Tonight: Shadow of the Bat-Man Screening at Discovery Green, with Two Star Symphony

Yeah, there’s a crap-ton of cool stuff happening tonight — and I’ll get to that, don’t worry — but I wanted to call this one out in particular, because it’s extra-special awesome-cool.

See, like the title says, this evening (Friday, October 19th) up at Discovery Green, there’ll be a screening of the silent film Shadow of the Bat-Man, with live musical accompaniment by the incredible, quirky, avant-garde chamber music ensemble {Two Star Symphony}.

And before you ask, no, this isn’t a Christopher Nolan Batman reboot you somehow missed; it’s a movie by Andre Perkowski, who took public-domain footage of old films — some to do with Batman, some not — and assembled them together into a 1920s-style homage both to silent films and the original character.

Shadow of the Bat-Man takes parts of classic films The Bat, The Man Who Laughs, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Frankenstein, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the 1943 Batman, and splices them all together with silent film-style dialogue cards to form a remarkably coherent, very neat reboot (downgrade? un-boot? I dunno) of Batman, which also somehow includes several of the classic Batman villains. (Minor Spoler Alert: Creepiest. Joker. Ever. Including Heath Ledger’s.)

Two Star Symphony, for their part, have contributed an original score for the film, which means the music’s bound to creepy and fun as all get-out. Check out the trailer below:

Shadow of the Bat-Man starts at 7:30PM, it’s all ages, and it’s free. And holy crap, the weather’s awesome, for once. Grab a blanket and get on up to downtown this evening.