In his treatise on psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan makes reference to das ding, a king of thing-presentation that is the thing in its dumb reality, the beyond of the signified. Similar to Emmanuel Kant’s theory of the thing-in-itself, das ding is the Other in absolute alterity, outside language and mainly characterized by the fact that, for Lacan, “it is impossible for us to imagine it”; in its dumb reality; it cannot be assimilated through identification. In her essay “Powers of Horror,” Julie Kristeva, “The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I;” the abject is exclusion, in a place without meaning, and from that place it cries out in revolt and brutish suffering. This is the essence of horror: that which can be neither known nor named; without identification, we cannot seek to fight and free ourselves, and are destined to become that horror which we cannot know. These concepts of alterity and abjection have frequently been used in horror texts. In John Carpenter’s 1982 horror-science fiction film The Thing, a group of men at an Antarctic research station, find themselves under attack by an alien. However, the alien’s true form is never known, as it instead attempts to assimilate itself inside the bodies of the living creatures it finds, thus remaining an unknown monster both outside human language and without its own language. This, perhaps, is the true face of horror:, in a place devoid of life and unreachable, where the monster is at once unnameable, unknowable, and yet frighteningly familiar. Is the alien, and by extension the men, an embodiment of das ding, the true nature of absolute alterity, and at the same time also the abject, lost in a place devoid of meaning, left to languish in exclusion from the human race? Through the lens of The Thing, and other texts such as Planet of the Vampires and It, this class will examine the horror where alterity and abjection meet. If, as Kristeva writes, the cause of abjection is that which disturbs order and identity, then horror stems from that which cannot be identified, the alterity of the other. 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. 

From magic lantern phantasmagoria to Universal Classic Monsters to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the monster mash has always been a popular subcategory within horror. But what makes a mash-up? The terminology comes from music, but remix horror can be found in film, literature, television, and many other media. In form, mash-ups are the Gothic ‘monsters’ of our age—hybrid creations that lurk at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. Like monsters, mashups offer audiences the thrill of transgression in a relatively safe and familiar format. And like other popular texts, mashups are often read by critics as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. This talk will focus on three key moments in the history of the monster mash, beginning by briefly exploring Gothic traditions of mashup and intertextuality in 18th-century novels. These texts and techniques are taken up in magic lantern performances and other media. Next we will link these practices to a discussion of Universal Studios, who industrialized and commercialised the monster mashup in films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), The House of Frankenstein (1944), and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), paving the way for later film franchises to capitalise on remix techniques and shared universes. Universal’s Monsters also prefigure the horror of the more recent literary mashups and ‘Frankenfictions’, our third and final example. From Anno Dracula (1992) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019) to Hotel Transylvania (2012) and Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), the monster mashup is everywhere in the twenty-first century, manifesting in new and interesting ways. While we can certainly see similarities between all these examples, each also has its own origins and copyright histories in different media. What has taken this genre from the margins to the mainstream? For the most part monster mashups remix not to transform, but to highlight a frighteningly unchanging status quo—reminding us that Gothic fears ultimately ‘derive from our inability to convince ourselves that we have really escaped from the tyrannies of the past’ (Baldick 1992, xxii). Despite (or perhaps because of) their derivative natures, there is a lot these texts can teach us about the history of the horror industry. Repetition and recombination can have a critical function, indicating when a particular theme, form, or interpretation has begun to lose its power. Amidst a twenty-first-century resurgence in cerebral, original horror, monster mash-ups may not seem to offer any meaningful commentary on our socio-political reality, but as each of the examples in this talk will show, they can help us to reveal and remix the most fundamental structures of the status quo. 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.

