PLEASE NOTE that this class is a live, in-person only event at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. It will not be streamable. Tickets must be purchased through the festival, and this event is not covered by the Miskatonic season pass. What if zombies, ghosts, and revenants aren’t frightening because they’re dead? What if they are horrifying because of excessive, uncanny vitality? Moving from ur-texts like WHITE ZOMBIE and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, to modern classics like RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and RE-ANIMATOR, Professor David Bering-Porter reveals how the undead embody our deepest anxieties about forms of life that refuse to die, far exceeding the limits of their natural lifespan. This excessive vitality extends beyond zombie cinema, manifesting in science-fiction nightmares of “grey goo” scenarios as seen in THE BLOB. Even apocalyptic revelations like 28 DAYS LATER reflect cultural fears rooted in biological reality: cancerous cells that refuse to stop dividing, viral infections overwhelming their hosts, and ecosystems pushed beyond their breaking point. In the latest collaboration with the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Miskatonic is proud to present David Bering-Porter’s canny analysis of the undead-as-reflection of society’s relentless consumption, expansion, and reproduction. Zombie cinema reveals an uncomfortable truth: in a world facing ecological collapse due to unchecked growth, the horror of excessive life might be a fate worse than death.

Since cinema’s earliest days, a disturbing archetype has stalked the silver screen. From the 1920 debut of THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI to the 2017 arrival of Jordan Peele’s groundbreaking GET OUT, horror cinema has harbored hordes of sinister, mind-controlling mesmerists. These Svengali-like manipulators are undeniably compelling villains, but they also illuminate something essential – and unsettling – about the very nature of film spectatorship itself. Devious hypnotists appear in disturbing films as diverse as Fritz Lang’s 1933 masterpiece THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, to Bigas Luna’s 1987 nightmare vision ANGUISH, demonstrating the medium’s enduring fascination with malicious mentalists. But more than a source of cheap thrills, their preternatural powers reflect the control the filmmakers themselves wield over the inner experiences of vulnerable viewers. At times the function of mesmerism has been more than allegorical, with directors Bernard Rose (CANDYMAN) and Werner Herzog (HEART OF GLASS) employing real hypnotic techniques on the sets of their films. In this lecture, film critic and author Adam Nayman will examine a variety of films to historicize hypnosis in horror movies. His survey will illuminate the role of hypnosis as both a provocative plot point, and a metatextual symbol of filmmakers’ power over their audiences. In addition to the aforementioned works, Nayman will address Brian De Palma’s SISTERS, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s CURE, Tilman Singer’s LUZ, and Lars von Trier’s EUROPA.

According to urban myth, New York’s sewers and underground tunnels were home to alligators and other unlikely creatures, giving rise to such science fiction horror films as Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic (1997). Over the last one hundred years, subterranean folklore and horror films have depicted a London Underground network infested with mummies, yeti, alien insects, cannibals, werewolves and hideously deformed serial killers. This talk will examine the fact and folklore that has informed such films as Quatermass and the Pit (1967), Death Line (1972), An American Werewolf in London (1981) and Creep (2004), as well as the comedy thriller Bulldog Jack (1935) which may have contributed to the folklore of an Egyptian mummy haunting the abandoned British Museum station.

