Miskatonic is proud to present an evening in conversation with the great British horror and sexploitation director Pete Walker. Starting out in softcore sex shorts in the 1960s before turning to features in 1968 with films like The Big Switch, School of Sex and his breakthrough, Cool it Carol! in 1969, Walker then self-financed a decade of brilliant horror and terror films including Die Screaming Marianne (1971), The Flesh and Blood Show (1972), House of Whipcord (1974), Frightmare (1974), The Confessional (1976), Schizo (1976), The Comeback (1978) and House of the Long Shadows (1983), with the odd sexploitation film still peppered in, such as Tiffany Jones (1973) and Home Before Midnight (1979). Walker’s work was often critically reviled in its day – even while being immensely successful commercially – although some astute critics did note their sophisticated subtexts, often dealing with double lives and the sadism of conservative authority figures who dole out various degrees of punishment to their younger, less repressed counterparts, who they see as vulgar or sinful. Thanks to the combination of enthusiastic British horror journalists and zine writers, the FAB Press release of Steve Chibnail’s book Making Mischief: the Cult Films of Pete Walker in 1998, and the reissue of several of Walker’s films by Anchor Bay in 2005, and more recently on blu ray by Kino Lorber (as well as on horror streaming services Amazon Prime and Shudder), he has thankfully staked his place in the horror pantheon. We’ll talk to Walker about being an upstart in an uptight industry, making a horror icon out of elderly Scottish actress Sheila Keith, turning communion wafers into weapons in The Confessional, working with horror giants Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and John Carradine on House of the Long Shadows, his ill-fated Sex Pistols documentary, and so much more.

A polymath of considerable artistic  importance in the horror genre, Clive Barker has been a mainstay in horror culture since the mid-1980s, and has won critical and fan appreciation for his various strange and often beautiful creations, which have been curiously overlooked outside of horror circles. This class will examine his uniquely abject and original artistry, beginning with the splatterpunk delights of Books of Blood (1984-5), The Damnation Game(1985), and The Hellbound Heart (1986) through to his fusions with the dark fantastic and YA fiction in Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show(1989), and Abarat series(2002 -), among other popular titles. Barker’s own films, as  a writer and director, in the 1980s and 1990s will also be examined to analyse their familiar Barkerian elements (sex, death, religion, belonging, selling one’s soul) alongside themes and motifs on monstrosity, cultural rejection, secret desires and appetites, torment and the limits of excess and power. With the aid of clips, sketches, posters, and archive material, in this lecture I will trace and present core themes and ideas that run riot throughout his fiction and film, and invite you to (re)discover Barker’s enduring legacy and unique contribution to horror culture.

NOTE:This archival class is now available online at http://www.vimeo.com/ondemand/shadowoverlovecraft   This archival class is behind a paywall for a limited time, from August 20, 2020 – September 20, 2020. 70% of proceeds from purchase or rental of this class during this period will be donated to Black Lives Matter charities. Featuring Authors Victor LaValle (THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM), Matt Ruff (LOVECRAFT COUNTRY), Ruthanna Emrys (WINTER TIDE), Peter H. Cannon (H.P. LOVECRAFT: A CRITICAL STUDY) and moderator Rodney Perkins. THE SHADOW OVER LOVECRAFT: INTERROGATING H.P. LOVECRAFT’S RACISM from Miskatonic Institute on Vimeo. There is no denying that H.P Lovecraft was a racist. In his earliest years as a writer, he was an outright white supremacist, later supposedly softened into a cultural elitist. Though racism was not uncommon in his day, and some have argued that this excuses his attitudes, his racism and xenophobia was especially vehement, even for his time. These attitudes are directly apparent not only in an infamous 1912 poem denigrating those of African descent, but in journal entries and personal correspondences, as well as indirectly discernable through allegorical descriptions of non-human races in his fiction. This latter point is the most tricky, as it is not discernible to everyone (sometimes a fish-person is just a fish-person) and this has on occasion made fans of his work defensive when it comes to this line of questioning. Often held as Lovecraft’s most racist horror story, The Horror at Red Hook was addressed, revised and reclaimed by writer Victor LaValle in his brilliant, multiple award-winning novella The Ballad of Black Tom in 2016, which reconfigures the perspective of the story to that of African American protagonist Charles Thomas Tester, which Locus magazine praised for “co-opting Lovecraft’s epic-scale paranoia into the service of a trickster tale.” The same year saw the release of Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country – currently in production as an HBO series with Jordan Peele and JJ Abrams – which similarly explores issues of race in Lovecraft’s work through its tale of an African American science fiction fan named Atticus Turner, traversing through New England during the heyday of the Jim Crow laws in search of his missing father. The release of both of these books prompted renewed questioning into the legacy of Lovecraft’s fiction for a legion of fans and fellow writers who have found magic in his Mythos and Cosmic Horror, easily one of the most influential strands of horror in literary history. But does Lovecraft’s racism overshadow his incredible contributions to the field? Should Lovecraft be demoted in the pantheon of horror writers based on his personal ideologies? Can people of those races and ethnicities Lovecraft directed hate towards still find value his work? Come join us as we hash it out Town Hall-style, with our special guest speakers, Lovecraft scholar Peter H. Cannon and authors Victor LaValle, Matt Ruff and Ruthanna Emrys – whose debut novel Winter Tide (2017) was called “A mythos yarn that totally reverses the polarity on Lovecraft’s xeophobia, so that in the end, the only real monsters are human beings.” The panel will be moderated by author and festival programmer Rodney Perkins.

