COVER undeadCenter

Midnight madness

MICKEY REECE HAS CURATED A SLATE OF MIDNIGHT MOVIES FOR THE FIRST ANNUAL UNDEADCENTER PROGRAM DURING THIS YEAR’S FESTIVAL.

By Matt Dinger

Mickey Reece has been showing his movies at deadCenter for years, but this year, he’s showing some genre selections he personally curated for the first undeadCenter program.

“All the big festivals have a midnight section, and it’s too big to ignore now,” Reece said.

His newest movie, Country Gold, will premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival and screen at Fantastic Fest this summer.

“I’ve been on tour with movies since 2018,” Reece said. “When I played the first genre festival, Fantastic Fest in 2018, with Strike, Dear Mistress, and Cure His Heart, the genre community was kind of the first one to accept me. My film festival experience as a filmmaker has always been genre fests. Going to all these festivals and then realizing we need something like that here in Oklahoma City. We don’t have that. It was a situation like, ‘I don’t necessarily want to do this, but if I don’t do it, who will?’”

The first annual undeadCenter lineup includes three features: Deadstream, directed by Joseph Winter and Vanessa Winter; Piggy, directed by Carlota Pereda; and After Blue, directed by Bertrand Mandico.

The shorts portion of the programming includes seven films.

Each film to be screened was hand-selected and sought by Reece himself.

“For this program, it’s all me reaching out to the filmmakers or the distributors and getting the movies that I wanted, so this

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A still image from After Blue. Photo provided. one is going to be more special than any other ones because I already know that we’re going to expand it next year and probably have to start including some submissions, which is not a bad thing. That’s cool, because hopefully now that this is out there, maybe we’ll get more genre submissions,” Reece said.

All of the undeadCenter programming will screen at Harkins Theatre Bricktown 16 and even though they are considered “midnight movies,” they will begin at 9 p.m. each night of the festival.

“I’m going to have some special guests that are within the community, like the Mondo Monday guys and VHS and Chill, come help me present and kind of describe to the audience that doesn’t know what a midnight movie is. This stuff isn’t, like, super prominent here in Oklahoma City but it doesn’t not exist. There’s people doing it, so I want to make sure that they are involved too. It’s community building and this is a community that we’re building,” Reece said.