Champaign-Urbana Area Film Events: October 2026
I've been trying to get things a little more organized, so I actually made a page to explain how people can submit their own screening info, to make these a little easier, and I have my first submissions this month.
As always you can also bookmark the CU Independent Film Calendar, or C-U Blogfidential, and follow The Chambana Film Society on Facebook or Instagram, sign up for the Chambana Film Society newsletter.
While DoctoberFest started last night, there's still 14 screenings still to go, so most of these listings are for that, but there are 6 screenings from Film Fanatic Nights, and 2 Ebert Center screenings, as well as the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
This is an insane month for movies, and I used longer synopsis' than I have been, so be prepared for a long read!
📅 Thursday, October 8: The Last Movie Critic @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 7pm - $12
Fresh from this year's EbertFest, The Last Movie Critic is a documentary portrait of Roger Ebert, not just the critic, but the idea he became. Told through Roger's own words, the film follows his voice as it guides us through his life's work and the philosophies that shaped it, anchored at Ebertfest, the festival he created to share the movies he loved directly with audiences. Through the filmmakers he championed and the community he built around the belief that cinema could make us more human, the film becomes a celebration of empathy, of sitting together in the dark, and of one man's gift to everyone who ever felt something there.
With post-film Q&A with the filmmakers.
📅 Thursday, October 8: The Black Cat @ Shocktober
📍 The Scratching Post - 6:30pm - $12
A delirious pre-Code horror classic, this 1930s nightmare is less a traditional monster movie than a collision of German Expressionism, Art Deco modernism, and pure cinematic weirdness. Its bold imagery, sinister eroticism, and gleefully macabre tone make it one of the strangest and most visually distinctive horror films of the classical Hollywood era. For fans of cult cinema, pre-Code Hollywood, and movies that seem to have escaped from another dimension, this is an essential big-screen discovery. The real attraction of this rarely seen gem is the legendary pairing of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, reunited after The Mummy and given characters that allow their contrasting screen personas to collide spectacularly. But the film belongs just as much to Edgar G. Ulmer, whose strikingly economical direction wastes no time plunging audiences into an atmosphere of ominous architecture, occult obsession, sexual tension, and escalating madness.
📅 Friday, October 9: All Skate @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 7pm - $12
ALL SKATE is the full history of roller rinks and roller skating as told by a diverse group of people who are currently involved with roller skating and rinks, and through my point of view having grown up in a roller rink built by my grandfather.
We cover everything from the early inline skating inventions, the patented Plimpton four-wheel design which prevailed, and then go though multiple phases of popularity including 1920s skaters including vaudeville performers and silent films, professional roller sports, the Skating Vanities, the 40s/50s during and post WWII when we expanded to over 5000 mostly family-owned roller rinks in the US, to the huge 1970s roller disco era, the return of roller blades in the 80s.
We also visit the times of decline over the years, especially since the 2000s, and the reasons many rinks couldn’t survive, visiting many former roller rinks to see what the buildings hold today, including retail stores, homeless shelters, and a sad return to my family’s rink which is now an indoor shooting range. But we end on a high note, with the amazing roller skating resurgence brought on by Covid, including skating in the Super Bowl for the first time ever in 2024.
With post-film Q&A with director April Wright.
📅 Saturday, October 10: Cookie Queens @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 1:30pm - $12
A celebration of girlhood and the complexities that come with it, Cookie Queens is a coming-of-age story about the joys, pressures, and tensions woven into one of America’s most cherished rituals: Girl Scout Cookie season.
Selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, and Audience Award Winner at South By Southwest Film Festival. 89% on Rotten Tomatoes.
📅 Saturday, October 10: Joybubbles @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 3:30pm - $1! (This screening sponsored by The Alliance For Inclusion & Respect)
A boy discovers he can control the global telephone system by whistling a magic tone. Born blind and yearning for connection, his early obsession with the telephone sparks a subculture that shapes the future of hacking and technology.
📅 Saturday, October 10: The Last Picture Shows @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 6pm - $12
Filmmaker Rustin Thompson journeys into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life: the movie theater. On the trip, he finds long abandoned and forgotten cinemas; movie houses that have fallen into disrepair; theaters recently closed, theaters struggling to hold on, and theaters that—thanks to their thoughtful caretakers—are not only surviving but thriving.
100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
📅 Saturday, October 10: Pinball: Beyond The Bumpers @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 6pm - $12
Pinball: Beyond The Bumpers is the most complete and visually dynamic documentary ever made about Pinball. From its origins in the 1600s, through its wartime survival, cultural reinventions, up to its current-day resurgence, Pinball: Beyond The Bumpers takes you on an amazing journey.
