On Monday, October 19, the Coyote Twin Theater in downtown Vermillion will dim the lights on a mystery. The 2002 live-action Scooby-Doo — the one with Freddie Prinze Jr. as Fred, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy and Linda Cardellini as Velma — screens at 7 p.m. as a Free Community Movie Monday, part of a series the theater is billing as Movies in Mansions. Admission is free, there are no reserved seats, and nobody needs a ticket to walk in off Main Street.
The premise of the series is a little loose, and the theater cheerfully admits it. Scooby-Doo is set on Spooky Island, a resort where the Mystery Inc. gang is summoned to investigate strange goings-on among spring breakers. There is no actual mansion in it — but the resort hotel has, as the event listing puts it, plenty of spooky mansion energy. That is the joke of Movies in Mansions: October is the month for creaky old houses, and if the movie has to stretch the definition a bit to qualify, so be it.
The film itself is a curious artifact of early-2000s Hollywood. Directed by Raja Gosnell and written by James Gunn — yes, the same James Gunn who later built the Guardians of the Galaxy films and now runs DC Studios — it was the first live-action adaptation of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon that Joe Ruby and Ken Spears created in 1969. The dog was rendered in computer-generated imagery, and the production was famously not a smooth one; the version that reached theaters was reportedly cut down from a racier original. It opened in June 2002 and became a hit anyway, spawning a sequel two years later. Two decades on, it has settled into the comfortable position of a movie people quote at each other — "Ruh-roh" — rather than one they argue about.
What makes the screening more than a cheap night out is the room it happens in. The Coyote Twin is Vermillion's only movie theater, and it is owned and operated not by a chain but by the Vermillion Cultural Association, the town's arts council, which bought the building in July 2015 specifically to save it from abandonment and demolition. Since then the association has put more than $300,000 into renovating both auditoriums and the lobby and installing modern sound, projection and lighting; the two houses seat a combined 228 people, and as of 2025 both are equipped with laser projection. The association describes the site as a dedicated cinema for over a century.
The building at 10 East Main has the scars to prove it. Cinema Treasures, the crowdsourced theater-history archive, records that the house opened by 1941 as the Co-Ed Theatre, operating under that name into the 1960s before being renamed the Coyote Theatre — a name borrowed from an earlier Coyote that had run in town in the 1940s. The architecture firm Liebenberg & Kaplan, a Minneapolis outfit that designed movie houses across the Midwest, is credited with a 1939 design for the Coyote. In 1972 a fire gutted the interior; the exposed brick walls visible around the building today are a reminder of that chapter, and the lobby did not get its first full refresh since the fire until late 2022. One auditorium carries the name Red Steakhouse Auditorium, honoring a donation from Jerad Higman, owner of the Vermillion restaurant; another is named for Masaba Inc., the local company.
Community Movie Mondays are a deliberate part of the association's mission. The theater is normally closed Monday through Wednesday, and those dark nights are offered to sponsors who want to put a film on for free. In 2026 the Coyote Twin set itself the goal of showing free movies on as many Mondays as possible, so that moviegoing stays an accessible arts experience regardless of income. Sponsors pay a flat $400 to cover film licensing and overhead, and they can pick a movie that suits their mission — or, as the association puts it, just for fun. The series has become a small engine of civic programming: a business or organization gets a night at the cinema, and the public gets in for nothing.
It helps that Vermillion has a reputation to protect. The town, home to the University of South Dakota, was named the country's Best Small Town Arts Scene in USA Today's 10Best readers' choice awards in 2025 and again in 2026 — a distinction the cultural association cites when explaining why a nonprofit cinema matters here. A free Monday screening of a goofy 2002 cartoon adaptation is, in that light, less a giveaway than an argument: that a small town in southeast South Dakota can keep a century-old movie house alive, fill it with people on a weeknight, and not charge them a dime.
October is a busy month at the Coyote Twin. The theater's annual Rocky Horror Picture Show fundraiser, with a shadow cast performing live in front of the screen and audience participation encouraged, is a Halloween-season fixture, and the fall calendar also includes the Vortex Film Festival in September and the Fool's 48 filmmaking project each spring. Scooby-Doo sits comfortably in that company — a movie that invites a crowd to holler at the screen rather than sit in reverent silence.
Doors and details are simple: 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Monday, October 19, at 10 East Main Street. Free admission, general seating, first come, first served. Bring the kids, bring a friend, or come alone and quote along. The Mystery Inc. gang will be waiting on Spooky Island, and the brick walls of the Coyote Twin will be doing their best impression of a haunted mansion.