Prosthetic demise, or the “dummy death” as film historians Howard S. Berger and Kevin Marr refer to it, is a practical cinematic technique wherein an actor portraying a character is replaced by an articulated replica special-effects mannequin at a moment of extreme violence and/or death within a given film’s narrative. This device has been employed by filmmakers all over the world, at every level of production and in every genre since the dawn of the cinematic medium. When viewed in isolation, the dummy death effect can be characterized as the cinematic illusion in microcosm. Artificial celluloid images convey the illusion of life and reality – an illusion that is reflected in the (either subtle or abrupt) transition from actor/character to its corresponding prosthetic replica. It is also cinema at it’s most vulnerable – understanding that a viewer is to temporarily accept this illusion as reality, as such, the nature of this illusion invites this moment where, without explanation, a character physically transforms (however briefly) into something inanimate or inhumanly animate during his or her death. Berger and Marr call this the “Destructible Man effect” and its very existence creates ripples upon ripples of visual and thematic repercussions. Berger and Marr utilize a two-prong approach when examining films that contain a moment of prosthetic demise: one is thematic and one involves strictly visual elements of cinematic storytelling. The key thematic elements relatable to the dummy death effect include (but are not limited to): transformation, substitution, deception, duality and abstraction. Transformation refers to the abrupt shift in method of presentation from actor/character to prosthetic facsimile (also reflected in narrative aspects such as personality or physical changes in characters); substitution refers to the replacement of actor/character with a prosthetic facsimile (and any story arcs that depict substitution of one or more characters for others); deception refers to the intended, illusory effect on the audience (and any experienced by characters within the plot); duality is reflected in the pairing of the actor/character with their dummy twin (and often reflected by twinning characters either with another character or psychologically, as in schizophrenia); abstraction defines the dummy as an inanimate image/replica of its living, human counterpart (again, which may also have metaphoric impact on the story’s characters). In addition, ever-present are themes of dehumanization, re-humanization and familial dislocation. Elements of visual storytelling in cinema that are relatable to cinematic dummies include (but are not limited to): shadows, silhouettes, mirror reflections, paintings, statues, photographs, dolls, mannequins, costumes and masks. An examination of films that contain a dummy death, using these two methodologies in tandem, allows the viewer to bypass potential analytical roadblocks like personal taste, subjective notions of high and low art and more traditional approaches to film criticism in favor of a more objective, fixed set of thematic and physical elements that can be used like tools to uncover hidden, recurring patterns of meaning, symbolism and sub-textual counter-narratives in all (including non-dummy-death) cinema. This overall approach also levels the cinematic playing field, allowing for an examination of films by directors as disparate as Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle, Francois Truffaut and Al Adamson, Quentin Tarantino and Edwin S. Porter, Steven Spielberg and Shohei Imamura, within the same cinematic, storytelling continuum. The class will be illustrated by clips from such dummy-death emboldened films like STRAIT-JACKET, SCANNERS, DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN, THE BIRDS, 2001 and THE FURY in addition to two crucial silent films: Alfred Clark’s Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895), known to be the first edit in cinema as well as the first dummy-death and The Great Train Robbery (1903), the first complex narrative film and also the first dummy-death within a complex narrative film.