This show explores the modern-day business of pinball and dives into its unique connection with Hollywood, Rock Music Icons, and American pop culture. This documentary also confronts the game’s public image problems and its decades-long battle with sexism, gambling, and the rise of the almighty video game.
More than just a history of Pinball, this is a cultural mirror, revealing how each era of the American landscape has changed this game. Over fifteen years in the making, this is the definitive, high-energy story of an Iconic American Game.
📅 Sunday, October 11: Silver Screamers @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - Noon - $12
Faced with budget limitations for traditional documentary financing, filmmaker Sean Cisterna taps into a government funding subsidy aimed at keeping senior citizens active. He visits various retirement homes to recruit a spirited, largely inexperienced cast and crew of older adults—many of whom do not even like or watch horror movies.
91% on Rotten Tomatoes.
📅 Sunday, October 11: A Brief History Of Chasing Storms @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 2pm - $12
From The Wizard of Oz to the Twister movies, the tornado has become an iconic American symbol. In A Brief History of Chasing Storms, Chicago filmmaker Curtis Miller takes us on a road-trip through “tornado alley”—an ever-widening region that extends from Texas and Oklahoma across the Great Plains and up into Wisconsin and Minnesota. Along the way, he reflects on the multifaceted myths and histories around the famously destructive weather events, recounted by those who have been impacted as well as by opportunists looking to profit.
From a guide at the Twister Museum to the owner of a company that builds tornado shelters and a team of intrepid storm chasers, tornado-philes of all stripes are featured as the film traverses the U.S., capturing the landscape in carefully staged tableaux. Through an evocative series of vignettes, quirky yet swirling with meaning in a world increasingly reshaped by environmental catastrophe, this thoughtful cinematic essay maps out the ways in which history, inequality, climate, colonization, and capitalism are entwined with these natural disasters.
📅 Sunday, October 11: CatVideoFest 2026 @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 4:30 - $12
Our fuzzy overlords return to the big screen! Each year, CatVideoFest curates a compilation reel of the latest, best cat videos culled from countless hours of unique submissions and sourced animations, music videos, and, of course, classic internet powerhouses (Keyboard Cat, we’re looking at you).
📅 Monday, October 12: The History Of Concrete @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 7pm - $12
Following the finale of his acclaimed HBO series “How To with John Wilson”, NYC documentarian John Wilson looks to the bedrock of his beloved New York City for inspiration and structure. Concrete, the world's most widely used building material, appears as an ever-present life force, and John sets out to make the definitive documentary on the matter. After attending a workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie, he decides to use the industry-approved Hallmark formula to tell this seemingly drab story and increase his movie’s appeal. But his foundation soon begins to crumble—literally and figuratively—as he struggles to balance artistic freedom with the realities of the modern film industry.
2026 Sundance Film Festival. 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
📅 Saturday, October 17: If Hafez Wrote A Haiku For Cowboys
📍 Spurlock Museum - 1pm - FREE
Filmed in a cinéma vérité style across 8 cities in Iran, Japan and the U.S. and edited with the pulse of a haiku poet, this feature depicts 18 fictional mundane scenarios on regret, longing and love that play across a split-screen tapestry. The slice-of-life plots incorporate a Japanese father who awkwardly reconnects with his estranged daughter, a young Iranian woman who desperately desires a red car to impress her blind date, and a black American cowboy who searches the city on a bicycle. More personalities emerge from a yellow dress, black chadors, and fake Indigenous regalia set against a visual panorama of red shrines in Kyoto, blue muqarnas of Tehran mosques and orange boulders of Colorado. Characters walk, drive, juggle, laugh, mourn, eat, love and regret amidst distinct landscapes of busy subways, arid deserts, quiet cemeteries, and lively festivals. Each story starts in one city and ends in another never fully resolved as everyone struggles on a search for something or someone. Sometimes people speak at the same time overlapping in multiple languages as settings jump between countries—all work to depict a commonly shared ordinariness often forgotten in a divisive world.
With post film Q&A with producer Anida Yoeu.
📅 Saturday, October 17: The Lorraine @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 4pm - $12
In the heart of Memphis, Walter and Loree Bailey’s Lorraine Motel was both a thriving hub of Black entrepreneurship and a destination for the greatest musicians of the 20th century—a place where Civil Rights demonstrations were planned, musical hits were written, and Black and white artists created history together. A rare, black-owned establishment, The Lorraine served as a safe haven and sanctuary for Black travelers during the Jim Crow era. Then, on April 4, 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. outside Room 306 cleaved that history in two, and the world forgot everything else.
