How a horror movie club scares the pants off Ulster for charity - and sees love bloom among the shadows

That’s because a film club showing old monster movies has been raising hundreds for charities around Northern Ireland, taking time every two months to dig a mix of classics and cheesy B-movies out of the crypt.

Taking place in a room above Belfast’s Sunflower pub, the Rue Morgue Film Club specialises in flicks from the 1930s to the 1960s, returning the likes of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi to the silver screen.

It grew out of a horror-themed book club, but as organiser Victoria Brown explained it also allows her to express her lifelong passion for creepy old films – especially those starring Vincent Price.

“I’ve loved film all my life, I studied it at Queen’s University, but I’ve been obsessed with horror since I was about five years old,” she told the News Letter. “I thought a way to explore and share that love would be to show movies, and get people out watching something they might not see.

“One of my favourite films is ‘House On Haunted Hill’ with Vincent Price. When I was a kid we used to go caravanning in Ballywalter, and I borrowed my Granda’s laptop to watch it in the car on a DVD I got from Poundland. I loved it, and I wanted everyone else to be able to feel like that. It was the first one we showed.”

That movie’s director, William Castle, was infamous for his gimmicks – offering a hefty life insurance pay-out to anyone who died of fright watching his flicks, for example, or rigging joy-buzzers under cinema seats that would go off when the titular creepy-crawly escapes in ‘The Tingler’. For ‘House On Haunted Hill’, he had plastic skeletons on fishing wire zooming over the heads of the audience.

“Sadly, we weren’t able to recreate that,” laughed Victoria. “There wasn’t enough room in the pub.”

When she first setup the club in 2022, she thought it would mainly appeal to people like herself, expecting a crowd of horror fanatics in their early thirties. Instead, her regulars are everyone from university students to a couple in their seventies. “If you’re into something you love, age doesn’t matter,” she says.

In addition to raising money for charitable bodies, which Victoria says she wanted to do to give something back to the community, Rue Morgue also benefits from its relaxed and informal location.

“The Sunflower’s very welcoming,” she said. “They encourage clubs ours, they like to be a part of the culture of Belfast.

“Plus it enables us to keep costs and ticket prices down, which given the cost of living is important. We want people to come out and have a good time, so keeping prices low is vital.”

And as Victoria can attest, sometimes love blossoms among the shadows – she met her partner through the film club, the pair bonding over a double bill of ‘White Zombie’ and ‘The Terror’.

“Chris is on the board of a local mental health charity, Metal For Life, who we were raising money for,” she says. “He was late; everybody else was on time, but he was late. Then he started coming to the film club and we’ve been together ever since.”