In this lecture, we’ll immerse ourselves in the dreamlike, destabilising atmosphere of Shoegaze Horror—a form of horror cinema that seemingly swaps story for sensation, jump-scares for stillness, and clear answers for ambiguous dread. Named after the 1990s music genre known for layered distortion, emotional opacity, and immersive soundscapes, Shoegaze Horror is cinema at the edge of coherence. It evokes fear not through jump scares or gore, but through repetition, oblique imagery, liminal spaces, and a slow emotional drift into disconnection. Over 90 minutes, this lecture will chart the emergence, form, and themes of Shoegaze Horror through a core set of films and wider cinematic genealogy. We’ll trace a genre defined by absence, distortion, and the ghostly echo of dead futures, and: Introduce the notion of Shoegaze Horror through its core cinematic strategies Explore the genre’s central themes: grief, memory, alienation, and emotional paralysis. Examine how Shoegaze Horror reflects contemporary cultural and psychological conditions—particularly post-financial crisis social drift and pandemic-induced dissociation and disconnection. Analyse key case studies and identify recurring formal elements across a diverse spectrum of films. We’ll focus on three films in particular: Using Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) as a formal gateway, we’ll explore how Shoegaze Horror builds dread through sensory overload, ambient sound, and retro-futuristic melancholy. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), the genre meets the internet age: alienation, identity erosion, and disembodied transformation through low-res intimacy and ambient dread. Skinamarink (2022) becomes our guide to childhood fear, abstract space, and temporal stasis—illustrating how Shoegaze Horror turns the home into a liminal, haunted, formless void. Through these films and others, we’ll map out this genre movement and its five key aspects: ambiguity; stillness; repetition; liminality; and auditory dread. We’ll also be asking: why now – what does this trend in horror cinema tell us about our culture and concerns? What are the psychological aspects of Shoegaze Horror? How does it differ from Folk Horror and Cosmic Horror? And where does it come from – what are the roots and precursors of this approach to horror, from Maya Deren and Jean Rollin to David Lynch and Kiyoshi Kurosawa?

The perversely erotic and profoundly shocking films of punk provocateur Jörg Buttgereit offer some of the most extreme experiences in all of cinema. Best known for 1987’s notorious NEKROMANTIK, about a femme fatale’s craving for cold flesh, his movies have rarely been topped in their taboo-smashing excesses – but while their reputation stands strong decades on, they are still poorly understood. The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is proud to present this candid conversation with the enfant terrible behind some of our beloved genre’s most stomach-churning, yet surprisingly complex films. Raised in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, Jörg Buttgereit launched diabolical DIY productions best remembered for their grisly FX, Mondo-style verite, and savage antisociality. Even hardened horror fans have shrunk from the brutality of films like DER TODESKING, Buttgereit’s nightmarish meditation on suicide, and SCHRAMM, a riff on TAXI DRIVER that satirizes society’s obsession with serial killers. However, gutsy viewers will find that these graphic spectacles have a cleverness, and even a political conscience, that cuts through the apathy and irony exhibited by Buttgereit’s cast of desensitized degenerates. Join Miskatonic’s Online Branch Director Claire Donner for this provocative conversation with the iconic Jörg Buttgereit, about his work, his influences, and his reflections on horror’s past, present, and future. Anchored by clips from his groundbreaking films, this discussion will be followed by a Q&A in which viewers can finally ask all of their burning questions about Buttgereit’s uniquely challenging body of work. At a time when horror discourse is fraught with ethical quandaries, and fascism is on the rise globally, this uncompromising filmmaker and his unflinching filmography have much to offer modern genre fans.

Bundy left them on a hillside. Gacy buried them in the crawlspace. Dahmer kept them, and then ate them. Gein wore them. The many breathing bodies which became victim to these murderers were subjected to the most heinous acts, and their last purpose told the story of what happened to them and why. In the contemporary cycle of true crime media, these torn bodies are re-created and re-presented in a never-ending parade of the spectacle of murder. This lecture will explore murder scenes across documentary, comics, dramatizations, and podcasts, as media sites of bodily destruction that appeal to our need to explore and understand humanity’s dark side. These bodies and crime scenes are used to tell us a story that we often already know all too well. This lecture will unpack Joe Berlinger’s Conversations With A Killer series, connecting the Gacy basement footage to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the uncanniness of the boxes, the sealed drum and the kettles, that were brought, one by one, out of Dahmer’s apartment. Later in the Monster: Dahmer series, the contents of those boxes and that apartment were re-created in horrific detail, folding Dahmer into Murphy’s screen horror universe. Our morbid fascination with death is explored in comics, examined here in Bendis and Andreyko’s Torso, a detective story on the hunt for the Headhunter killer, which re-presents crime photographs in a palimpsest with the frames and gutters of the graphic novel. And lastly, the lecture will turn to the true crime podcast, and the crime scene as it forms in the mind of the listener, with an exploration of ‘Gold Star’ material in The Last Podcast on the Left. Murder might be most foul, but we can’t help but look.