Urgent yet deeply joyful, THE LORRAINE is both a reckoning with the Civil Rights Movement’s unfinished legacy and a celebration of Black excellence and resilience. Renowned documentarian Sam Pollard uses archival footage and music along with the voices of those who lived it to vividly revive what was lost. The film ultimately becomes a story of reclamation: of people, space, history, and identity. Of transforming trauma into light.
THE LORRAINE reminds us that history is never as neatly resolved as we’re taught to believe, and that the fight for justice is still very much evolving.
📅 Saturday, October 17: Once Upon A Time In Harlem @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 6:30pm - $12
A decade after his death, genre-defying filmmaker William Greaves has one last trick up his sleeve with what he considered the most important event he captured on film: a 1972 party he engineered with the living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance.
2026 Sundance, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto & New York Festivals. 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
📅 Saturday, October 17: Santa Sangre @ Shocktober
📍 Cloud Mountain Kombucha - 8pm - $12
A hallucinatory descent into madness and memory, this masterwork stands as one of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most ferocious and personal visions—equal parts surrealist nightmare, operatic melodrama, and cult initiation rite. Emerging after years of myth-making around the director’s unrealized projects, the film marked a triumphant return that reaffirmed Jodorowsky’s status as cinema’s high priest of the subconscious. Drenched in ritual, symbolism, and Grand Guignol intensity, it plays less like a conventional narrative than a waking dream engineered to unnerve and mesmerize a roomful of viewers at once. Decades later, its power remains undiminished: shocking, hypnotic, and unmistakably the work of a singular auteur whose influence continues to ripple through cult and midnight cinema.
Content Warnings: Graphic violence and gore, murder, disturbing imagery, sexual content, nudity, religious imagery, psychological trauma, body horror, and themes of abuse and incest.
📅 Sunday, October 18: NAZA @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 7pm - $12
Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Directors’s Statement: We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible. While filming over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanisation of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like?
Many of the revelations in the film were published almost immediately as we learned of them, in the months following the October 7th attacks, by The Guardian (one of NAZA‘s producers), in collaboration with reporting partners +972 Magazine and Local Call. The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence. It is up to all of us to break that silence.
5 Awards & the longest standing ovation in history at the Venice Film Festival. 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
📅 Tuesday, October 20: The Hunger @ Shocktober
📍 Amy's Place - 6pm - $12
A landmark of stylish 1980s horror, this sensual, decadent vampire film transformed the genre into something closer to an art object. At its center is a centuries-old lesbian couple whose glamorous existence begins to unravel when mortality intrudes, giving the film an erotic and emotionally charged dimension that was strikingly unconventional for mainstream cinema of its era. Long before becoming one of Hollywood's most commercially successful visual stylists, Tony Scott announced himself with a debut of extraordinary confidence. His music-video sensibility—fluid camerawork, saturated imagery, slow motion, and hypnotic editing—collides with gothic romanticism to create a world of beauty, desire, decay, and eternal loneliness. Catherine Deneuve radiates icy elegance, David Bowie brings unforgettable rock-star charisma, and Susan Sarandon delivers a fierce, sensual performance as the woman drawn into their immortal world. Set to an unforgettable post-punk soundtrack, it remains one of the most visually intoxicating, erotically charged, and genuinely distinctive vampire films ever made.
Content Warnings: Graphic blood and violence, sexual content, nudity, vampirism, death, body horror, disturbing imagery, and mature themes.
📅 Thursday, October 22: 2026 Roger Ebert Lecture
📍 Spurlock Museum - 4pm - FREE
Join the College of Media's Ebert Center for the annual Roger Ebert Lecture. Allyson Nadia Field, professor and chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, will focus on her book Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss That Changed Film History (2026). Her research spans early silent film, with a particular focus on Black performers. Her book traces the rediscovery, identification, and significance of an 1898 film that represents the earliest portrayal of Black affection on screen. Rare film clips will be featured throughout the presentation.
Attendees can join this free event in person or register to join via Zoom.
📅 Saturday, October 24: The Fly @ Shocktober
📍 Analog Wine Library - 8pm - $12
A landmark of modern horror and one of the defining achievements of David Cronenberg's career, this astonishing fusion of science fiction, romance, and body horror turns a classic monster premise into something profoundly human. Cronenberg, one of cinema's great chroniclers of physical transformation and psychological obsession, uses grotesque imagery not simply to shock but to explore aging, illness, sexuality, mortality, and the terror of losing control of one's own body. At the center is a career-defining performance from Jeff Goldblum, who transforms from eccentric scientist to increasingly horrifying creature with extraordinary physical and emotional commitment. Geena Davis gives the film its emotional center, making the increasingly gruesome transformation genuinely heartbreaking. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Makeup, the film remains a triumph of practical effects — and an experience that demands to be seen on the big screen. Visceral, tragic, strangely beautiful, and deeply disturbing, it is Cronenberg's science-fiction nightmare at its most powerful.
