Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) remains best known for her supernatural horror novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). After several decades of critical and commercial neglect, her work now has a higher public profile than ever. Her back catalogue has been re-published by Penguin, Ruth Franklin’s award-winning 2016 biography inspired numerous reviews and articles, and Jackson’s estate has released two well-received collections of her previously unpublished work since the late 1990s, with a volume of her selected letters forthcoming. A film adaptation of her 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle was released last year, and Mike Flanagan’s 2018 Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House brought a whole new generation of fans to her work. In the first half of seminar, I will be talking about who Jackson was and the reasons why her work remains so important for horror fans and creators. The impressive scope of her literary interests will be an important theme. As well as creating the most famous haunted house of the twentieth-century, Jackson also played a foundational role in establishing the ‘Suburban Gothic’ sub-genre (in her debut novel, The Road Through the Wall, 1948), wrote what is still the single-most notorious American folk horror tale (‘The Lottery’, 1948), and penned a bleakly funny apocalyptic satire (The Sundial, 1956). What’s more, she was also one of the most high-profile working mothers of her era, thanks to the many non-fiction stories about her busy family life published in contemporary women’s magazines. In the second half of the talk, I will focus on one particularly timely (and influential) aspect of Jackson’s interest in domesticity and female interiority: her recurrent depiction of deeply troubled young women. I’ll argue that precocious mass-murderer Merricat Blackwood, the narrator of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is the precursor to the many young women in the contemporary horror cinema canon who find the boundaries between reality and fantasy dangerously malleable. Within American horror cinema, teenage girls are often only permitted to openly express rage when their actions are related to some kind of external supernatural force (as in The Exorcist, Carrie, Teeth, Ginger Snaps and Jennifer’s Body). We Have Always Lived in the Castle is therefore particularly interesting in that it explicitly relates its heroine’s disturbing behaviour to the deeply dysfunctional workings of the nuclear family. I will then discuss several recent horror films focusing on homicidal young women whose behaviour and motivations owe much to the Jackson blueprint. These films will include Excision (2012), The Bleeding House (2011), Black Swan (2010), Stoker (2013), The Eyes of My Mother (2016), and Thoroughbreds (2018). 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. 

This just-added special Solstice class is included in your LA Pass or your Global Pass! Note it takes place in Pacific time. Since this class falls on the Winter Solstice, the class will be preceded by a brief talk about the Winter Solstice from Dr. Greg Salyer, President of the Philosophical Research Society, who are our usual Los Angeles venue and our partners in presenting this special class. Magic and technology share a deeply intimate relationship to the human experience as they are both methods that use tools to gain control over nature and ourselves. The magician and the inventor both attempt to break open conventional ways of working with the forces that shape our lives. Magic is, indeed, a kind of spiritual hacking: They are opening the machine of the universe to understand how it works and bend it towards a new purpose. And when magicians and artists use technology to explore the occult imagination they reveal new ways of enchanting our lives. Based on the research from Peter Bebergal’s Strange Frequencies, this multi-media presentation will take participants through the history of how human beings have attempted to interact with the otherworldly using technology. John Dee’s shew stones, spirit photography, and ghost radios, are all examples of our capacity to reengineer our spiritual lives. These, and other kind of occult practices require experimentation, breaking boundaries, and using devices in ways they might not be originally intended for. This desire to restore some inner agency to our own lives is also apparent recent popularity of DIY and maker culture. We are seeking enchantment and wonder in new ways and are coming to see it means pushing up against spiritual and material restrictions. Peter will stage the fantastic with film clips, photographs, and sound recordings. Topics include: The legend of the golem; automata and the uncanny valley; magic lanterns and natural magic; spirit photography; electronic voice phenomena; and the dreamachine. The course will propose that belief in the supernatural is not required to be enchanted. Technology provides means through which we can activate that part our imagination. Hacking is a state of mind. Please note these classes are live events and cannot be downloaded for later viewing. Image from: Peter Strickland’s radio adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape ORIGINAL EVENT TRAILER (From 2019 class):

