October is nearly here, and lurking about all the ghosts, ghouls, and jack-o-lanterns is another perennial holiday season favorite: Philly Archives Film Fest! 
This opportunity to see screenings of seldom-seen weird & wonderful short films from Philadelphia-area archives and museums is part of Archives Month Philly, a annual celebration of archives in the Philadelphia region launched in 2013 that sees libraries, archives, and other collecting institutions throughout the region open their doors to the public for special events programming in the form of tours, workshops, outdoor walks, and other free events.
The Philly Archives Film Fest will be celebrating its 6th year of inclusion in the month-long event. Hagley Library was pleased to join Philly Archives Film Fest in its second year in 2019, when we shared Return to Teflon Place, a 1975 parody of the soap opera "Return to Peyton Place" created by DuPont to promote Teflon II cookware.
Since that time, we’ve returned and again and again, and have enjoyed sharing other staff favorites from our collections, including Thank You, Mr. Chips, a 1947 sponsored film created for the National Potato Chip Institute, and Freewheelin', a 1975 sponsored film about the 4th Annual National Truck-In hosted by the National Street Van Association.
We’ll be returning this year, and we’ll be also be returning the wonderful resource that is our Cinecraft, Inc. films (Accession 2019.227) collection. But what spooky (or not so spooky) surprises will we bring this year? You’ll have to show up to find out!
The Philly Archives Film Fest is a free event that will be held on Wednesday, October 28th, from 7-9 PM, at its usual haunt, PhilaMOCA, a Philadelphia event space created out of an 1865 showroom of a different kind (three generations of the Finney family used the building as a commercial showroom for mausoleums and cemetery monuments).
To get the best seat to see what emerges from the archives this year, show up early - last year’s event was a well-attended event that packed the former mausoleum showroom and had organizers grave-digging the venue for extra chairs!
Skylar Harris is the Metadata and Digitization Coordinator at Hagley Museum and Library