Chicagoans may have met Stephanie Sack when she owned Vive la Femme, a Bucktown boutique for young women of size and style. Today, her reach extends overseas as Marketer Emerita for Barge Lady Cruises. Yet Sack is best known as a “Horror Hostess with the Mostess” for her cinematically unique screenings across the Windy City.
This December, she’s putting together a Rocky Horror Picture Show costume party (Dec. 8) at the International Museum of Surgical Science. But before guests can see what’s on the slab at the “Don’t Be It, Screen It” event, Sack stopped to chat with Rebellious.
Janet Arvia: What is your approach to programming film events?
Stephanie Sack: From high-energy local voices to award-winning maestros from Italy, connecting the right speaker with the right screening is one of the most exciting and satisfying parts of my productions. I never want a film event to feel like somebody simply threw up a screen and hit play. The guests, the conversation, the venue, the audience—all of it should become part of the experience.
My programming is often an act of double discovery. I partner with venues that may be off the beaten path for filmgoers but are well worth discovering in their own right. The setting is never merely a room containing a screen; it becomes part of the film’s meaning. A medical nightmare shown in an intimate room inside a museum devoted to surgical science, fantastique cinema presented inside a French cultural center, or three nights of international giallo paired with gelato and late-night theatricality can make films of the past newly immediate.
My programming assumes—if it does not outright demand—intelligence, presence, insight, and scholarship from the audience. But intellectual ambition does not need to be a drag. I refuse to underestimate people, and I refuse to explain a film into submission before they have experienced it. My introductions open doors; they do not close down interpretations. I am serious about cinema without insisting that cinema—or the experience of watching it—must always be serious.
The films I screen are entirely of their moment and somehow totally outside it. They carry the politics, anxieties, aesthetics, and preoccupations of the cultures that produced them, while containing something unruly—an image, performance, twist, or reveal—that escaped its original context and continues speaking across decades. Historical context does not imprison a film; rather, it reveals how strange, daring, funny, disturbing, and unexpectedly relevant that film can remain.
In addition to the upcoming Rocky Horror event, what can Chicago film fans look forward to?
In December, I’m returning to the Alliance Française de Chicago for Champagne, Chocolat & Chabrol, a double feature pairing The Champagne Murders and Merci pour le chocolat with, naturally, Champagne and chocolate tastings. Claude Chabrol is a criminally overlooked contributor to the French New Wave, but where some of his contemporaries exploded cinematic convention, Chabrol brought a delightfully damning sheen to the gloriously bourgeois. His films are exquisitely elegant, wickedly observant, and deeply revealing of beautiful people behaving badly.
So, you’re not just well-versed in Italian “Giallo” horror films. You’re an enthusiast of European cinema from the 1960s to the ’80s.
Oh, absolutely. I am cinematically omnivorous. Giallo may be one of my great obsessions, but I love French Fantastique, British Hammer Horror, Soviet Science Fiction, Czech New Wave, Spanish Fantaterror, Belgian Bizarre; and all the wonderfully strange border-crossing cinematic niches that flourished from roughly the 1960s through the 1980s.
British horror fascinates me in all its forms—from folk horror, where landscape, ritual, and tradition become uncanny, to Hammer, which understood that horror could also be lush, sensual, colorful, and gloriously theatrical.
I love Czech New Wave because beauty, absurdity, politics, fantasy, and experimentation coexist so naturally. Soviet science fiction explores enormous philosophical questions instead of simply staging spectacle. French Fantastique can be incredibly elegant while simultaneously becoming completely unhinged. And Italian genre cinema—Giallo especially—can turn murder, architecture, fashion, music, psychology, and pure visual excess into something almost operatic.
What I respond to most is cinema that seduces me and unsettles me: visually ravishing, emotionally complicated, psychologically demented, probably melancholy, usually outrageous, and completely committed to its own strange and beautiful world. Give me atmosphere. Dazzle me with ambiguity. Put me firmly in the hands of a master.