SPRING 2022 SEMESTER OF ONLINE CLASSES

While we say this is the spring semester, arguably it sits equally in winter. For those of us in colder climates, winter can mean bulky warm sweaters, nights sitting by a fire, trudging through the snow, and the constant threat of death from being caught outside (there are monsters out there, you know). For those in the southern hemisphere, its summer, which means warm sunshine, perhaps some time camping or at the beach. There are monsters there, too. And whether it be winter or summer or spring, we want everyone to be safe and well. To that end, the city branches have chosen to continue with online classes for this semester. All fingers, toes, claws, and other appendages crossed that these branches will return to live classes in the autumn.

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is delighted to present its roster of classes for the spring semester, 2022. Classes will continue to be on Tuesday nights, and we welcome students from around the world. We have fourteen classes on a wide range of topics, delving into all corners of horror studies, from the sublime to the strange to the terrifying.

Miskatonic London starts in January and February with two favourite horror film subgenres: the teen slasher film, and the found footage, looking at how these genres have evolved in recent years. In March, it takes a long dive into the incarnations of everyone’s favourite vampire, Dracula. April will take a deep dive into manifestations of grief in horror cinema, and May revolves in newfound scholarship on the pulp fiction of the Victoria age, the Penny Dreadful.

Miskatonic New York begins with investigation the development of Holocaust studies and its representations in literature. We dive into the unreliable narrator in horror film and television and how they create their alternative realities. Things might get a little squeamish in March, with a look at the presentation of bodily fluids in gore and pornography cinemas. And we spend the last online class underground, with a look at subterranean horror.

Miskatonic Los Angeles opens with a history of India’s first horror film factory, helmed by the Ramsay brothers. A short trip east in February takes us to Thailand and the intersection of the supernatural and horror in its folklore. March and April see an exploration of women in horror literature, first in their contributions to the Gothic, and next with their hidden history in horror and dark fantasy writing. And May wraps up the season with a dive into representations of race and monsters.

The Institute will be offering a Global Pass for US$85, which offers a discount to attend all 14 Miskatonic classes in the Spring 2022 semester, as well as the City Branch Pass (£35 for London, US$30 for New York, and US$40 Los Angeles), and individual tickets to each class (£8 for London, US$10 each for New York and Los Angeles). Please note that all classes will take place in the time zone of their Branch affiliation; be sure you can attend before booking (and watch out for daylight saving time changes!), as all sales are final and classes cannot be watched after the live broadcast. Registration is necessary for each class. Please look under ‘Additional Information’ in your order confirmation email for links to register.

SPRING 2022 CLASSES

MISKATONIC LONDON
Branch Director: Josh Saco 

Miskatonic London offers monthly classes and a discounted full semester pass. For our Spring 2022 Online semester, admission to individual classes is £8, and a full semester pass including all five classes curated by Miskatonic London, is £30. Please note students from anywhere in the world can attend.

Tuesday January 11th 7:00pm GMT
HYPERPOSTMODERN OR JUST PLAIN CAMP? A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPORARY TEEN SLASHER FILM
Instructor: Daniel Sheppard

In the late nineties, teen slasher films entered their third production cycle following the box-office successes of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2. These films are often described as being “like Scream,” criticized as copycats and cash-ins, in which they have become apolitically synonymous with terms such as “metatextual,” “self-reflexive,” “pastiche,” “postmodern,” etc. While such cynicism suggests that the teen slasher film has become a self-deprecating mockery of itself, Daniel Sheppard brings into consideration the role of the gay screenwriter and, in doing so, demonstrates how Kevin Williamson’s use of camp in Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2 created new generic possibilities for other gay screenwriters, directors and producers working in Hollywood at the turn of the millennium—as well as now—including Silvio Horta (Urban Legend), Don Mancini (Bride of Chucky), Gus Van Sant (Psycho), Jeffrey Reddick (Final Destination), and Aaron Harberts (Valentine).

