroll Lynch's directorial debut, LUCKY is at once a love letter to the life and career of Harry Dean Stanton as well as a meditation on mortality, loneliness, spirituality, and human connection.
An addendum to To Live Is To Dream: A Northwest Tribute to David Lynch.
“There’s an extra-dramatic thrill to watching [David Lynch and Stanton], who have known each other for at least thirty years, play old friends… Love and respect light every moment.” Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com
“Lucky is a remarkable film, a living testament to the talent and formidable screen presence of the late Harry Dean Stanton. I think we are the lucky ones to have such a beautiful film to remember the actor by.” Leonard Maltin
Before Sunrise and Before Sunset double feature
- Monday, Jun 16, 2025, 6:30pm
Screening location: Northwest Film Forum – 1515 12th Ave, Seattle
Richard Linklater's classic romance, BEFORE SUNRISE, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Join us for a double feature of it and the beloved follow-up, BEFORE SUNSET, on June 16th, the date Jesse and Céline first came into each others' lives.
BEFORE SUNRISE opens with a chance encounter between two solitary young strangers. After they hit it off on a train bound for Vienna, the Paris university student Céline (Julie Delpy) and the scrappy American tourist Jesse (Ethan Hawke) impulsively decide to spend a day together before he returns to the U.S. the next morning. As the pair roam the streets of the stately city, Linklater’s tenderly observant gaze captures the uncertainty and intoxication of young love, from the first awkward stirrings of attraction to the hopeful promise that Céline and Jesse make upon their inevitable parting.
In the breathtaking follow-up, Céline tracks down Jesse, now an author, at the tail end of his book tour in Paris, with only a few hours left before he is to board a flight back home to the States. Meeting almost a decade after their short-lived romance in Vienna, the pair find their chemistry rekindled by increasingly candid exchanges about professional setbacks, marital disappointments, and the compromises of adulthood. Impelled by an urgent sense of the transience of human connection, BEFORE SUNSET remains Richard Linklater’s most seductive experiment with time’s inexorable passage and the way love can seem to stop it in its tracks.
“Taken together–which they should be–Before Sunrise and Before Sunset make up one of the supreme movie romances of the post-’80s era, an affair of the film and flesh to make the heart leap and the mind dance.” Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune
Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos (with Harley Flanagan in-person)
- Monday, Jun 30, 2025, 6:30pm
- Monday, Jun 30, 2025, 9:00pm
Screening location: Here-After (21+) – alley entrance, 2505 1st Ave, Seattle
Exclusive screenings of the brand new documentary about Cro-Mags founder Harley Flanagan, with Harley and his wife and manager, Laura Flanagan, joining for in-person Q&As after each showing!
Founder of the pioneering band Cro-Mags and a legend of the NYC Hardcore scene, Harley Flanagan is a punk rock icon who has defied the odds and come out the other side. But while his career has been a no-holds-barred ride, WIRED FOR CHAOS isn’t just about the music, it’s about a man forged in fire – a survivor of neglect, sexual abuse, drugs, violence and PTSD – who’s lived to tell the tale.
Featuring interviews with Henry Rollins, Flea, Darryl Jenifer of Bad Brains, and more!
Please note: Here-After is a 21 and over establishment. The entrance is via the alley in back of The Crocodile building. Get there early to order tasty beverages from the bar and delicious food from Tat’s Deli!
“Chances are if it happened in New York and it was important and interesting, Harley Flanagan was somewhere in the room.” Anthony Bourdain
“This film floored me… It’s a glorious portrait of the human spirit and of a person’s ability to change for the better.” Steve Kopian, Unseen Films