Homeownership is integral to the mythology of the so-called American Dream, and the right to property has been a thematic device in horror since The Castle of Otranto. With the promise of stability, autonomy, comfort, and a path towards upward mobility, the house is not merely a financial asset but a representation of our identity and our place in society. But what happens when malevolent forces shatter that illusion of power and safety and the dead won’t give up the deed? When does the private home become a haunted house? With films like The Amityville Horror, The Haunting in Connecticut, Dark Water, and His House, this talk will examine the role homeownership plays in horror both as aspirational bait and financial trap. Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering. 

In the gothic and horror imagination, inert things are often literally or seemingly vivified by being ascribed properties of the human. Human-like avatars of the creepy and the weird, objects such as dolls, puppets, dummies, automata, and waxworks facilitate key narrative, cultural, and socio-political discourses pertaining to identity and personhood. By stressing the permeable boundaries between self and other, uniqueness and anonymity, the living and the lifeless, these entities become haunting symbols of liminality and powerful harbingers of loss and death. Using an intermedial, intergeneric, and transdisciplinary approach, this illustrated lecture will focus on the figure of the doll and propose an investigation into the ways these humanoid bodies operate in gothic and horror cinema. Drawing on ‘thing theory’, as developed by Bill Brown and Elaine Freedgood, we will first explore the difference between objects and things and will then trace the use of eerie dolls from early film to contemporary horror flicks. In so doing, we will look closely at how unsolicited animation is depicted in order to distinguish between gothic and horror films in their use of this familiar trope. We will analyse the disruptiveness that in/animate agents foster in the narratives and the manner in which they activate Masahiro Mori’s ‘uncanny valley’ to represent subjectivity in crisis. The unsettling presence of the doll disturbs or subverts the normal subject object relationship and articulates themes as varied as mental instability, trauma, ageing, and consumerism. In this part, we will look at such films as Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), Dolly Dearest (1991), and the Child’s Play franchise. We will then move on to consider the negotiation of agency and femininity through acts of ‘dollifying’, by which I mean both the ascription of human faculties to inanimate objects and the subject’s acquisition of doll-like qualities. The nefarious implications of this process, along with its (paradoxical) potential for empowerment, will be discussed with reference to such films as the eccentric British gothic horror drama Corridor of Mirrors (1948) and the horror musicals The Devil’s Carnival (2012) and Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival (2015). For centuries, creepy dolls have toyed with our collective imagination. But why are we drawn to them? What can the doll’s association with transgression, doubling, and monstrosity tell us about ourselves and the postmodern societies in which we live? By the end of the class, students should be able to answer these and other related questions. Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering. 

The Miskatonic Institute is excited to once again team up with the collaborative virtual event NIGHTSTREAM, to present a special lecture on that very contemporary horror phenomenon, the Creepypasta. From the Slender Man to Candle Cove, creepypastas have an undeniable influence on pop culture. Internet urban legends and fictions have recently been the object of numerous films, tv series and podcasts. Such phenomenon deserves not an analysis, but an exploration, in order to understand why they fascinate us (and why they keep us in front of our computer late at night). Being one of the first scholars to write about the Slender Man mythology, Simon Laperrière invites you on a journey through those amateur fictions, questioning why their impact is so strong on a sociological point of view. Creepypastas are a new folklore that cannot be ignored, especially when a film like We’re Are All Going to the World’s Fair understands their power so well. Welcome into a world of strange and funny stories. Welcome to the Back Rooms!

Horror has been a key component of video games since the medium’s inception. From Haunted House for the Atari 2600 to this year’s Resident Evil: Village, video game designers have tasked players with something wholly unique to the genre: live through the horror, or die trying. The artistry behind crafting compelling stories with stimulating and responsive game mechanics requires a singular perspective and skill set. Miskatonic is proud to welcome genre legends Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick to discuss their role in the craft behind such hit horror video games as Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan. This lecture will be an in-depth exploration of their approach to the maze-like structure of horror video game scripts, and how they make sure the audience never gets lost in the process. Horror has always pushed the boundaries of sensation, and Fessenden and Reznick know firsthand how powerful, and terrifying, this relatively new medium can be. Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering. 