During the 1970s and 80s the field of comics erotica in Italy burst dramatically to life, swiftly developing into a diverse field that straddled a range of genres including horror, crime, adventure, and comedy. Perhaps the most successful of these comics were those developed by Edifumetto, a Milanese publishing house established by Renzo Barbieri in 1972. At its height, Edifumetto was publishing hundreds of individual titles and selling millions of copies every month, with their comics appearing across Europe, Central and South America, North Africa and French-speaking Canada. Typically appearing as small-format pocket digests, these comics were notable for their lushly painted cover art which featured work by some of Italy’s finest illustrators, including Alessandro Biffignandi and Emanuele Taglietti. Significant also were the explicitness of their themes and imagery, with storylines that blended nudity and sex with violence so gratuitous that it occasionally bordered on parody. Although active across a range of genres, perhaps the most visually and thematically dramatic of Edifumetto’s comics were their horror titles, which included Wallestein il Mostro, Zora la Vampira and Sukia. This was a publishing genre in which the classic and the contemporary collided; deserted cemeteries and ruined castles played host to tales of depravity and madness that blended seamlessly with a world of fast cars, guns and glamour. Today these comics survive as a powerful record of a unique flowering of adult comics horror whose visceral and stylish intensity remains unmatched anywhere in the world. This talk will discuss these extraordinary comics from a cultural and historical standpoint, examining both the transnational context within which they evolved, and the uniquely Italian environment that shaped their development. Their links to the wider media landscape will be considered in detail, allowing for a full understanding of the position that they occupied within the popular cultural environment to emerge. Their relationship to developments in the international comics market, especially the growing trend for transnational practices of production and distribution, and an increasing acceptance of adult and erotic content across much of the western world will also be discussed. Finally, the talk will examine the close stylistic and thematic links that bound comics such as Wallestein to contemporary trends in Italian cinema, and especially to developments in the giallo and horror genres and films such as Dario Argento’s Suspiria and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. 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 her book on the role of gender in the modern horror film, Carol Clover discusses how the female body often translates as a metaphoric architecture for cinema, arguing that its penetrable yet opaque interiority becomes a perfect site for housing anxieties, fears, or what one would deem, following Freudian theory, the uncanny. This potentially disturbing correspondence between the uncanny feminine and architectural interiority finds its most overt articulation in horror films that take residential towers as their setting, with the precarity of female bodies highlighting the terrors that they give rise to. We see this in numerous horror films from the late 1960s until the present. This lecture focuses on the coupling between residential towers and threatening and/or threatened female bodies in two films—David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), and Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992)—locating in each productive engagements with different stages of neoliberalism and urban development. Negotiating the complex legacy of the association of the home with the realm of the feminine, we will think through questions of gendered representation via the concept of concrete maternality, which alludes to the residential tower as a new site that incubates anxieties related to the late capitalist transformation of social relations and its gendered formulations of unhomeliness. Specifically, as we look at the treatment of the residential high-rise as womb-like, we will come to understand the building as concrete, objective in its materiality, while envisioning its interiors to be experiential/embodied, thus open to subverting the logic of late capitalism from within. In other words, examining bodily and gendered analogies in architecture will enable us to reflect on the various ways sites and sights of horror directly relate to broader cultural trends and economic policies. Finally, we will reflect on the legacies of these films and turn to more recent productions that explore similar issues. 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 British Film Studio Hammer Films is perhaps one of the most iconic film studios of all time. Hammer’s production of gothic horror pictures began in 1957 with The Curse of Frankenstein, and would go on to cement a lasting house style for the company and international success. This success has led to the company being extensively documented both within and outside academia. Yet a crucial area of the company’s history remains largely unexplored. This talk will utilise never seen before archival materials held in the Hammer Script Archive to present a new perspective on Hammer Films. The talk will argue that whilst many studies of Hammer Films have been undertaken, none have accounted for the significant amount of creative and economic labour that went into over 100 unmade projects at the company. Utilising primary materials such as screenplays, financial documentation and correspondence, the talk will examine the industrial and production contexts of an eclectic range of Hammer’s unmade films, ranging from Loch Ness Monster project Nessie to Dracula in India script Kali Devil Bride of Dracula. Through an examination of these lost projects, the talk will therefore look to address a crucial gap in the history of Hammer Films via their unmade projects. Foregrounding Hammer’s unmade texts in this way also necessitates a shift away from the typical analysis of Hammer’s stars or the film’s visual style, and instead allows for an examination of the methods of production and the creative roles of the managing director, producer and screenwriter. For example Michael Carreras was Managing Director of Hammer between 1971–1979, and materials on Hammer’s unmade projects create a detailed picture of his tenure in charge of the company. As well as the Hammer Script Archive, the talk will utilise materials held at the BFI archive, the Margaret Herrick Library and the Warner Bros Archive in Los Angeles to refute key narratives surrounding Hammer’s demise, which often centre on creative stagnation. Instead the talk will suggest that Hammer’s unmade projects demonstrate exceptional creative innovation, even in the final years before their closure in 1979. It will argue that it was key tensions within Hammer, as well as larger industrial changes to the British film industry, which ultimately sealed the company’s fate. 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. 

