WATERVILLE – Watching a scary movie on the VCR in the coziness of a well-lighted living room just doesn’t cut it for Sharon Kitchens.

Kitchens is producing a film series that opens Friday night at the Railroad Square Cinema which features the kind of movies that deserve to be seen on a big screen in a dark room. The kind of movies that crawl inside your brain and linger in the dark corners.

Well, at least three of the movies have the potential to be that spooky. The fourth – with the help from technology that was cutting-edge 50 years ago – is just plain scary fun.

The Spook-A-Thon, as Kitchens is calling the series, opens with 1954’s “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” to be shown in 3-D (glasses distributed before the screening) on Friday and Saturday nights.

The Alfred Hitchcock classic “Rear Window,” also from 1954, follows on Sunday and Monday nights.

The following four nights are devoted to two 1970s movies in which Satan figures largely – “The Omen” and “The Exorcist.” “The Omen” will be shown Tuesday and Wednesday, Oct. 28-29, and “The Exorcist” on Thursday and Friday, Oct. 30-31.

All films start at 9:30 p.m.

Kitchens, 30, of Rockland was in the film business in New York and Los Angeles, including a job that had her working closely with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, but left the fast lane to settle in coastal Maine. Her passion for movies remains, though, and the Spook-A-Thon series is the second she has produced. The first brought now-classic films from the 1950s and 1970s to audiences at Camden’s Bayview Street Cinema.

Kitchens approached Railroad Square co-founders Ken Eisen and Alan Sanborn about her idea for the Spook-A-Thon, and they were impressed with Kitchens’ enthusiasm, Eisen said.

Kitchens also worked with Colby College officials, and has lined up Carol Olivieri Schulte, author of “Ghosts on the Coast of Maine,” to speak on campus after Saturday’s showing. And on Thursday, Oct. 30, Holly Nadler, a ghost expert from Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., will lead a candlelight walk around the campus and conduct a reading.

The college also has arranged a shuttle service to the theater.

“The Creature from the Black Lagoon” is considered a “B” movie classic.

“I didn’t think there was any better way to open a film festival,” Kitchens said. Working her Hollywood connections, she was able to find a newer print of the film.

Eisen, a former film critic for Maine Times, has written that movies can express a society’s subconscious fears, just as, in the Freudian view, dreams express the individual subconscious.

“I think it’s easier to see that with horror films,” he said.

“Creature” might be seen as another cheesy film from the ’50s, Eisen said, if it were not for the 3-D effect. With the glasses, audiences embrace “the illusion of something not there,” he said.

And the image of a theater packed with people wearing those funny glasses “sure is fun,” Eisen added.

The movie is like “King Kong” in its use of the beauty and the beast theme, as a web-footed, humanoid “gill-man” chases the “leggy, luscious Julia Adams,” according to one review.

“‘Rear Window,'” said Eisen, “is one of the recognized classics of film,” by one of the most acclaimed directors of all time. James Stewart and Grace Kelly, as well as Hitchcock’s touch with the storytelling, lend an elegance to the movie, he said.

While not a horror film, “Rear Window” is a murder mystery that explores some dark themes, Eisen said, such as voyeurism, alienation and the impersonality of city living.

“I think it’s a very chilling movie,” he said.

“It really is an amazing film.”

“The Omen” (1976) came on the heels of “The Exorcist” (1973). Following the tumult and questioning of traditional values of the 1960s, both films tapped into a sense of “maybe there was something in all that religion after all,” Eisen said.

“The Omen,” directed by Richard Donner, stars Gregory Peck and Lee Remick as a couple who learn their child is the Antichrist.

“The Exorcist,” starring Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow and Linda Blair, shows – in graphic detail – the effects of demonic possession on a young girl.

“We got very afraid of our babies at this time,” Eisen said of the two films.

Kitchens called “The Exorcist” “one of the scariest movies ever made,” and “The Omen” “one of the most disturbing.”

A pass for all four films is $20; individual tickets are $7.50. A host of door prizes have been donated by film companies, Kitchens said.

Tickets are available at Railroad Square; Harbor Audio Video and Wild Rufus in Camden; Second Read in Rockland; Pavlov’s Music in Augusta; and online at: www.villagesoup.com/clicktix