NOTE: This live, in-person lecture will take place at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Miskatonic is pleased to present the latest offering from our ongoing collaboration with the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival with this lecture on horror’s ability to interrogate national traumas and haunted histories, spotlighting two classics of Japanese cinema. Despite recent Hollywood portrayals of the Manhattan Project (OPPENHEIMER) and Operation Paperclip (INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY), one controversial World War II-era endeavor remains largely taboo and obscure: the medical experiments conducted on human test subjects by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army.

The fight to bring this subverted history to light may be reflected in certain fantastical post-war fictions—see especially the contagious curse in Hideo Nakata’s RINGU (1999), and the nuclear monstrosity of Ishiro Honda’s GOJIRA (1954), threats that rise up from dark depths to assail innocent, ignorant, or irresponsible victims. In this talk, Professor Sigmund Shen identifies these films as allegories for the struggles of Japanese historians, journalists, and scientists to reckon with memories of this troubled past.

Shen’s comparative analysis of these classic genre films will be supported by an in-depth examination of their historical underpinnings, and a psychoanalytic inspection of their symbolic and emotional content, ultimately highlighting the psychological and political functions of horror cinema.

30% of ticket proceeds will be donated to The Sunrise Movement because the fossil fuel industry is the real giant monster.