Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” has unsettled readers since its first publication in 1839. A tale steeped in atmosphere, madness, and the terror of premature burial, it remains one of Poe’s most haunting and influential works. Few short stories have proven so endlessly adaptable, or so capable of absorbing the aesthetic concerns of successive generations. Across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Usher has been repeatedly reimagined across film, television, theatre, music, literature, and visual art. There have been approximately twenty screen adaptations, spanning continents and styles. European filmmakers have included Jean Epstein’s lyrical Impressionist version (1928), the surrealist animation of Jan Švankmajer, and the transgressive excesses of Jess Franco. In the United States, the story was memorably shaped by Roger Corman and Curtis Harrington, while British interpretations range from Ivan Barnett’s 1946 adaptation (filmed in a Hastings guesthouse then occupied by Aleister Crowley) to Ken Russell’s idiosyncratic reworkings. The role of Roderick Usher has attracted some of the screen’s most distinctive performers, including Vincent Price, Martin Landau, Denholm Elliott, and Oliver Reed. The story’s cultural afterlife continues into the present. Recent reimaginings include Lady Usher (2020) and Mike Flanagan’s eight-part Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), which reworks Poe’s themes for contemporary audiences. Musically, the tale has inspired operas by Philip Glass and Debussy, as well as concept albums by The Alan Parsons Project, Peter Hammill, and Lou Reed. It has also been adapted for the stage by Steven Berkoff, reimagined in fiction by Ray Bradbury, and illustrated by artists from Arthur Rackham to Leonor Fini. A masterpiece by one of America’s greatest writers, The Fall of the House of Usher may be the most continuously transformed short story ever written and its collapse shows no sign of ending. All talks start at the following local times: London @ 19:00:00 Berlin @ 20:00:00 New York @ 2pm (3pm 16th March) Los Angeles @ 11am (12pm 16th March)

Mark Pilkington, author of the UFO meta-conspiracy classic Mirage Men, presents a curated selection of his favourite filmic artefacts from the flying saucer era and beyond. Against the backdrop of the longest sustained wave of UFO coverage in the United States since the 1940s—culminating in a series of inconclusive congressional hearings—this lecture examines how moving images shape belief, doubt, and wonder. As UFOs have re-entered public discourse, Hollywood and the Military Entertainment Complex have responded in kind. High-profile figures such as Steven Spielberg and Jerry Bruckheimer have announced large-budget films inspired by recent aerial encounters, promising spectacles that frame revelation as entertainment. These productions function as religious epics for an age of Big Tech Conspirituality, offering cosmic truths that can supposedly only be communicated through fiction. Yet the most compelling UFO films are not blockbuster spectacles but accidental documents. Shot by startled witnesses with whatever recording technology happened to be at hand—8mm film, VHS camcorders, digital smartphones, night-vision equipment—these fragments form what Pilkington terms a kind of “UFO vérité.” Spanning more than eighty years, they constitute a parallel history of both the UFO phenomenon and domestic media technologies, capturing fleeting moments of ambiguity and awe. These artefacts occupy a liminal space between evidence and illusion. For viewers, their impact can range from mild ontological unease to life-altering revelation. For believers, UFOs function like dust on celluloid or glitches in digital images: unintended artefacts that rupture the medium’s spell and expose the fragility of consensus reality. Paired with a persuasive witness narrative, even the blurriest image can destabilise certainty, provoking a deeper and more unsettling question—if this is real, what else are we not being told?