Arcadia Theatre (Philadelphia)

The Arcadia Theatre was a cinema at 1529-1531 Chestnut Street in Center City, Philadelphia, recorded by the Athenaeum of Philadelphia with a seating capacity of 500 and with the Sablosky Corporation and Frank DeLong among its clients. In February 1975 it cancelled a midnight booking of Black Mass, a film about a satanic rite by Ray Hoersch, later R.C. Horsch, after what The Philadelphia Inquirer called reported pressure from the Philadelphia Archdiocese.¹²

Black Mass

"Chestnut Hill filmmaker Ray Hoersch" was to show Black Mass at midnight at the Arcadia. The Inquirer reported on February 28, 1975, that the showing "was cancelled after reported pressure by the Philadelphia Archdiocese, according to the Bandbox's Art Carduner, who gave the film a new home" at the Bandbox Theater in Germantown.² A joint statement of sixteen Catholic, Protestant and Jewish leaders of Philadelphia, led by Cardinal John Krol, called the film "a blasphemous attack on the religious rites held in sacred reverence by millions of Christian believers" and urged "believers of every religious conviction to use every moral force to discourage the showing of this film."³