“Now Rick has come full circle—in “retirement,” he’s as busy as ever, working on a wide range of projects at home. He says it feels like being a kid again.” – Peter Jackson Rick Baker is a world-renowned titan of the film industry whose curriculum vitae glitters with Oscar® gold, having won a record 7 Academy Awards® for Best Makeup over the course of his career, but his beginnings likely resemble many of our own. As a taciturn “monster kid” who whiled away youthful hours gleefully poring over love-worn copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, reverently drawing images of his favorite horror stars, and customizing Aurora model kits, Baker found that his idiosyncratic affinities made him something of a misfit. Through diligent research and exhaustive trial and error, Baker’s hobbies evolved into his life’s passion, as he incorporated mask-making and makeup into his creative world. Upon initial experimentation with makeup on himself, Baker recalls, “I sat in front of a mirror, but the reflection was not my face. It was no longer me. It was the face of a hideous vampire. Suddenly, I felt free. . . . I was hooked. I had to do more makeups. I wanted to look like my favorite monsters. On that day, my life was changed.” Although he was a shy adolescent, the transformative qualities of makeup emboldened Baker to dabble in the performative and the outrageous. Though seemingly contradictory, donning these eerie exoskeletons of his own design are precisely what enabled Baker to come out of his metaphorical shell. Makeup artists are known for testing their trade on themselves – they are, after all, their most reliable test subject – but Rick Baker’s personal relationship with transformation is clearly more than one of convenience. It is immediately obvious from Baker’s lavishly illustrated biography, Metamorphosis, and from his endlessly entertaining Instagram account, that Baker delights in applying makeup to himself. With a career as storied and varied as his, Baker has a unique perspective on the psychology of physical change to share with us. Miskatonic Los Angeles is deeply honored to host a conversation with the living legend himself, Rick Baker. Utilizing Baker’s self-portraits in the medium of monsters as our guide, we will track his personal and professional metamorphoses: from a boy to a man, and from a novice to a master. 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 1980s and early 1990s Horror Cinema had mostly disappeared from the Spanish film industry due to a variety of factors, most remarkably the marginalization of genres through the introduction of a series of legislative changes that favored auteur films. This situation radically changed in the mid 1990s with the arrival of a younger generation of filmmakers that attempted to make it new, often looking inwards (the very history of Spanish cinema) and outwards (international forms of cultural engagement) in order to appeal to the younger generations of film spectators. In this regard, two films, Tesis (Alejandro Amenábar, 1996) and The Day of the Beast (Álex de la Iglesia, 1995) are key landmarks, deploying horror categories and tropes within a dynamic of generic hybridization. In this respect, Tesis also is particularly pioneering in as much as it utilized the “imperfect aesthetics” of digital video. Thus, the film explicitly connects with the wider Spanish mediascape of the 1990s and the rise of reality TV and its characteristic visual “noise” as a key strategy to engage spectators. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, new directors such as Jaume Balagueró, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Paco Plaza, J.A. Bayona or Amenábar himself radically changed the contours of Spanish horror through a fundamental strategy: the internationalization of the national film output from an aesthetic and industrial viewpoint to appeal to both the domestic and foreign markets. In this context, this session will continue through a detailed analyzes of the four installments of the [Rec] franchise (Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza), a series of films that extensively uses the imperfect aesthetics of video, and, simultaneously epitomizes the configuration of Horror as the main exportable asset for the national film industry. While discussing the specificities of the above-mentioned films, this session will connect Spanish horror with other international films that deploy the imperfect aesthetic of video as a key stylistic feature, such as The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield. To sum up, the session will analyze the main industrial dynamics at the core of contemporary Spanish cinema and also scrutinize a variety of aesthetic strategies in order to pin down one of its dominant trends—the mix of filmic and videographic imagery—exploring also how they relate to transnational modes of address and spectatorial engagement. We will seek to answer the following question: taking horror as a case study, in what ways and how can we speak about Spanish national cinema or should we find an alternative template or conceptualization to define the studied body of works? 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. 