Thou dost feel that I shudder. — My teeth chatter while I speak, yet is is not with the chilliness of the night — of the night without end. – Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial In 1983, Tony Scott’s The Hunger introduced one of the most important moments of goth history. Cast as a vampire, David Bowie and his co-star Catherine Deneuve stalk the nightclub looking for prey. With fog so thick it casts a strange haze on the pit of writhing dancers, Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” begins its nine-minute long requiem with a foreboding, echoing bassline and a screeching guitar. Frontman Peter Murphy appears in frame behind a cage – his face sunken in, the light perfectly angled towards his high set cheekbones. The strobe light clicks, counting the seconds until Bowie’s character locks in on his victim. Here, goth’s past and future converge – forever and ever. This lecture will discuss the inextricable link between horror and the goth subculture through music, visuals, fashion, and spaces – with an emphasis on the 1980s. It will focus on the allure of the unknown and its pleasurable horrors, as well as their underlying meanings. While the foundation of goth gathers inspiration from early horror films (Dracula, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), it also influenced later iterations of the horror genre through visuals and soundtrack selections (The Crow, Queen of the Damned). Additionally, we will discuss how the aesthetics of the horror genre leaked into the interior of the club: not only did the music set the tone, but the decor of its walls created the overall atmosphere, which at times included meat bags (Planet X, Liverpool) and an elevated coffin surrounded by candelabras (The Magic Circle, Zürich). Topics covered will also include Freud’s das unheimliche (the uncanny) within album art – such as X-Mal Deutschland’s cover for their 1982 single for “Incubus Succubus” – as well as Danielle Dax’s performance in The Company of Wolves, and Propaganda Magazine’s video trilogy. Plus, musical and visual samples from beloved artists including The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees as well as the ghastly theatrics of bands such as Specimen, Neva, Parálisis Permanente, and the Virgin Prunes. 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 vast collection of rapidly-produced murder mystery films that emerged in 1970s Italy has become known in exploitation cinema histories as the giallo. This all-encompassing categorisation has however subsumed several smaller, loosely-connected film cycles, each of which was embedded in its immediate cultural, economic and political contexts in different ways. This talk will investigate how a collection of these cycles capitalised on preoccupations with the recent past in 1970s Italy, and an attendant sense of disquiet towards modernity and the pace of socio-cultural change. This will in turn reveal various strategies that were being deployed to exploit the local film market, in a perpetual attempt to capitalise on topicality and the perceived tastes of the popular audience. The key cycles to be considered include a small collection of films that make explicit reference to memories of the Second World War weighing heavily upon the present (In the Folds of the Flesh, Naked Girl Killed in the Park, Watch Me When I Kill, Hotel Fear), commentaries on the increasingly globalised lifestyles of affluent post-war modernity (a much larger category, including such films as Blood and Black Lace, A Quiet Place to Kill, Blade of the Ripper and What Have You Done to Solange?) and ‘rural’ gialli that gaze inwardly at Italy’s atavistic underbelly, to deploy a well-established set of discourses surrounding the nation’s past and the onset of modernity (Bay of Blood, Don’t Torture a Duckling, Torso, The House of the Laughing Windows, Bloodstained Shadow). Ultimately, the talk will consider these films as prime examples of the serial repetition that characterised Italy’s popular film industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Numerous opportunistic (and usually short-lived) bursts of activity – known locally as filoni – emerged around the profitable film genres du jour. By looking at several of these cycles side-by-side (and placing them in the broader context of numerous filoni focusing on violent crime that emerged at the same time), this talk will examine how this sector of the film industry engaged both with contemporary events and the whims of the market: firstly, by creating speculations in an attempt to predict where the next cycle might lie, informed by previous patterns; and secondly, to exploit the short-lived favourable market conditions of already profitable cycles. My interest is therefore not with uncovering ‘hidden’ preoccupations in the films. Rather, it is with investigating how the industrial conditions of filone filmmaking demanded production decisions that relied on the assumption that such preoccupations were present in a target audience. 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.

“It was a corpse factory,” left wing political theorist Rosa Luxemburg said about the Great War, what we generally call today World War I. The corpse factory also brought the dead to life in ways that still cause us to shiver. The Great War is the mother of horror. We will, for example, meet an infantry officer fighting in the Carpathians (Dracula country), named Bela Lugosi. We will discuss not only how his experience of exile following the failed Hungarian revolution affected his long-running identification with Dracula (one that began before 1931). We also will meet some lesser known grandparents of horror like French director Abel Gance whose 1919 film J’Accuse arguably represents the first zombie film. In his climatic scene, armies rise from the dead and move en masse against a world that betrayed them. But Tom Savini and Greg Nicotero did not fashion these images of the undead. Gance used veterans, scarred, bandaged and mutilated, as his extras…most of which would return from the film set to their very real deaths at Verdun. Can we say the Great War created the horror film? In many respects yes. The idea of the terrifying supernatural, of course, has its roots in the earliest human civilizations and probably back to the first ceremonial burials. But we will learn how modern horror received a special impetus from what happened to the human body, what could be done to the human body, by the terrifying tech introduced in the Great War. Film clips from Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, along with lesser known works like The Unholy Three and Warning Shadows, will be discussed as the new form of horror. We’ll see, in fact, that the Great War even changed our language for talking about these films as. By the 1930s, the idea of the “horror film” enters several languages and replaces the “weird mystery” description of films dealing with the supernatural. Finally, we’ll see the growth of what we’ll call horror culture and how the Great War shaped it. We’ll learn about Lovecraft and Machen’s fascination with the war and how surrealism and horror joined common cause. The Great War transformed the modern world. The Great War also filled that world with nightmares, some old as time but made new in the ghastly aftermath of the conflict. Join us in exploring the wasteland. 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 March 1966 Life magazine published ‘The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug that Got Out of Control’, an article that covered the growing popularity of LSD use in America. Staff writer Gerald Moore was largely even-handed in his account, reporting that LSD could provide the user with ‘beatific serenity and shimmering insight’. However, he struck a darker, more cautionary tone when he described the case of an unnamed ‘teen-age girl’ who attended a Hollywood ‘acid party’. According to Moore, she took LSD and then suffered a bad trip: ‘a sudden vision of horror or death which often grips LSD users when they take it without proper mental preparation.’ Within psychedelic culture the threat of the bad trip hovers like an ominous presence. Psychedelic or ‘Mind-clearing’ drugs may promise wisdom, visionary insight or a fabulous holiday for the brain, but they can also release the horrors of the id, tear the veil of sanity and pull you into the void. As psychedelic culture took root into the public imagination, film-makers of the mid to late 1960s, drew heavily on its visual language. From the art-house to the drive in; Conrad Rooks’ Chappaqua (1966) to Ed Mann’s Hallucination Generation (1966), cinema variously made use of and attempted to imitate the sensory intensity of the stereotypical acid trip: polychromatic colours, spatial-temporal distortion and strange, surreal encounters. However, as this class will explore by way of an illustrated talk, it was the horror cinema of the period that made the most productive and imaginative use of psychedelic imagery. Films like Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers (1967), Vernon Sewell’s Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968) and Daniel Haller’s The Dunwich Horror (1970) vividly rendered ‘sudden vision (s) of horror or death’ in scenes that carried a distinctly acid-tinged ambience. These cinematic bad trips are gateways to inner space and terrifying psychic landscapes. Along with other examples by directors including José Mojica Marins, Ray Danton and ‘J.X. Williams’, they signify a preoccupation with a horror of the mind, not of the body. With reference to writers including Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary this class will chart the emergence of psychedelia across the Sixties and will examine the incorporation of its visual language in horror cinema during the period 1966-1972. Rather than seeing the films in question as acts of exploitation, the talk will frame them as radical works of acid horror, a from which in the case of The Dunwich Horror is used to conjure the cosmic vertigo integral to H. P. Lovecraft’s writing. Further, the talk will also read back from the films to the wider drug culture to uncover a sense of horror underpinning the psychedelic experience as a whole. 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.

British comics dominated children’s entertainment in the UK in the last century but have been all but forgotten today. When they are remembered, it is often assumed that the boys’ titles were all about sports, space and war, while girls got stories about ponies, ballet and boarding schools. But nothing could be further from the truth! – these comics were not for the fainthearted and the girls’ titles in particular told many stories of outsider protagonists, psychological cruelty, isolation, and supernatural mystery. Misty (IPC, 1978-80) is an important part of this lost history, whose stories included “Pacts with the devil, schoolgirl sacrifice, the ghosts of hanged girls, sinister cults, evil scientists experimenting on the innocent and terrifying parallel worlds where the Nazis won the Second World War.” (Guardian, 18 August 2012). This lecture will introduce students to Misty and its creators, explore the ways in which it draws on Gothic themes and archetypes, and argue that its combination of fairytale abstraction and psychological mystery constructs a particular type of ‘Gothic for Girls’. I begin by giving some brief background to the rise of the British girls’ comics industry from the 1950s onwards, with a particular focus on spooky stories and horror host characters. I then look more closely at Misty’s inception and creation, and explore its evolution from a proposed horror vehicle into a supernatural mystery title. This cultural history discusses its aesthetic, Misty herself as host character, and the editorial changes that were made to proposed story content. The second part of this talk digs more deeply into the Misty stories to explore their Gothic qualities, with particular reference to gender. It argues that Misty twists Gothic tropes into metaphors for the experiences of a female teenage audience: for example, through grotesque bodies, uncontrolled growth, and the exclusion of male characters. I also analyse Misty’s use of Female Gothic symbols (e.g. the double, the Other, mirrors, masks), and archetypes (e.g. witch, ghost, vampire). The final part of this lecture contextualises Misty against 1970s children’s horror (TV, public information films) and the literary tradition of children’s Gothic. It argues that Misty combines Female Gothic tropes with fairy-tale markers to articulate a Gothic for Girls: an underexplored subgenre that constructs and acknowledges girlhood as an uncanny experience, interrogating expectations and reimagining its fears. 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 1920’s Haunted Spooks to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the genre of horror-comedy has never really, you should excuse the expression, died. Yet humor and horror seem pretty different; one’s a pie in the face, the other’s an axe in the skull. It’s obvious why watching someone being torn asunder would be horrible but why is the endless suffering of the Three Stooges funny? Could there be any congruencies between funny and fear, snickers and screams, gore and gags, slapstick and slaughter? Yes. This class proposes – carefully, while remaining alert and well-armed – that the two genres are not mortal enemies. For one thing, people in pain are a perennial part of every art; to be fascinated with human suffering is to be human. Both comedy and horror can show us how to live (and, of course, die); from Psycho we learn that Death can come to anyone at any time. Also, to always shower with a friend. The class will examine horror’s relationship with philosophers’ explanations of comedy: Immanuel “Carrot Top” Kant’s Incongruity Theory (it’s funny when two things that don’t go together go together); Sigmund “Shecky” Freud’s Relief Theory (comedy is a rapid expulsion of tension); Thomas “Nutso” Hobbes’s Superiority Theory (“You’re in pain and I’m not – ha!”); Henri “Giggles” Bergson (comedy requires “a momentary anesthesia of the heart”); and Mel Brooks (“Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die”). We’ll explore the mechanics of both using video clips and examples ranging from Frankenstein and Dracula to Abbott & Costello, and try to figure out what makes us laugh and/or scream. We’ll see that both genres love loss of control, anarchy, the breakdown of rules and conventions – the beast within us set free. And both exploit our paradoxical feelings about helplessness: seeing someone out of control can be hilarious (a clumsy person falling) or horrifying (a clumsy person falling into a snake-pit suspended over a shark-pit next to a zombie zoo). Both humor and horror also share a mordant view of our relationship to pain; an obsession with the human body and its multifarious fluids; and a subtext of death and transcendence underlying the eviscerated flesh and fart jokes. What could be more blood-curdlingly fun? 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 2020, almost from out of nowhere, masks have become a politically explosive subject in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet masks have an extraordinarily long history, containing great potency both culturally and socially, a subject of key interest for anthropologists and those in other fields of research. Horror cinema can reveal a great deal about the contemporary mechanics of masks and mask wearing in terms of how the genre has evolved since its earliest days to the present. As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas argues in her Bram Stoker Award nominated book Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019), three factors have long been at the core of how masks have endured so unrelentingly as extremely powerful cultural objects: the intersection of ritual, power and transformation. This talk maps the concept of the horror mask from ancient times to a range of different cultural and national contexts, including Japanese Noh theater and the Italian commedia dell’arte, turning towards its evolution in gothic literature and Grand Guignol theater in France, before focusing on film in particular. Beginning with early cinema, the lecture will provide a chronological tour of how the mask evolved and became such an enduring, ubiquitous, yet bewilderingly critically overlooked element of horror cinema iconography, leading to its codification in the genre from the early 1970s. Then, a loose taxonomy of different kinds of horror masks will be introduced: skin masks, blank masks, repurposed masks, animal masks, and technological masks. Across these categories, Heller-Nicholas will discuss a range of examples from horror movies from around the world with an emphasis as much on how the mask can deviate in its meaning and usage as it does present a coherent, consistent logic. But, at its heart, the presence of the mask remains mobilized around those three key concepts: ritual, power and transformation. What does this tell us about horror? What does this tell us about the cultures that produce and consume the genre? And what can it tell us about where we are today, where the very presence of the mask instantly speaks to very specific political affiliations and beliefs where masks are now a life or death matter? 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.