Throughout the 70s and 80s, Renee Harmon was quietly–and not so quietly–working both in front and behind the camera producing DIY exploitation films. She wrote and produced zombie nightmares (Frozen Scream) and action thrillers (Lady Street Fighter, Executioner Part II) at a time when women typically played empty plot devices on the big and small screens. This lecture will explore Renee Harmon’s immense career and her dogged, unconventional ways of getting her films made. We will dive into her work with director James Bryan (Don’t Go in the Woods) and focus on Jungle Trap, their final collaboration that was left unfinished in 1990. Lecturer Annie Choi will share how, through a series of wacky events involving a used car, the Bleeding Skull team had the honor of collaborating with Bryan to complete and unleash the film in front of new audiences today. Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering. 

A great amount has been written about Terry, but much of it is either inaccurate, far too academic (‘imagining what was never intended’ as Terry would have said) or just plain silly.  Terry would have laughed loudly at academic analysis of his work although, perhaps secretly, he would have been more than a little flattered. The films he made were always carefully planned, but they were primarily made to entertain, and for no other reason than Hammer was in business to make money – and Terry would have find it amusing that people thought otherwise.  He would remind people that his films were what you see, nothing more and nothing less.  No hidden meaning, no significant undercurrent, just an interpretation of the written word.  My lecture Terence Fisher Master of Gothic Cinema is an analysis of the man and his films.  He was a shy person, normally directors are strong-willed individuals who command the sound stage with an iron fist.  Terry just got on with his work and only rarely did he insist on something (and if he did the technicians knew he was usually right) and very rarely did he lose his temper.  He just wasn’t that kind of man.  During his directing career most of his pictures were largely dismissed as cheap, vulgar and sensational, including the early ones.  Now, in the early twenty-first century, his work is considered a major influence not only on the history of Hammer Films, but on the whole genre of horror films, especially the mid to late twentieth century cycle.  Terry didn’t really live to see his films acknowledged, except by a handful of dedicated fans and film historians.  He would have been pleased by their acceptance today, but would have also have been tickled pink because his work has proved all those pompous critics wrong – and Terry was never one to like critics.  What did they know about what the public wanted or indeed, what would stand the test of time?  This class will not only be discussing the horror cycle and their background, but also some of his work as an editor and a number of the preceding directorial films that integral as a training ground for the Hammer Gothic cycle. He once commented in connection with The Curse of Frankenstein that, ‘Until that moment I had been learning the craft.  Now I began to feel the art of it’. In essence, even in the 1950s he was an old-fashioned director but the art of film construction, through editing and all the genres he had worked on prior to 1957, were what made his Hammer horror cycle so timeless and still enjoyable today. Those films set the trend for other directors and producers at the time, including Roger Corman and his Poe cycle, and even today many directors of the genre refer to Terry as the founding father of the style. Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering. 

Gender non-conformity has long been a marker in cinema for murderous villainy and psychosis or has been presented as reason enough for anyone thus marked to be dispatched from their narrative universes with excessive (and often casually misogynistic) force. For transgender and gender-diverse people, everyday life can be the stuff of horror, ranging from the bureaucratically ontological – can you think of many other peoples the notionally most advanced of societies will attempt to legislate out of existence? – to enduring the constant background noise of the threat of violence, felt especially by trans people of color. A lot of screen media production, notwithstanding that it mightn’t all be read as “horror” by genre afficionadi, has only served, through stereotyping and ignorance, to perpetuate the real traumas and horrors experienced routinely by trans people. Necessarily then this lecture will debunk no small number of harmful myths about transgender people propagated by the screen media-industrial complex and in the horror movies historically produced within it. But that’s not all… We’ll explore the ubiquity of trans narratives and imagery within horror cinema – even if they’ve most often been deployed at a metaphorical remove from being transgender narratives and imagery, per se. Horror films concerned with body dysmorphic conditions – whether blights borne upon the surface of a body, or of mutilation or recombination of its constituent parts, inside, outside or inside-out… or concerned with unsought-after metamorphoses from causes natural, surgical or supernatural, and even possession narratives – all can be read as allegories for gender dysphoria… Frankensteinian narratives, which long pre-date the availability of gender affirmation surgery for those who seek body modifications to reconcile their sense of self with their corporeal housing, present even more points of metaphorical intersection, between horror cinema and trans lived experience, to dissect. We’ll move beyond the metaphorical and also celebrate the increasing participation of transgender people behind and in front of the camera, pausing to unpack challenges posed by the latter development. Trans performers and characters often appear only for a film to foreground their transness; a trans identity is very seldom secondary. But here’s the rub: even when it doesn’t matter, it matters. Take Bit (dir. Brad Michael Elmore, 2019): a 21st century Lost Boys for a kyriarchy-sensitized viewership which features trans actor Nicole Maines as a protagonist whose gender identity is never problematized – what a blessing! But… perhaps also a curse, in that, while transness has been rendered visible (a trans actor in a lead role!), hers is simultaneously invisible (her transness is erased narratively, and many viewers mightn’t apprehend that the actor is trans). Can any of us truly be what we can’t see? Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering. 