There’s one little country that America can’t seem to stop obsessing over. Ever since the slaves rebelled in St. Domingue to end slavery and colonization in the territory now known as Haiti, America has consistently represented the location as the space of nightmares, even stressing a secretive, ritualistic ceremony as the start of the revolution. Thus American representations of Haitian culture reduce them to an island of aberrant sorcerers creating monsters to destroy the West. Even Disney joined the lineup, dropping quips about Haiti’s parasitical nature in films such as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2010); likewise, President Trump could not resist alluding to it in his discussions of foreign policy, listing it as one of a number of ‘shithole countries.’ Yet a closer look at these representations and America’s concurrent sociopolitical behaviors reveals that such depictions actually say more about the US and its anxieties and missteps than it ever does about Haiti. Time and again, in various films and texts, Haiti disappears behind a mask of American making as the creators abject problematic political maneuvers and ideals onto the island. After all, as Seabrook notes in Magic Island (1929), Haiti may produce zombies, but it’s Americans they labor for. This course therefore examines a series of horror films and select texts to consider how these fictions erase Haiti to reveal the monster of American politics. Given the philosophical discord created by the American Occupation of Haiti in light of America’s democratic ideals, we will especially consider the films which arise in the era after the Occupation, in addition to considering how these texts repeat discourses apparent from the late 18th and early nineteenth century and predict representations in later films. Recommended texts and films: White Zombie (1932) The Emperor Jones (1933) I Walked with a Zombie (1943) The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985) ‘The Mulatto’ (Victor Sejour) ‘….Dead Men Working in Canefields’ (William Seabrook) ‘Benito Cereno’ (Herman Melville)

Edogawa Rampo (1894 – 1965) burst onto the literary scene in 1920s Japan with a rapid succession of short stories and novels that not only inaugurated a new genre of homegrown Asian detective fiction, but also helped to articulate the cultural logic of “erotic, grotesque, nonsense” (ero-guro-nansensu) in the interwar period. At a time when new forms of mass media, mass culture, and the avant-garde were ascendant, Rampo earned instant notoriety for his startling explorations of Japanese modernity: the lure of secret codes, fetishes, and illicit or prohibited desires; a fascination with cinema and visual spectacles; the psychology of leisure, boredom, and thrill-seeking; and a seemingly inexhaustible wanderlust for the labyrinthine back alleys and boulevards of the imperial metropolis Tokyo. This presentation will discuss scopophilia and claustrophilia as two predominant horror themes in Rampo’s fiction writing and their adaptation in the Japanese film and art worlds. Jacobowitz argues that he used these drives for visual pleasure and a love of coffin-like, enclosed spaces to achieve something closer to what his contemporaries, the Surrealists, regarded as a bridge between reality and imagination toward a more pure expression of the unconscious mind. We will explore his “Stalker in the Attic” (1926) and the film The Watcher in the Attic (1976) directed by Noboru Tanaka, the omnibus film Rampo Noir (2005), and Suehiro Maruo’s graphic novel The Strange Tale of Panorama Island (2010), among other works. 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.