Tuesday February 8th 7:00pm GMT
‘PEOPLE ARE GOING TO WANT TO SEE THIS’: THE EVOLUTION OF WITNESSING IN FOUND FOOTAGE HORROR
Instructor: Shellie McMurdo

Part of found footage horror’s appeal is a lack of loyalty to a specific “look” (although it has revisited several, for reasons I will explore). The subgenre’s construction of terror stems from the fact that these narratives are presented not as adjacent or similar to our reality, but part of it. This class presents the subgenre’s preoccupation with its cultural context – as evidenced through its rapid aesthetic evolution – as a significant contributory component to its longevity as a distinct horror movement. It will outline how the vulnerability of characters in found footage horror is emphasized by the subgenre’s unstable frames, and how they are repeatedly endangered by what lurks in the offscreen space, or punished for their desire to see, to look, to witness, and to know.

Tuesday March 8th 7:00pm GMT
CASTLEVANIA’S ‘MISERABLE PILE OF SECRETS’: DRACULA ADAPTATIONS AND WHAT THEY CAN TEACH US
Instructor: Matthew Crofts

This class will explore just what it is about Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that makes it eternally relevant for adaptation within a rapidly changing culture. Dracula demonstrates the significance of Victorian anxieties within contemporary culture more than any other novel. Theories of adaptation has moved beyond fidelity to an ‘original’, recognising instead that each new adaptation has its own audience and intention. Dracula adaptations react to the needs and expectations of the era that produced them – providing an invaluable case-study that demonstrates changing attitudes toward Victorian legacies and their synergies of reinvention. This class will examine the extended ‘afterlife’ of Dracula in transformations, identifying shared themes across diverse media, and to demonstrate that reworking Dracula, even making him child-friendly, is a way of coming to terms with problematic nineteenth-century histories. Increased engagement with new media incarnations of Dracula is vital to understanding the appeal of this nineteenth-century vampire to modern audiences of all kinds.

Tuesday April 12th 7:00pm BST
NURSING GRIEF: THE MANIFESTATIONS OF GRIEF, LOSS, AND THE SUPERNATURAL BEING IN BELOVED AND HEREDITARY
Instructor: Carolyn Mauricette

When we lose a loved one, it’s a crushing and life-changing event—and the loss of a young child unleashes an indescribable pain for families. Genre films Like Don’t Look Now and The Changeling have captured this emotional upheaval of a life lost too soon, but there are two films that are unlikely bedfellows in representing a mother’s grief: Beloved, the 1998 film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel of the same name, and Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary. In “Nursing Grief”, we’ll take a look at how grief manifests in both films, how the two women react to the deaths of their children, the contrast between Sethe, Annie and the supernatural, Sethe’s experience of grief as a formerly enslaved woman, The child from the “other side” and what they represent in both films, the matriarchs in Sethe and Annie’s lives, and how audiences connect to grief as a catharsis in genre films.

Tuesday May 10th 7:00 BST
EXCAVATING THE PENNY DREADFUL: LABOUR EXPLOITATION IN VICTORIAN TRASH FICTION
Instructor: Sophie Raine

From their inception in the 1840s until their decline in the 1860s, the penny dreadful was a source of derision from both moralist and literary critics. Distributed in weekly penny-parts aimed at the working classes, these serials were hugely popular in the Victorian period with texts such as George W M Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844-46) even outselling Dickens. There has been a resurgence of interest in some of these texts particularly the aforementioned The Mysteries of London and James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls (1846-47) featuring the demon-barber of Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd, which has been subject to numerous adaptations over the years. It is due to this renewed interest – aided by archival work excavating many of these forgotten texts by the contributions of collectors such as Barry Ono – that we are able to access these texts and gain a deeper understanding of these controversial Gothic serials. This lecture will aim to explore these texts as radical in terms of their political content and demonstrate how these texts show the malleable form of the Gothic mode as they adapt the genre harkening back to older forms and acknowledging their own role within Gothic discourses.

 

MISKATONIC NEW YORK
Branch Co-Directors: Cristina Cacioppo & Shelagh Rowan-Legg

Miskatonic New York offers monthly classes and a discounted full semester pass. For our Spring 2022 Online semester, admission to individual classes is US$10, and a full semester pass including all four classes curated by Miskatonic New York, is US$30. Please note that students from anywhere in the world can attend. There will only be 4 online classes for this semester.