On a biking holiday with her boyfriend Rex, spirited, impulsive Saskia relates her childhood dream of being imprisoned in a golden egg, floating through the universe. Her anecdote turns out to be a chronicle of a death foretold. George Sluizer’s brilliant 1988 thriller Spoorlos unfolds as a series of prophecies, including several of the self-fulfilling variety: its characters can envision the consequences of their actions but pursue them anyway. After Saskia disappears from a roadside rest stop, Rex is consumed by a need to know what happened to her, a slave to his own morbid curiosity. In a parallel storyline, a prosperous chemistry professor strives to control and channel his own involuntary compulsions. Where many genre films utilize the element of surprise, Spoorlos is constructed so that its characters—and the audience—can see everything coming. This creeping, inescapable dread makes Sluizer’s film a classic—Stanley Kubrick called it the scariest movie he’d ever seen— and gives it a genuinely existential dimension. In this brand-new lecture, film critic and author Adam Nayman (It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls; Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks) will analyze how Spoorlos plays with various literary and dramatic conventions from its shivery, premonitory prologue to its startling, retrospectively inevitable climax, while also examining its relationship to various cinematic influences (including Vampyr, Psycho and The Shining). In addition, the lecture will include a comparison of Spoorlos with its 1993 American remake The Vanishing—a curious and baffling case of a European filmmaker reworking and arguably disfiguring his own material in a Hollywood context. Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering. 

In Britain, the books of horror novelist, Shaun Hutson, were at one time outsold only by those of Stephen King. Yet despite his success, Hutson’s work has never been subject to extensive scholarly appraisal. This is due, at least in part, to the literary value Hutson’s work is said to lack, and the disdain directed towards him by his (critically revered) contemporaries. Clive Barker, for example, is alleged to have referred to Hutson’s work as “irresponsible”, while Ramsey Campbell has accused Hutson on more than one occasion of “dragging horror into the gutter”. Politically ambivalent and morally conservative, Hutson’s writing also lacks the socially-charged impulse and cultural nuance characteristic of acclaimed authors such as James Herbert. So what, then, is interesting about Shaun Hutson’s oeuvre, if, by the author’s own admission, “greed is [his] main motivator” and his books aren’t “about anything”? This illustrated lecture explores this question and others, offering an assessment of Hutson’s novels during his most prolific decade, the 1980s. It will offer an overview of the “literary nasties” phenomenon sparked by the publication of Herbert’s The Rats – and imitators such as Guy N. Smith’s Night of the Crabs – to establish the context from which Hutson’s writing emerged. It will be argued that novels such as Slugs (1982), Spawn (1983), Erebus (1984), Chainsaw Terror (1984), Relics (1986) and others operate as pop-culture barometers that are reinforced by Hutson’s cult celebrity status in the contemporaneous horror and rock music press. A self-confessed super fan of the band Iron Maiden and avid cinemagoer, one finds in Hutson’s work epigraphs from hard rock acts such as Saxon, Dio, Queensrÿche and of course Maiden itself, juxtaposed against writers as diverse as Nietzsche and Lovecraft, while his books are said to read “as screenplays” and are indebted to popular cinema in numerous ways. The talk maintains that Hutson’s novels and celebrity function in a similar matter to “shock rock” acts such as Kiss and video nasties – whereby style is said to prevail over substance, and therein lies the appeal. The talk will be lavishly illustrated, feature extended quotations, clips from interviews, as well as contemporaneous horror films to assess the lasting significance of – as Kerrang magazine had it – “The Shakespeare of Gore.” Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering.