Our second instalment of horror theory courses focuses on the synesthetic pleasures and sensual pains of horror with five classes devoted to the body and the senses. Course content will include the place of affect theory in horror studies, the revelatory tradition in cinema and photography, Deleuzian bodies without organs, the desire and dread conjured by the Gothic documentary (gothumentary), and a trip through the nightmarish world of Kenneth Anger.
We will also screen a wide variety of films and moving-image works, including French cinema of sensation, body horror, B-horror, avant-garde horror, documentary horror, and more.
Instructors: Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Kristopher Woofter, Alanna Thain and Ayanna Dozier, Papagena Robbins, Anne Golden
Week 1: February 17 – “Affect, Sensation, and Horror Studies”
- Instructor: Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare
- Film: Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001) – France (100 minutes)
- Reading: “Between Meaning and Mattering: On Affect and Porn Studies” by Susanna Paasonen (2014)
Week 2: February 24 – “Horror, the Revelatory and the Gothic ‘Thing’”
- Instructor: Kristopher Woofter
- Film: Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2012) – France / USA (87 minutes)
- Reading: Le Cinéma du diable by Jean Epstein (1947)
SPRING BREAK – MARCH 3
Week 3: March 10 – Intensities: David Lynch Between Life and Death
- Instructors: Ayanna Dozier and Alanna Thain
- Film: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992) – USA (135 minutes)
- Reading: 6 – “How do you make yourself a body without organs?” from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980)
Week 4: March 17 – “‘Caging the Monster that Will Live for 100,000 Years’ in the Future-Tense Gothumentary”
- Instructor: Papagena Robbins
- Film: Into Eternity: a Film for the Future (Michael Madsen, 2010) – Denmark – 75 minutes
- Reading: “Gothumentary: The Gothic Unsettling of Documentary’s Rhetoric of Rationality” by Papagena Robbins and Kristopher Woofter (2012)
Week 5: March 24 – “Mad About the Boy: Kenneth Anger”
- Instructor: Anne Golden
- Films: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954, 38:00), Scorpio Rising (1963, 28:00), and Lucifer Rising (1972, 28:00) – USA.
- Reading: “Illuminating Lucifer” by Carel Rowe (1974)
Alanna Thain teaches cultural studies and world cinemas, and also directs the Moving Image Research Laboratory (mirl.lab.mcgill.ca) at McGill University, where at least part of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (1981) was filmed (most of the film was filmed at Concordia University). She would like to confirm that she is still recovering from watching that film while unsupervised at a very young age, and is still waiting to be able to watch it again. Her horror specialty is the work of David Lynch. She also runs a bike powered mobile cinema project, Cinema out of the Box, and collaborated with the Volatile Den for a cemetery screening last summer (https://www.facebook.com/mobilecinemamontreal).