This lecture aims to introduce students to the African Horror literary genre. While African Horror films have made great strides in recent years, thanks to the Nollywood film industry and the South African Horror Film Festival, African horror literary fiction is still to take its rightful place in the commercial horror market. We shall examine the term “African Horror”, and how it is portrayed by the popular media before discussing its place as a bona-fide literary genre, similar to other regional horror genres and its classification by distributors. We shall also discuss what constitutes African horror, and what makes it different from horror fiction written by people of African descent. With over 4000 African tribes and counting, it would be impossible to study African Horror under one uniform blanket as each tribe has its own unique culture and lore. Therefore, I shall focus on the West African (specifically, Nigerian) region in discussing the evolution of African Horror from folk tales under the moonlight to early written works such as Amos Tutuolas’s The Palmwine Drinkard (1952), Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa’s Indaba, My Children: African Folktale (1964), to later African Horror works such as Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1993) and Nuzo Onoh’s The Sleepless (2016). We shall also examine the mythos of African Horror, the lore, the superstitions that surround death, burial rites and the afterlife in African communities and the role colonialism, Christianity, politics, poverty and globalisation have played in creating situations that give rise to evils such as the harvesting of Albino body parts, the killing of child witches and the kidnapping of humans for witchcraft or political motives. These true-life horrors have all been bred by superstition, and these superstitions form the ethos behind most African Horror literature. We shall discuss the relevance of African horror to the genre pool, especially as relates issues of negative stereotyping of the continent and the prevalence of poverty and other true-life horror situations in the continent which has led some critics to question the relevance of African Horror genre amidst these real life problems. I shall illustrate with video clips, images and press articles in an interactive session with the students. It is my hope that the students will accompany me on this unique journey into the deep mysteries of African culture and understand this emerging horror genre and the various shades of superstition that drive the African Horror narrative.

For this Special Screening at the IFC’s Center’s 2nd annual genre film festival What the Fest!? NYC, Douglas E. Winter – acclaimed author, editor, biographer of Stephen King and Clive Barker and personal friend of the late Dallas Mayr (aka Jack Ketchum) – will be presenting a short tribute to author Jack Ketchum before the film, which will also be followed by a Q+A with the film’s director (and ‘The Woman’ herself!) Pollyanna McIntosh. From the What the Fest!? website: When we last came upon Darlin’, she was leaving her seemingly ideal suburban family life behind to live in the wilderness with The Woman (writer/director Pollyanna McIntosh, perhaps best known for her role on The Walking Dead), who came into her life when her depraved father captured The Woman and kept her chained up in the family barn. It’s eight years later and Darlin’ is a teenager not unlike any other, except for the fact she’s been raised in the wilderness by a feral woman. Now separated from her family and placed in a Catholic girls reformatory (never a good idea, but that’s the Catholic Church for you), she’s being assimilated back into society and taught the ways of the Lord. But the feral part of Darlin’ is never far away, and neither is The Woman who loved, nurtured and cared for her, hoping to bring her family back together. The Woman, the late novelist Jack Ketchum’s most twisted creation, was first introduced in his 1991 novel Offspring, and when that tale came to the screen in 2009, Pollyanna McIntosh brought the character to life so vividly that Ketchum and Lucky McKee wrote the 2011 film THE WOMAN (later novelized by Ketchum) to continue her story. Now McIntosh herself has taken the reins as writer/director and made a stunning debut feature that honors the author and this demented family saga. McIntosh has assembled a first-class cast, with Irish actress Lauryn Canny excelling in the title role and Nora-Jane Noone and Cooper Andrews (McIntosh’s co-star on The Walking Dead) both lending fine support as Darlin’s few adult sympathizers. And then there’s McIntosh returning as The Woman, fiercer and more feral than ever, but also filled with the love and purity of a devoted mother that makes this her best performance in the series yet. As dark and violent as anything you’ll find at this year’s What The Fest?, DARLIN’ is both a satisfying continuation of the saga of The Woman and her demented family and a terrific directorial debut for its star. – Matthew Kiernan Director: Pollyanna McIntosh Producer: Andrew van den Houten Cinematographer: Halyna Hutchins Editor: Julie Garcés Running Time: 101 min Language: English Country: USA Year: 2019

