Zombie Honeymoon director Dave Gebroe, with special guest zombies Tuesday at the Pioneer Theater (Photo: STV)

(Ed. Note: This is the first entry in a new feature here called the Wednesday Centerpiece. Every week around this time, The Reeler plans to profile a New York film figure or phenomenon of particular note--at least until sleep deprivation catches up and claims my life. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the new feature, and please send along recommendations if you know or hear of a NYC cinema story you would like to read more about. -- STV)

Your eyes should adjust to the pitch black after about ten minutes, but that does not necessarily make a visit to the secretive Dr. Reinhardt van Nostrand's lair any less offsetting. You get two red candles with a table and a chair in the back aisle of the Pioneer Theater; wait for a few minutes in the ghost-cackle sound effects and the doctor will call out to you in his deliberate, cultivated German accent—cultivated, that is, from what you assume is a lifetime of horror B-movie viewing.

"I am more comfortable in the dark," the doctor boomed from his spot in the theater's distant blackness. "It reminds me of my childhood." At least that is what he told The Reeler Tuesday afternoon, when it spoke with van Nostrand about the full slate of horror films he programmed for the Pioneer through October. The theater plans to screen more than 50 genre pictures, including a collection of independent thrillers, documentaries and enough zombie films to stuff anyone on brains for a long time.

Such an exhaustive, ambitious calendar suggests the "doctor" might be the real deal when it comes to horror. He might also be the nom de spook of a full-time programmer who haunts the theater year-round, but where's the fun in deconstructing personas, especially in October?

And anyway, the guy has obviously done some serious thinking about all of this. "I think too often, zombies are stereotyped and ghettoized," van Nostrand said. "Too often, we the living think of zombies as exclusively slow, dimwitted, pasty, previously Christian, middle-class zombies. But I think it's important to recognize that zombie culture extends much, much further and that there are zombies of many different backgrounds. And also, I think it is important that zombies have an opportunity to celebrate their culture--to show their cinema both to themselves and the world so they may feel proud of being zombies and they feel proud of their accomplishments."

The doctor refers to it as a sort of "affirmative action" for zombies, and it began this week with the premiere theatrical engagement of Dave Gebroe's Zombie Honeymoon. A remarkably nuanced study of love and commitment, casual viewers inclined to skip the film based on its title alone will miss out on one of the year's most pleasant, well-made, genre-bending surprises: A blissed-out pair of honeymooners (Tracy Coogan and Graham Sibley) faces sudden crisis when a mysterious figure staggers from the Jersey Shore surf and vomits a bloody black muck onto the groom. He dies, but of course, he does not—this is a zombie movie, you know. The ensuing bloodbath tests the limits of loyalty as the newlyweds struggle to adapt to their new way of life.

Gebroe's direction allow extraordinary space for Coogan and Sibley, whose lived-in performances emphasize the genuine pathos and humor woven into Gebroe's script. "You scared me," the bloody, undead husband says at one point when his wife sneaks up behind him; that you cannot help but both believe him and belly-laugh is a testament to Zombie Honeymoon's ironic grace.

"I really wanted to make the perfect combination of a personal film and an entertaining horror film," Gebroe told The Reeler earlier this week. "There are so many people trying to get into Sundance with their 'personal stories.' And it's oh-so-very solemn and oh-so-very special and oh-so-very precious. And that really bores the shit out of me. I like a good film as much as anybody else. Whether it's an art film, a Hollywood film—it doesn't matter to me, as long as it's a good film. The idea here was to make the first horror movie that women would drag men to go see—that had a really romantic angle to it."

Such angles symbolize the Pioneer's mission at this time of year, when a documentary about a burn victim who finds spiritual solace as a cable-access zombie (I, Zombi) can settle in with genre standards like Night of the Living Dead, Zombie and even Shaun of the Dead. Ian Allen's remake of the 1922 silent sub-sub-cult classic Trapped by the Mormons—featuring a young woman struggling to resist the religion's "polygamous zombie vampires"—directly precedes the cruel, bleak thrills of Paul Fox's acclaimed The Dark Hours on Oct. 19. "A lot of the movies I was looking through, I wanted to see," Allen told The Reeler. "That's about all you can ask for in a lineup of that sort. Some of the movies are classics, and some of the movies take themselves more seriously, and others are more comedic. It's a great mix."

The October series also provides a launching pad to New York filmmakers like Susan Devine, whose Incident at Blood Gorge tells the story of a group of soldiers who experience a succession of grisly denouements while trapped on a Himalayan base during a blizzard. Devine intercut scripted scenes shot at an old New Jersey military installation with footage solicited from Himalayan climbers who had taped portions of their expeditions.

Inspired by the legend of both Himalayan monsters and the more contemporary standard of Pakistanis and Indians dying while waging war on the world's highest battleground, Devine said the resulting film sought to emphasize the scariness of everything you do not see. She sent Blood Gorge to the Pioneer one Friday last summer after reading about the October program; three days later, her film had its first-ever booking as part of the theater's weekly Bizarro Monday event.

"I just wanted to get it out there and get it out to fans," Devine said. "It's generating a lot of interest and excitement, and I didn't want to wait to position it around a certain festival. I just didn't think it was that kind of a movie. It's a horror film—it's not some Sundance life story. It's a gritty horror film. I'm realistic about my audience, and those are the people I wanted to see it."

Back in the dark, Dr. van Nostrand's benevolence reasserted itself. And even if I could not see him wink, I could have sworn I heard his tongue strike his cheek pretty hard, if only for a moment. "This is in part, I believe, a sort of an incubator for people working on the periphery of cinema—and of life," he said. "I think it is important for this kind of space—this kind of home—to exist. We know that documentaries have DocuClub. We know that Latin American cinema has Cinema Tropical. We know that Asian American cinema in New York has Asian CineVision. Well, horror and the darker side—sometimes intersecting with those other groups—has Bizarro Monday. And in October, it is a time for the Mondays to take over the entire month so that the incubator can support the child."