On Halloween night, both floors of Hyperreal Film Club in East Austin were covered in fake spiderwebs as a couple hundred people — drinks in hand — danced, joked and talked movies. A 12-foot skeleton loomed over the dance floor.
The night’s only requirement: costumes. Guests dressed up like everyone from ’90s indie star Parker Posey to the beloved Miss Spider from James and the Giant Peach to cult classic icons like The Stranger from The Big Lebowski.
The one thing nearly every outfit had in common? It originated on the big screen.
“It's always exciting to be like, I have a really niche movie Halloween costume that I can actually wear to this party and people will know what I am,” Hyperreal programmer Emily Basma said.
This year marks Hyperreal’s ninth year in existence and first year since opening a brick-and-mortar space on Chicon Street. Even if they hadn’t started out with throwing parties in mind, the founders always wanted Hyperreal to be as much about celebrating the people showing up to watch movies as the movies themselves.
“David McMichael and Tanner Hadfield were childhood best friends. … They wanted to do pop-up movie screenings and essentially make friends,” co-founder Jenni Kaye said. “That's how we got started.”
Kaye said their first showing in July 2016 was well attended. The film, shown in the basement of a downtown art gallery, was The Holy Mountain, a 1973 nonlinear story of an alchemist and his followers.
That night, Kaye, McMichael and Hadfield realized there was a group of people in Austin who, like them, also wanted their movie-watching experiences to be social.
“ There were so many amazing places in town to watch movies already,” McMichael said. “One of the things that we could add to the city's movie scene [was] a place that really focuse[d] on community.”
The trio began showing movies monthly at different venues around the city. People would show up and start seeing the same people, Kaye said.
To emphasize their community mission, they started featuring a short by a local filmmaker before each screening. That’s what first drew Basma in 2018.
“The commitment to always showcase local short films … to see what your friends, who are also filmmakers, are making and showcasing,” she said.
Steadily, the Hyperreal team grew the club into a full-fledged brand. It became a registered nonprofit in 2019, amassing over 20,000 followers on Instagram, Kaye said. Bars and hotels would hire them regularly, she said, “to come out and just pick a movie.”
In 2022, the club transitioned from monthly screenings to a weekly residency at Hotel Vegas on Sixth Street.
But as Hyperreal became a fixture of the Austin film scene, the founders increasingly felt their nomadic model wasn’t sustainable.
“We’d always been volunteer run, but the volunteers were just me, David and Tanner,” Kaye said, sweating and hauling projectors around. They decided they needed a permanent space.
After two years of searching, McMichael found what he considered the perfect spot on Craigslist.
“I came over here, opened the door, and I was like, I think I'm home,” he said.
In spring last year, Hyperreal launched a Kickstarter campaign to help get their dream clubhouse up and running.
“It takes such a huge outlay of effort and time and people’s donations to build,” McMichael said. "We spent, you know, almost half a year building this place.”
On Sept. 10, 2024, the theater opened with another screening of The Holy Mountain.
“Holy Mountain had become kind of part of the fabric of Hyperreal,” Kaye said. “It was a completely sold-out show.”
The next month, the team threw their Halloween party.
“We'd done it at different spaces every year,” Basma said. “Having a permanent space allows us to do Halloween the way that we always wanted to do Halloween.”
Kaye said she believes the club is now reaching more people than it ever has with more movies being shown and more ways for volunteers to get involved — from helping with programming to social media to theater operations.
“ We went from showing movies once a week to having screenings five days a week,” she said. “Plus … now we have like 200 volunteers.”
This year’s Halloween party would be bigger than ever, too, Kaye said, designated by the city as an official block party.
“ It feels kind of like a college party and we're in our 30s,” one guest said Friday. Another, who had never attended a Hyperreal event before, said she felt right at home: “So many nerds. I love it.”
So what’s next for Hyperreal?
“I have no idea,” McMichael said. “We always hoped we'd get this far, but I don't know. More movies, more friends, more wild spectacles.”
The founders are just happy Hyperreal has found a home. Whatever is coming next can wait.