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. Image from: Peter Strickland’s radio adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape EVENT TRAILER:

In the 1980s, a handful of writers — Clive Barker, David J. Schow, Joe R. Lansdale, and John Skipp & Craig Spector — inadvertently kicked off a seismic shift in literary horror. Less a conscious revolution than a spontaneous eruption of the arts, these restless artists bucked against the constraints of conventional horror, serving up whopping doses of wildly explicit sex, visionary violence, and really loud rock ‘n’ roll, underlying an even more subversive layer of fierce cultural critique. At the time, it was accused of “coarsening the genre”. And when the 80s horror boom crashed and burned in the 90s, there were those who held splatterpunk responsible. In the years that followed, “extreme horror” fiction paved the way to cinematic “torture porn”. And even network cop shows started showing more graphic onscreen violence than would have gotten an “R” rating a mere fifteen years before. Best-selling novelist, award-winning book editor and filmmaker John Skipp conducts a crazy three-hour tour through a history of horror’s most hilariously-named subgenre. The forces that shaped it. And the forces it has shaped, as we enter the fresh horrors of the 21st century. For a full reading list of the books discussed in Skipp’s class, see HERE >> photo: Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale. Richard Christian Matheson, David J. Schow, Ray Garton, Robert McCammon and John Skipp in 1986 by Beth Gwinn

This class will introduce students to the horror films of the 1940s through those films often described as examples of the paranoid (or Gothic) woman’s film. These films, which emerged in response to the phenomenal success of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, feature a woman in love with a potential murderous lover. Although the cycle begins before the war, its key period of productivity was during the war years, and it can therefore also be seen as a key genre associated with changes in the audience during this period. With many men away fighting the war, women were encouraged to disassociate with domesticity in favour of war work and this changed the nature of the cinematic audience. Rather than simply going to the cinema as part of a couple or a family, Hollywood was overwhelmed by the new audience of women that were going to the cinema in groups or alone, and these changed circumstances encouraged these female audiences to play with new forms of femininity. The films therefore exhibit these ambivalent relationship to both the home and the world beyond in both of which require their female leads to turn detective. We will therefore begin with a discussion of Rebecca as a key text within this cycle. It will examine the ways in which these film plays with their heroines’ struggle to make sense of their husbands; and the ways in which these women find themselves unable to tell whether these husbands love or hate them, a uncertain which motivates their investigative narratives. We will then move onto other examples of the genre, such as another Joan Fontaine classic, the 1944 adaptation of Jane Eyre, which was (like Rebecca) explicitly understood as a horror film at the time. This will also be used to illustrate another key feature of the period, that these were not low budget horror films but major prestige studio productions, and ones that sought to acquire associations with legitimate culture. We will also look at Gaslight in this context, a film that sweep the academy awards in the 1945. The class will then move on to explore the ways in which these materials were linked to another key feature of the period, film noir, which is often seen as distinct from the paranoid woman’s film, although neither of these terms existed at the time, and the films that are now associated with these two categories were usually identified with being part of the same category in the 1940s: the horror film. The class will therefore look at Phantom Lady (1944), a film often seen as a classic of film noir but one which was produced by a woman, Joan Harrison, who had also been one of Hitchcock’s key collaborators. Although often seen as a film noir, this film features a female, rather than a male, detective (film noir is often distinguished from the paranoid woman’s film on the basis that the former is supposed to be male centred and the latter female centred), and one that features another key aspect of these films, a focus on psychological horror: the heroine’s antagonist is a psychologically deranged killer. Finally, the class will end with a consideration of Val Lewton’s films. Lewton is often read as both a low budget filmmaker and as one of the key contributors to the horror film in the period. However, through an examination of his first film, Cat People (1942), the class will explore how Lewton’s films feature many of the elements discussed above: a female detective, psychological horror, and an attempt to acquire associations with legitimate culture. We will therefore examine its associations with Rebecca and Jane Eyre, on which Lewton had been a script editor before being hired to produce films for RKO.