With Ghost Fest, the Historic — and Haunted? — Balboa Theater Gets a Spooky Film Festival

“I have to figure out how I’m going to get a ghost to come down on a line … without getting stuck on something.”

On a dark, chilly October night, as the fog curls in from Ocean Beach around its luminous neon frontage, the Balboa Theater feels like the movie theater at the end of the earth — or a portal to another era.

And through its doors, Kai Wada Roath is looking up at the ceiling of its main auditorium, plotting how to give theatergoers a good fright this weekend.

Wada Roath is the curator of Ghost Fest, a two-day film festival at the Balboa, running Oct. 18 and 19 with immersive screenings of ghostly classics spanning over 70 years.

“I really want to show the classics that the ghost hunters and investigators really enjoy,” he said.

On Saturday, that means screenings of House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, The Haunting, The Legend of Hell House, Ghostbusters and House. On Sunday, attendees will see The Changeling, Carnival of Souls, The Innocents and The Amityville Horror — as well as the decidedly non-scary The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, “a classic romance with a ghost,” said Wada Roath.

On Saturday, festivalgoers can also watch a short film documenting the San Francisco Ghost Society’s 2016 visit to the Balboa Theater. Because this historic building, which turns 100 years old in 2026, is itself rumored to be very, very haunted.

With his lifelong fascination in the supernatural, and several ghostly encounters of his own, Wada Roath has no doubt the Balboa harbors spectral visitors. He said he encountered one ghost, in a large empty room behind the movie screen, who “wanted us to get out of there,” he noted. “That was probably a manager ghost, or someone who had worked here.”

“All the other ghosts are just sitting in seats, watching the movies,” he said.

A legacy of scares

It was over a decade ago that Wada Roath began his Super Shangri-La Show residency at the Balboa — named to evoke a magical, hidden place and with the express purpose of showing the strangest movies he could find on a monthly basis — as well as yearly film festivals like Ghost Fest.

These screenings, he said, are a “getaway from life … I try to transport someone into a different world that they’ve never seen.”

And at Ghost Fest, Wada Roath plans to follow in a grand tradition of providing audiences with chills on and off the screen. “Obviously I’m going to put some ghosts up in this place, you know?” he laughed. “Gotta do it, right?”

The festival program features two classics from director William Castle — House on Haunted Hill and 13 Ghosts — who was himself a notorious purveyor of publicity stunts, gimmicks and in-theater tricks during screenings of his movies.

In straight-faced, Alfred Hitchcock-style appearances in his own movie trailers, Castle warned audiences of the frights they could expect. “For the first time in motion picture history, members of the audience — including you — will actually play a part in the picture,” he told viewers in the trailer for 1959’s The Tingler.

Castle delivered on his promise: he’d bought powerful vibrating motors reportedly used by the military to de-ice airplane wings, and set them to go off during screenings of The Tingler under certain seats.

For screenings of House on Haunted Hill, Castle rigged up skeletons with glowing red eyes to float over the seats above the audience, to be released at the pivotal appearance of a walking skeleton onscreen.

Castle and his ilk were pure showmen, said Wada Roath. “They wanted to have an extra bonus for the viewer, whether it was something buzzing them from under their seat or someone running down the aisle dressed as a monster,” he said.

And while he might not go quite as far as Castle, Wada Roath warns Ghost Fest attendees to expect a few ghoulish extras in the theater this weekend. Something he will reveal: His plan to follow directly in Castle’s footsteps by handing out special “ghost viewers” for 13 Ghosts — constructed in his own home from “100 pairs of 3D glasses” with the help of his daughters.

Is this seat taken?

Ghost Fest will be Wada Roath’s eighth film festival, following his previous engagements of joyful weirdness that include Bigfoot Bonanza, the Sorceress Sabbath Witchcraft Film Festival and the Space Visitors Film Festival.

And when he’s not concocting Super Shangri-La show lineups for the Balboa, he acts as the official ambassador for Confusion Hill in Mendocino County, and writes books and pamphlets about haunted spots including Humboldt’s Benbow Historic Inn.

Wada Roath’s goal with Ghost Fest is to create the kind of communal experience that audiences just can’t get by streaming spooky movies at home, he said. “The more people are stuck in their house, the more they’re ordering their groceries to get delivered, the less opportunities they’re having to have interactions with people they don’t know,” he said. “And that’s what the world’s about.”

Wada Roath is particularly drawn to the idea that the Balboa’s own ghosts can be found sitting in the theater’s seats, just like their living counterparts, watching the screen.

“I would imagine they go to places that are their favorites, right?” he asked.

“If we were ghosts, where would we go? We go to our favorite places.”

Ghost Fest takes place Saturday, Oct. 18 and Sunday, Oct. 19 at the Balboa Theater (3630 Balboa St., San Francisco). Full day passes are $25 but tickets for individual screenings also available. Tickets and more information here.