The first thing I noticed was the light. Red and yellow bulbs hung off the rafters of a glass roofed room full of plants, a pull down screen sat at the far end, and about a dozen silhouetted heads were turned toward a woman in a blue jacket pressing a payphone to her ear. I took that photograph on Wednesday, October 7, at Silk City on Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia, and it is still the frame I would hand someone if they asked what a good night out looks like. People around here call me Harry Hayman, and on this particular night I was just another guy in a chair, which is exactly where I like to be. My brother and his friends at Secret Handshake Vintage were showing an old, strange, gloriously colorful Italian film in a room that already had plenty of atmosphere of its own, and nobody had to pay to get in.

The poster on the table

Before the screening I photographed the poster, and I have looked at it more than any other picture from the night. It is a hand drawn thing, a pink bust with stitched eyes and a taped mouth rising out of a spray of black hair on a field of purple and red confetti. Across the chest, in wobbly black capitals, it says BLOOD and BLACK LACE. Below that, in huge halftone letters, it says OPERA. In the corners are the Secret Handshake sticker, which reads microcinema, vintage and upcycle around a stack of tapes, and a VHS Club logo. At the bottom it gives the venue, Silk City, 435 Spring Garden St., a 6:30 p.m. show, and the words FREE, Wednesday, October 7, 2026.

I will be straight about what I can and cannot tell you. The headline title is Blood and Black Lace, and that is the film the post is about. The poster lists a second title, OPERA, and in one of my photographs the subtitles on the screen name a character called Mira. Dario Argento’s 1987 film Opera has a character named Mira, Betty’s agent, played by Daria Nicolodi, so I think the night was a double feature, which is exactly the kind of thing this crew does. I did not keep a running order, and I will not pretend I did.

What Mario Bava built in 1964

Blood and Black Lace is the film I came for. Mario Bava was born in Sanremo in 1914, worked as a cinematographer, special effects artist and director, and earned the nicknames Master of Italian Horror and Master of the Macabre. According to Wikipedia’s entry on the film, it premiered in Rome on March 14, 1964, under the title 6 donne per l’assassino, as an Italian, French and West German coproduction starring Eva Bartok and Cameron Mitchell. The setting is a Roman fashion house, Christian Haute Couture, where a masked killer murders the models while hunting for a scandalous diary. Ubaldo Terzano shot it in color, and Bava’s vivid lighting is a huge part of why people still talk about it.

Fashion, murder, outrageous color, a little decadence. The film sells itself in four words. It is a story about beautiful clothes and a very ugly secret, and every frame looks like somebody spilled a paint box over a mannequin factory. That is the match I mean when I say I cannot think of a much better room for it. A diner and lounge complex with a tropical garden out back is the right kind of weird for a film like this.

What giallo means

Giallo is the word you will see in every write up of this film, and it is worth knowing where it comes from. It is Italian for yellow. The term comes from Il Giallo Mondadori, a crime and mystery paperback series that the publisher Mondadori started in 1929, whose books had yellow covers and were mostly Italian translations of British and American mysteries. Over time the word came to mean any mystery novel, and then a style of Italian murder mystery thriller on film, with stylized killings, a mysterious killer in gloves or a mask, and a strong visual style.

Wikipedia credits Bava’s earlier The Girl Who Knew Too Much from 1963 as the first true giallo, and it says Blood and Black Lace gave the genre its masked, black gloved killer and its bold use of color. It also notes that the real giallo boom came later, after Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in 1970. That is a useful reminder that a film can be early, can be right, and can still wait years for the world to catch up. I keep coming back to that, because the people showing it in a Philadelphia garden room are doing a version of the same thing.

What a microcinema actually is

A microcinema is a small, independent, do it yourself screening room, and it is not the multiplex with the popcorn. Wikipedia traces the term to 1994, when Rebecca Barten and David Sherman coined it for the Total Mobile Home MicroCINEMA in San Francisco, and it describes a global movement of small cinemas run on a shoestring. Nothing is wrong with the theater and the popcorn. I will go to both. But a microcinema pays attention to everything the multiplex skips: the movie, the room, the people who show up, and the conversations afterward.

Philadelphia has plenty of them now. Broad Street Review profiled ten Philly film clubs in March 2026, and it describes Secret Handshake as a group built around unexpected double features based on a shared theme, with past pairings that include a Valentine’s Day night of The Loved Ones and May and a Christmas night of The Muppet Christmas Carol and Black Christmas. The same article says VHS Club, curated by Nicole Goicuria, shows iconic films on VHS tape, with most screenings free. Seeing both of their names on one poster tells me this is a small scene that likes to share a stage.

Secret Handshake Vintage

Here is the part where I admit I am biased. Secret Handshake Vintage is my brother’s world, along with his friends, and I have written about it before. In an earlier post I described it as a beautifully obsessive little world built out of movies, books, VHS tapes and the forgotten cultural stuff, one that rescues VHS tapes that lost their boxes and gives them another life. I have also written about the Secret Handshake screening nights at Penn Treaty Park, where the same instinct plays out on a lawn in Fishtown. I am leaving names out of this one, because the work is bigger than any one of them.

What I love about all of it is that the work is about the whole experience. They are not just pressing play. They are thinking about the movie, the room, the people and the talk that happens when the lights come up. That is all the stuff that gets lost when we sit on the couch scrolling through 900 movies and somehow deciding there is nothing to watch.

Silk City, and why the room mattered

Silk City sits at 435 Spring Garden Street, at 5th and Spring Garden. Its own website describes three spaces: a classic retro diner, an enclosed tropical garden that is open year round, and a lounge for live bands, unique shows and weekend DJ parties. The garden room matches what I saw, all plants, brick, glass and string lights, though the website does not say where a film night would be set up, and I will not guess. In my fourth photograph, an emblem set into the floor reads SILK CITY PHILLY, with a banner beneath it that says Everything old is new again.

I could not have written a better caption for the evening myself. An old Italian murder movie, a stack of rescued tapes on a hand drawn poster, and a Wednesday night crowd of weird people in a weird room: that is everything old being new again, on purpose. Honestly, my kind of crowd.

Why I keep showing up to rooms like this

I spent a good part of my life trying to figure out how to get people into rooms and give them a reason to come back. Turns out my brother and his friends are doing their own version of that with movies, and they are doing it with films that might otherwise never find their way onto a screen in front of an actual audience again. There is something pretty great about watching strangers discover an old movie together, and doing it for free on a weeknight makes it one of the more generous things a city can offer.

I keep saying that culture is infrastructure, and it is rarely a cathedral. Sometimes it is a pull down screen, a borrowed room and a handful of people who care more about the film than the ticket price. If that sounds like your tribe, give Secret Handshake Vintage a follow and check out one of their Microcinema Nights. Proud of what my brother and his buds are building. Keep it weird, guys, and keep finding your tribe, one subtitle at a time.

Blood and Black Lace at Silk City: A Microcinema Night in Philadelphia