Tuesday January 18th 7:30pm EST
THE HOLOCAUST AND ITS DOUBLE: WRITING FICTION IN THE MEDIUM OF GENOCIDE
Instructor: Tony Burgess

Primo Levi responded to Adorno’s startling statement that “after Auschwitz poetry is an act of barbarity” with a slight shift into possibility: “after Auschwitz there can only be poetry about Auschwitz”. In the past twenty years or so, Holocaust Studies has emerged as its own formidable discipline. Despite unique pressure, and possibly because of it, Holocaust Studies has made increasingly relevant advances in most fields of theoretical practice. This lecture attempts a preliminary examination of how these practises and strategies might hyphenate into other areas of study. Themes include the problem of emplotment, modelling exceptional history within history, the productive effect of silence and repression, hybridization, the false opposition of mystification and demystification, fiction and non-fiction, intentionalism and structuralism. This lecture is part confessional, part academic slurry with a literary horror fiction and film focus.

Tuesday February 15th 7:30pm EST
DON’T DREAM IT’S OVER: UNRELIABLE NARRATORS, DEATH DREAMS, AND DETERMINISM IN HORROR
Instructor: Robyn Citizen

The already dead or damned unreliable narrator, and the similar path of characters immersed in death dreams – initially popularized by Ambrose Bierce’s short story, “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” –  allow for philosophical explorations on the nature of reality, consciousness, the grim inevitability of death and occasionally, the possibility of an afterlife. This class asks students to consider horror narratives in popular cinema and TV with characters who negotiate their impending / past deaths by constructing alternate scenarios in which they have escaped their fates going on to avenge themselves or make different choices entirely with their second chances. In a media landscape where sci-fi and fantasy multiverses and their defining ‘what ifs’ are central to a significant number of family friendly, mainstream entertainment, what is the source of the horrific being mined in horror characters’ departures from objective reality?

Tuesday March 15th 7:30pm EDT
THE SOILED BODY: GORE, PORNOGRAPHY, AND BODILY FLUIDS
Instructor: Éric Falardeau

Gore and pornography are united by a spectacular exhibitionism of bodily fluids. Their exhibition, fetishized by the close-up, acts as a revealer of the ambiguous relationship that the subject, the spectator or his cinematographic double (the characters with whom he identifies or not), maintains with his carnal envelope. This lecture will address different issues (anthropological, sociological and psychological) through the analysis of the representation of bodily fluids. Objects of disgust and fascination, they are the expression of an existential angst that gore and pornography insidiously force us to face.

Tuesday April 19th 7:30pm EDT
SUBTERRANEAN HORROR
Instructor: Leo Goldsmith

From bowels of Hell to Dracula’s crypt to the New York City sewer system, horror is obsessed with the dark, mysterious inner substructures of the planet. Across a wide array of media, for folklore and literature to painting and cinema, horror explores these underground locales both as sinister settings — obscure origins or grim resting places — and as a symbolic terrain that mirrors the hidden, repressed, or lurking forces of the human psyche, the supernatural, or history itself. Navigating the lairs, mines, caverns, and hollows of this subterranean subgenre, this lecture shines a light into these dim spaces, mapping the ways the underground landscape has indexes the suppressed impulses of human consciousness, the literally buried traumas of the past (as in the highly dubious trope of the “Indian burial ground”), physical architectures of class hierarchy and warfare, and Nature’s revenant energies in an age of anthropogenic climate change. Reference texts include literary works such as Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow,” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear,” and films including Quatermass and the Pit, Plague of the Zombies, The Descent, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and C.H.U.D.

 

MISKATONIC LOS ANGELES
Branch Co-Director: Amy Voorhees Searles & Graham Skipper

Miskatonic Los Angeles offers monthly classes and a discounted full semester pass. For our Spring 2022 Online semester, admission to individual classes is US$10, and a full semester pass including all five classes curated by Miskatonic Los Angeles, is US$40. Please note that students from anywhere in the world can attend.

Tuesday January 25th 7:30pm PST
THE CINEMA OF THE RAMSAY BROTHERS
Instructor: Shamya Dasgupta

They were a family of outsiders, who moved to Mumbai from Karachi during the Partition of India, and set up a shop selling and repairing radios. In the 1970s, they transitioned to film producing and, one fateful night while observing the reactions of the crowd in a movie theater, made the decision to pursue the genre that would define their career. In this lecture, Shamya Dasgupta, author of Don’t Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers, will detail how seven brothers with a business background embraced every aspect of filmmaking—while economizing at every opportunity—to become India’s first horror film factory and a genre unto themselves. They made a splash in Bollywood, but just like in the movies, their tale has a rise, a fall, and eventual redemption. Join us to learn why, even today, decades later, the Ramsay name is synonymous with horror in India.