Mystery Incorporated – Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo – have been investigating supernatural events for over fifty years and, in that time, there has never been a serious study into the make-up of the show … until now. Scooby was the regular supernatural fix for an entire generation; the ultimate ‘pleasing terror’ and a foundation stone of The Haunted Generation. The show has always been far more than a straight children’s cartoon about solving mysteries and unmasking villains. It has from its outset been a social and political commentary, a study on the supernatural, an exploration of the gothic and the hauntological landscape and a microcosm of the worlds of horror, the occult and more. There is much to learn about the genre from a (not so) simple Saturday morning entertainment. The show has always drawn on real-world folklore and myth in its representations of ghosts, witches, monsters and more. It has parodied literature and film in its explorations of horror and the supernatural. In return, it has been a strong influence on our own pop culture through urban myth and linguistic references such as ‘Zoinks’ and ‘Scooby Snacks’. The Nickelodeon vehicle Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated features the character of Professor Hatecraft, lecturer as Miskatonic University, who tells Velma that “Jinkies is not a real word”. This presentation begs to differ, and provides the proof! ‘Zoinks! The Spooky Folklore Behind Scooby-Doo’ is based on the presenter’s groundbreaking book which pulls off the mask and reveals the truth behind the fiction. Written with input from a number of the show’s writers and producers and with an afterword from one of the voices of Scooby and Shaggy, Scott Innes, it uses film and TV analysis, folkloric knowledge and gothic theory to examine the construction of the Scooby world and the background behind the characters and landscapes.

In the Director’s Cut of Ari Aster’s MIDSOMMAR, Christian asks Ulla and Maja about the “attestupan” ritual which takes place at the end of the life cycles of the Hårga people: “Do you have a typical period of grieving? Is there a time when you mourn?” Ulla’s answer is a simple, yet so complex: “We grieve and celebrate”. In this incisive lecture, horror scholar Tugce Kutlu analyzes the intricacies of grief and mourning in contemporary horror cinema, introducing a new way of understanding the function of such films. The turn of the millennium saw a rise in violent events transpiring in the public eye as well as a surge in public displays of mourning, as in the cases of 9/11 and the funeral of Princess Diana. Death was everywhere, on our televisions, on our computers, and finally, on our smartphones. There was nowhere to hide. This may have urged contemporary horror filmmakers to create cinematic “memento mori,” five of which will be examined using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ “Five Stages of Grief.” MIDSOMMAR will be addressed in a section on “Denial”; HEREDITARY receives an in-depth reading in the section on “Anger”; the latest iteration of PET SEMATARY facilitates a consideration of “Bargaining”; THE WOMAN IN BLACK goes back to horror’s roots in gothic literature to examine “Depression”; and the section on “Acceptance” investigates one of cinema’s most tangible portrayals of grief, THE BABADOOK. For a genre with such unbreakable bonds to death, serious studies regarding grief in horror cinema are still sparse — and guest speaker Tugce Kutlu aims to change that. This talk explores the reasons why representations of mourning in horror may have risen in the last two decades, and proposes a view of these films as cinematic “memento mori” that can finally unite grief studies with cinema, and perhaps help usher viewers through their own grieving processes.

The most iconic image in the global horror hit RINGU (1998) is arguably that of a dead and sodden Sadako (Rie Inoo) climbing out of the grainy footage on a television set to kill the film’s male protagonist — a climactic sequence that echoes her equally terrifying emergence from the well earlier in the film. However, the water-well appears across Asian horror cinema as an overdetermined site of violence against women and the transgenerational transmission of historical traumas. Burdened with the symbolic weight of the vagina and womb, the well nonetheless functions as an index of both individual and collective tragedies. In Indian horror films, the well inevitably invokes the historical catastrophe of the Partition, when hundreds of women either willingly committed mass suicides by throwing themselves into wells in rural areas or were brutally assisted in the act by kin and community. The well is probably the most potent affective image of the violence that women endured in the period that birthed the modern states of India and Pakistan. In this context, therefore, the well is never simply a metaphor for the fecund/abject female body, although it is always that too. In this talk, professor and author Meheli Sen will perform a deep analysis of recent Indian horror films like KAALI KHUHI (2020), CHHORI (2021), and NEELAVELICHAM (2023) alongside earlier texts like RINGU to provide a generative framework for understanding the ways in which genre films continue to situate women and girls within a continuum of violence and precarity in non-western cinemas.