Sunday July 18th, 2pm-4pm
The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies has recently found a permanent home at Blue Sunshine, and who better to christen the new pad than the writing/directing team behind the most beloved HP Lovecraft film adaptations of all time?
Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli ( Re-Animator, From Beyond, Dagon) will be the inaugural instructors at Miskatonic’s new home, and will be delivering a two-hour masterclass on adapting Lovecraft to the screen – the challenges, the techniques and some insight as to why their films stand out amidst a sea of historically troubled counterparts.Their masterclass will be happening at Blue Sunshine (3660 St-Laurent, 3rd Floor) on Sunday July 18th from 2pm-4pm and will be followed by a Q&A period. Seating is limited, as Blue Sunshine is a small space (max 50 people!), so it is a rare chance to be in an intimate environment with some of the genre’s leading lights.
Dennis Paoli has written for film, TV, the stage, and the internet. His feature films include Bodysnatchers (with Stuart Gordon, for Warner Brothers), adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator (with Stuart Gordon and William Norris), From Beyond (for Empire), and Dagon (for Filmax).
For the stage, he wrote the one-man show Nevermore: An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe, which has been performed internationally; co-wrote the script for Re-Animator: The Musical, for which he won several LA theater awards; and co-wrote with the Organic Theater Company, the baseball comedy Bleacher Bums, which ran Off-Broadway, through three revivals in Chicago, and over seven years in Los Angeles. The television version for PBS won an Emmy, and the film version (which he co-wrote with Mitch Paradise) aired on Showtime. The HBO film The Dentist (with Stuart Gordon) and his work for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series—adaptations with Stuart Gordon of H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat—brought the horror genre to cable television. His adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Hound was streamed on Halloween 2015 by the genre website Tales from Beyond the Pale (talesfrombeyondthepale.com).
Dennis is also an academic, a teacher and administrator at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He has taught Gothic and Irish literature and 20th century drama. He has written criticism and articles for the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, and various volumes, periodicals, and online blogs.
The most important work he does is as Donor-Advisor of The Heidi Paoli Fund, a philanthropic organization that supports cancer patients and their caregivers.