Tuesday February 22nd 7:30 PST
THAI HORROR FILM AS AN EXTENSION OF THAI SUPERNATURALISM
Instructor: Dr. Katarzyna Ancuta

Horror has always been important for Thai cinema, although most Thai horror films, steeped in local folklore, history and modes of narrative, have relatively little in common with the genre as defined by major western productions. Most of those films follow strictly supernatural plots built around a variety of beings described collectively as phi (ghosts, spirits, deities, and demons), they are therefore commonly known as nang phi, or ‘ghost films.’ Thai horror films differ from their western counterparts in one more aspect: they exist as an extension of Thai supernaturalism, a collection of shared beliefs and cultural practices that not only affects the portrayal of the preternatural in the films but also frames the functioning of the local entertainment industry. How then does one make a ghost film for an audience that sees living with spirits as part of everyday experience? How does one create a work of fiction that, on some level, can still be recognized as ‘real’? In this lecture we will focus mostly on the 21st century films seen as a distinct stage in the evolution of Thai horror cinema. We will discuss the main themes of these films, situate them in the larger body of Thai cinematic horror, and address the effects of globalization on horror film production in Thailand.

Tuesday March 29th 7:30pm PDT
SHE MADE ME A MONSTER: WOMEN AND GOTHIC LITERATURE
Instructor: Lisa Kröger

We know the Gothic when we see it: the gloomy, mold-covered manor house, the ghostly whispers of long-buried secrets, the heroine locked in a prison of her own mind. Beneath these Gothic tropes is a rich of history of women writers, beginning with the literary success of Ann Radcliffe, and that of the other authors (Regina Maria Roche, Eliza Parsons) who published with Minerva Press in the last decades of the eighteenth century. While the Gothic was a genre geared toward female audiences, it often promoted radical ideas of the feminist movement, which was gaining popularity at the same time. For these women, the Gothic was a space that allowed for the safe exploration of feminist themes like the lack of rights within marriage, the contested female body, women’s autonomy, and more. This lecture will examine women’s critical role in the creation of Gothic literature, as both creators and fans, from the earliest Gothic novels in 1790s England. Then, we will look to the modern Gothic, as it is being reimagined today in literature and film.

Tuesday April 26th 7:30pm PDT
THE WOMEN OF WEIRD TALES
Instructor: Melanie R. Anderson

In the early decades of the twentieth century in America, pulp magazines developed into prime real estate for genre fiction such as westerns, science fiction and fantasy, horror, mysteries, and adventure stories. Specific magazines catered to specific tastes, and readers of Weird Tales (1923-1954) were looking for horror and dark fantasy. Ultimately, the fiction and names of many pioneering writers of genre fiction who wrote for the pulps have faded into history. Many of the surviving works are by men. This, however, does not mean that women were not involved in the production of the pulp magazines. They were in positions ranging from cover artists to editors to writers. This lecture will explore how women were involved in the production of the pulps with a focus on Weird Tales. These women’s stories fit into a larger tradition of horror and dark fiction by connecting the legacy of women writing horror prior to the twentieth century to later generations.

Tuesday May 31st 7:30pm PDT
RACIAL HORROR AND THE MONSTROUS FOREIGN
Instructor: Mila Zuo

Is race a trope of horror? What is racial horror? This talk addresses the abjection of race through the lens of the contemporary horror film. From the Haitian origins of the enslaved zombie to gothic multiculturalisms, the nonwhite figure has been continually enfleshed and encoded in the West as monstrous, alien, and foreign. Often frightening, overly desirous and hyper-appetitive, racialized creatures are the source of terror and jouissance—objet petit a in Lacanian terms. From the horrific specters of slavery and genocide of Black and Indigenous populations to Yellow Peril techno-orientalism, white Western horror thrives upon the abjection of racialized bodies. Drawing together psychoanalytic approaches, critical race theorists together with horror, we will analyze the recent turn of Black and Indigenous horror films as well as global Asian films to reveal the ways in which such conventions are troubled by global nonwhite filmmakers. Finally, we will speculate on the extent to which racial horror casts (counter)spells on its audiences through tempo, color, rhythm, and affect.

For further information, images or interview requests, contact The Miskatonic Institute at miskatonicihs[at]gmail.com.