Peter Strickland

Long before immersive cinema was a thing, there was King’s Cross’s Scala Cinema. For moviegoers in ’90s London, a visit was a portal to a heady but frill-free world of movies – a big-screen Babylon where bad taste and high art were showcased with equal enthusiasm, anything went during its famous late-night marathons (the toilets could get pretty seedy) and the two resident cats, Huston and Roy, gazed on it all with a seen-it-all-before nonchalance, cadging snacks from indulgent audience members. As captured by ‘Scala!!!’, a wild and gonzo new documentary from co-directors Ali Catterall and one-time Scala programmer Jane Giles, it was also a gateway drug for young filmmakers-to-be like Ben Wheatley and Peter Strickland. The latter, the visionary behind films like ‘Berberian Sound Studio’, ‘The Duke of Burgundy’ and ‘Flux Gourmet’, shares his formative memories of going to the Scala as a teenager. ‘I first went to the Scala in 1990, a 16-year-old sixth former from Reading. I'd been to London twice with my parents to see “Star Wars” and “Return of the Jedi”, but that was my first solo trip and it was a bit of an unknown. I’d wanted to see “Eraserhead”, which I’d read about in Empire Magazine. Its iconic poster with the hair and the backlit backdrop was very popular with goths in Reading. I was never in that world but I took a punt, and the Scala was where it was showing. I used to go to the Odeon and Reading’s ABC Cinema, so it was like nothing I'd experienced. It was like “Alic