This screening continues our Cult Cinema Weekender - a celebration of strange and wonderful supernatural films as part of Hastings' Jack in the Green Mayday celebrations!

Hosted and curated by Katie Spooner from Strange Frames, our film club that celebrates the offbeat, grotesque and arcane.

Magick Hastings is a poetic exploration and an esoteric mystery tour of the town’s occult layers, with filmmakers Michael Smith and Maxy Bianco introducing viewers to tarot seers, trance-inducing witch doctors, and local occult dandies and adepts living in the spirit of Uncle Aleister, characters who embody the town’s eccentric, left-field spirit.

Stops include a consecrated, working Russian Orthodox chapel where the Holy Spirit is invoked each Sunday, hidden in a suburban Edwardian back garden, and a chapel of an altogether darker nature, underneath the West Hill and the Jack-in-the-Green’s Maypole, where the idol of a Celtic god of the underworld hewn out of the subterranean rock troubles the shadows of the Smugglers Caves, and is said to disturb the goings on there.

Michael will also be screening his much-loved film Stranger on the Shore, a wonky love-letter to his hometown made in 2015 when it was still all strange and new to him. The film proved to be the seed of his new novel, Stranger on the Shore, 26 numbered copies being the very first available to buy on the night!