Content Warnings: Graphic body horror, gore, vomiting, bodily transformation, violence, sexual content, disturbing imagery, death, and psychological distress.
📅 Tuesday, October 27: Night Of The Living Dead @ Shocktober
📍 The Virginia Theatre - 7pm - $10
George A. Romero’s 1968 horror masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead, follows a group of panicked survivors trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse as flesh-eating ghouls lay siege to the house. The movie is celebrated for revolutionizing the modern zombie genre.
Featuring:
Daniel Kraus, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and author of Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World
📅 Thursday, October 29: Suspiria
📍 Spurlock Museum - 7pm - FREE
The Knight Auditorium at the Spurlock Museum on campus upgraded its projector to a DCP (digital cinema package) system this summer, thanks to joint funding from the Spurlock and the Ebert Center for Film Studies. This makes the Knight Auditorium the first venue on campus capable of providing film industry-level resolution standards for the optical enjoyment of the whole Illinois community.
Please join us as we inaugurate the Spurlock’s new projector with a colorfully spectacular screening of Dario Argento’s horror film Suspiria (Italy, 1977, English dub). An American ballet student (Jessica Harper) enrolls in a prestigious German dance academy as ancient supernatural forces impose their will on the students in increasingly gruesome ways. Director of photography Lucian Tovoli supervised the film’s recent 4K restoration.
This event is free and open to the public and presented by the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies.
📅 Saturday, October 31: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
📍 The Virginia Theatre - 7:30pm Doors - 8:30pm Show - $10
Rocky Horror is back at the Virginia. Get your tickets early, it sold out last year.
We'll be back with a handful of free tickets for Time Warp (see below)
📅 Saturday, October 31: The Witch @ Shocktober
📍 The Literary - 10:30pm - $10
A landmark of modern horror and the astonishing feature debut of Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse, The Northman, Nosferatu), this chilling tale of superstition, isolation, and religious paranoia helped usher in a new era of intelligent, atmospheric horror. Drawing extensively from period diaries, folklore, and historical records, Eggers creates a world of astonishing authenticity, immersing audiences in the fears and anxieties of colonial New England. Rather than relying on conventional jump scares, the film builds dread through meticulous craftsmanship: candlelit interiors, haunting sound design, stark natural landscapes, and an overwhelming sense that something is profoundly wrong. Every detail contributes to an atmosphere of mounting paranoia as faith, family, and identity begin to unravel. Featuring a breakout performance by Anya Taylor-Joy, this modern folk-horror classic is a remarkably assured debut — hypnotic, disturbing, and utterly immersive. It's the kind of film that demands to be experienced in a dark theater, where its creeping dread can take full effect.
Content Warnings: Horror violence, disturbing imagery, child death, animal violence, religious extremism, psychological distress, nudity, and occult themes.
📅 Sunday, November 1: Time Warp @ DoctoberFest
📍 Savoy 16 + IMAX - 4pm - $12
Fifty years ago, The Rocky Horror Picture Show burst onto the scene and blew everyone's minds — a glorious, campy, sexy, utterly bizarre midnight ritual that turned movie-going into something you did rather than just watched.
For misfits, dreamers and the delightfully weird, Rocky Horror became their sanctuary. And for the queer community especially, it was something even more powerful: the one place you could feel completely, gloriously free.
Today, that freedom has never felt more precious — or more fragile.
Lights up on Rock Springs, Wyoming — a dusty boomtown in one of the country's most conservative states — where 25-year-old Kenny Starling has done something audacious: opened the first drag and queer theater company in town. Their debut show? A shadow cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Kenny's mission: to bring queer visibility, joy, and acceptance to the high desert plains of Wyoming.
TIME WARP follows Kenny and his extraordinary cast as they rehearse, discover, and transform — lacing up corsets, stepping into heels, and finding that every performance is equal parts joy and defiance.
Wyoming calls itself the "Equality State," but Kenny believes his fearless cast — and the audiences who show up — might finally make that true, at least inside the Broadway Theater on a Friday night.
TIME WARP is a celebration of joyful self-expression, found family, and the radical, timeless act of being yourself.
That's everything! See you next month.
