The Beacon Cinema earned my devotion one night at the tail end of 2023. My obsession with the mid-century British writer of “strange stories” Robert Aickman had led me to the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas, a small-screen tradition of adapting classic ghost stories each December. That Christmas Eve, the Beacon was showing 1968’s black-and-white Whistle and I’ll Come to You, an adaptation of an M. R. James ghost story that is often cited as the inspiration for the BBC series.
At the beginning of the show—lights dimmed, house packed—Beacon co-owner Tommy Swenson strode down the steps of the small theater holding a flickering candle. Face aglow, he read an invocation that summoned the correct spirit(s) for the evening, then warned us, gently, not to laugh at the film’s ending. Everyone obeyed, and the depiction of a scholar’s mind coming completely undone was allowed to unspool just as it should.
Face aglow, he read an invocation that summoned the correct spirit(s) for the evening, then warned us, gently, not to laugh at the film’s ending.
I was hooked. Here was this idiosyncratic masterpiece I would never otherwise see in a theater—the kind of thing only a select few weirdos care to know about, but those who care, really care. Since then, I’ve been back to the Beacon for giallo, Czech new wave, Czech gothic fantasy, Japanese magic realism, Soviet horror, and other types of magical horror fantasy. I don’t even really consider myself a film buff. But in a culture increasingly engineered to be frictionless—optimized, algorithmically recommended, and scrubbed of troublesome edges—it’s a balm to the soul to have this bastion of darkly wonderful highbrow-lowbrow taste, always so unapologetically itself.
The pillars of the Beacon, as set out in a program celebrating their fifth anniversary, are these:
I. IMAGE
II. SOUND
III. MONTAGE
IV. DURATION
V. ARMED STRUGGLE
VI. SEX
VII. BLOOD
VIII. KUNG-FU
IX. A WOMAN LOSING HER MIND
X. REVELATION
That’s part aesthetic manifesto, part provocation, and part extremely accurate description of what happens on-screen.
Their six-paragraph About page will not tell you the year of its founding (2019) or the names of its co-owners (currently Swenson and Shayna Nowicki), but it does begin with a quote by Karl Marx and goes on to “declare fidelity to a cinema utopia in which our struggle for collective liberation is bound up with all the unrealized possible futures woven through the forgotten histories of film.” The Beacon desires to do nothing less than wrench back our experience of time itself from the jaws of the endless doomscrolling present.
The third of those pillars—Montage—is key to how Swenson (a veteran of Scarecrow and a former programmer at Alamo Drafthouse) thinks about his job. “Film is montage. It’s various images set together. So programming is sort of taking that to the next necessary point where you’re taking multiple images, multiple films, and putting the films together so they’re in conversation with each other. I always think you can show one movie and it’s incredible…. But then you put two movies together, now they’re in conversation. Now there’s friction, now there’s sparks.”
Friction and sparks come up a few times when I talk to Swenson and Nowicki. Both are loath to pin down their tastes, but Nowicki says she knows what it feels like when she finds something she doesn’t want to show: “It creates no interesting feeling, no interesting friction with the current moment.”
Although plenty of movie theaters organize programs around one director or genre, the Beacon also gets much more thematic. “When you start thinking conceptually about what connects movies, it gets so much more expansive and exciting. ’Cause you can connect themes and ideas from a movie in, like, Soviet Russia in the 1920s to films in Paris in the ’60s, or now being made in California in a guy’s bedroom.”
The two current longer-running programs at the Beacon are Shadowland (“the emotional otherworlds of classic cinema”) and Time as a Symptom (“slow cinema and its reverberations”). Other recent programs have covered American dreams and nightmares, squatter’s cinema, “Super Krime,” “Self-Destruction and Mutual Annihilation as a Transcendental Art,” and “The Market Has a Mind and It’s Dreaming of You,” the website for which is illustrated with a quote from Jean Baudrillard that describes “a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.” (It goes on and gets even better.) How many places are there in Seattle where you can encounter Baudrillard in the wild?
And the thing is, it works. All this could sound like a recipe for a tiny, fiercely admired theater whose screenings are attended by the same dozen initiates. Instead, shows at the Beacon regularly sell out. Since Swenson and the original co-founder Casey Moore opened the 50-seat theater in a former yoga studio in 2019—and somehow carried it through the pandemic—Seattle audiences have responded with remarkable enthusiasm. “It is great to see,” Swenson says. “I think what surprised me more than anything is people’s openness—to the unknown and to new experiences.”
When the Beacon opened, Swenson says, its programmers made more attempts to lure audiences with familiar favorites. But the screenings that succeeded were often the weirder propositions: Do you want to see something you’ve never heard of? “People do want to have discoveries,” he says. “They want to go on adventures. They want to have new experiences.”
That appetite is not limited to rediscovering neglected classics. The recent Cece’s Interlude, about a trans girl who becomes pregnant, featured what Nowicki calls “an unheard-of filmmaker and totally unheard-of actors.” Both screenings sold out. “It was amazing, and everyone loves it,” Nowicki says.
Although the Beacon is far from the only successful micro-cinema around, programming around deep cuts and rarities isn’t the usual formula for theaters in general. Nowicki says: “It’s something you hear in programming, that you’re not supposed to program according to your taste. But I think if you don’t, then you’re not passionate about the things that you show, and it is very apparent.”
Part of what audiences respond to at the Beacon is the passion, which is maybe another way of saying the conviction. Most screenings have those personal intros, which welcome theater-goers and provide a context backed by thought and research. The staff (which includes front-of-house crew Jasira Andrus and Marc Palm, both of whom also help with programming ideas and trailer editing) cut many of their own trailers, and even some of their own films. Being small and scrappy allows the Beacon to pivot quickly so that, for instance, when David Lynch died, they could put together a wonderful tribute of archival footage and interviews and show it within a matter of days.
In an age when so much is available via streaming services, there’s something special about going to the theater. “There’s a real ritualistic component to it,” Swenson says. “You have to take the time. You have to commit. But then you go into the dark space, and lights go down, and a light comes on. And I think it’s primitive. It’s primordial. You’re at once alone there and experiencing it directly to you, but you’re also part of this social collective that only exists in this moment. And so there’s energy, there’s feeling. … [And] you get to have your focus dedicated, which is so rare, so difficult to maintain.” For a few hours, the Beacon makes sustained attention feel possible again.
Their success has become a kind of feedback loop, too, in which people have learned to trust their choices, which keeps them coming back for more.
“It’s not so much that we are the ultimate experts who are telling you what is worth watching,” Swenson explains. “But someone is making the choice.… And there’s a risk-taking to it. There’s an opening up to it, and you’re just like, ‘Let me see something new. Let me have a new experience.’
“It’s almost liberating, where you’re constantly inundated with scrolling and updates and everything, to just take the time to go into the dark room and look up at the bright light and just sink into time. Experience time as a feeling. Let it come into you.”
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