From the 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, from 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 indexed 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 Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” Wells’s The Time Machine, Kafka’s “The Burrow,” and 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.

Please note this is a live broadcast event – the class cannot be watched later, so please be sure you are available at the date and time the class is being offered in before registering. All sales are final, and we will not give refunds for any reason other than class cancellation. Classes curated by Miskatonic New York are in Eastern Time.