We regret to announce that David J. Skal has had to cancel his Miskatonic LA class. We will notify ticket holders of this cancellation by email and will also notify you if the class is rescheduled at any point. We have however scheduled a separate class for November to make up for the cancellation – “School of Shock: Pain and Pleasure in the Classroom Safety Film,” taught by Kier-La Janisse – and you can either have your tickets transferred over to this new class or receive a refund. The horror genre has always been informed by bottomless displaced anxieties about the body, disease, and medicine. In this lecture, David J. Skal, the author of THE MONSTER SHOW and HOLLYWOOD GOTHIC explores the pop culture underpinnings of modern horror in real-life medical crises and controversies, including the preoccupation with demon children that took hold as thalidomide, birth control, and abortion changed the reproductive landscape; the poisoned Tylenol crisis of 1982; the vogue in visceral, transformative special effects that paralleled the development of the plastic surgery industry; the link between the AIDS epidemic and a resurgent fascination with vampires; and much more.

In the early 1970s, just before Hollywood auteurs like Wes Craven and John Carpenter invented the modern horror film, eschewing old-school, fantastical monsters for gritty, politically edged stories aimed at excavating our deepest anxieties, producer/director Dan Curtis dominated television horror with a series of programs reinterpreting traditional genre tropes for what novelist Don DeLillo famously referred to in Running Dog as “the of conspiracy, the age of connections, links, secret relationships.” Although major newspapers almost unfailingly remembered him first and foremost in his 2006 obituary as the man who brought the epic World War II-themed miniseries The Winds of War and War and Remembrance to television in the 1980s, with their graphic depictions of concentration camp existence, Curtis had earlier built his reputation as a purveyor of a different kind of horror – first with the Gothic-turned-supernatural daytime soap Dark Shadows (1966 to 1971) and then with a series of TV movies and specials airing between 1968 and 1975, including The Night Stalker, The Night Strangler, Trilogy of Terror, and adaptations of such classic monster tales as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Turn of the Screw, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.   Knowingly or not, Curtis – praised by Stephen King in Danse Macabre for an “unerring, crude talent for finding the terror place inside you and squeezing it with a cold hand” – tapped into the zeitgeist of the time – the turbulent sixties, the paranoid seventies – by imbuing classical, literal monsters with human dimensions, beginning with Dark Shadows, whose conflicted, Hamlet-esque vampire, Barnabas Collins, spoke to the outlaw culture of the late sixties just as the antiheroes of Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did, and paved the way for a stacked roster of tortured successors, including Angel and Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Stefan Salvatore The Vampire Diaries), and Edward Cullen (Twilight). With The Night Stalker (1972), scripted by horror legend Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Twilight Zone), Curtis once again turned to the classic creature of the night, in this case a vampire terrorizing young women on the streets of Las Vegas, but, in the age of Watergate, stirred in a political cover-up, foreshadowing a rash of literary and cinematic paranoid thrillers and mesmerizing a young viewer by the name of Chris Carter, who, twenty years later, would create The X-Files. Join us as we explore these and other titles in Curtis’s horror oeuvre, exploring his thematic and aesthetic preoccupations, his evocation of the times, his own influences, and his influence on the men and women who have followed in his footsteps by finding the terror place inside us and squeezing it with a cold hand.

The summer of 1975 completed changed movie history. Not only did the release of JAWS set the standard for the “summer blockbuster”, it also ignited society’s communal anxiety, fear, and fascination with what could be lurking just the below the surface of the water. The success of JAWS not only led to a slate of rip-off films soon to be dubbed as “sharkploitation”, but also had real life repercussions of pure terror leading to deserted beaches and massive shark culls. However, JAWS was by no means the first or last aquatic horror media to pique our interest in the deep blue. Our fascination for monsters of the abyss goes back to the dawn of man and has traveled with us throughout time, from Jonah’s whale to ancient sea monsters depicted in early cartography to Moby Dick to the upcoming MEG film. From unknown ghosts of the deep to sharks, mermaids, gators and the Great Old Ones of Lovecraftian lore, This lecture by Rebekah McKendry will examine not only the history of aquatic horror, focusing on film, but also touching on earlier texts and visual arts. McKendry will also explore the psychology behind our fascination with unknown fathoms, exploring the mental intersections of fear and fascination, the symbolism of submergence, and the subconscious primordial elements of the deep.

TICKETS HERE >> Screenwriter and author Stephen Volk is perhaps best known for writing the notorious BBC Halloween hoax Ghostwatch, which spooked the nation, hit newspaper headlines and prompted questions to be asked in Parliament. However, his many other notable screenplays include those for the films Gothic (directed by Ken Russell), The Guardian (directed by William Friedkin), the BAFTA award-winning The Deadness of Dad, and The Awakening, while his other TV credits range from Afterlife to the recent Midwinter of the Spirit. In addition, he is also a renowned prose author of novellas and short fiction, winning British Fantasy Awards for his collection Monsters in the Heart and his novella “Newspaper Heart”. Arguably his most acclaimed work of fiction so far has been the 2013 novella Whitstable, a story featuring legendary horror icon Peter Cushing. He followed this in 2015 with another novella, Leytonstone, about the early life of Alfred Hitchcock, and will be completing his Dark Masters Trilogy this year with the publication of Netherwood, a fictional account of an encounter between famed black magic author Dennis Wheatley and notorious mystic Aleister Crowley. During this exclusive event, Stephen Volk will discuss his career and work with screenwriter & filmmaker Sean Hogan.  Covering both his film & TV credits as well as his prose fiction, the pair will look at the differences between writing for film and television; his contrasting screenwriting experiences in the UK and the US; the process behind writing fictionalised biographical works such as Gothic and the Dark Masters Trilogy; discuss the stories behind the creation of some of his most famous/infamous credits; examine why and how he built a successful prose career away from screenwriting; and talk more broadly about the methodology of representing the supernatural onscreen and what horror is actually ‘for’. The evening will end with a Q&A session with the audience, and should provide an invaluable insight into writing for page and screen by an acknowledged master of the forms; no aspiring writer should miss the chance to learn from Stephen Volk’s hard-earned experience across a wide range of writing disciplines.

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is proud to present this special one-off class with film writer and scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Rape Revenge Films: A Critical Study) at Austin’s Fantastic Fest. While the growing noise in recent years surrounding the inequalities facing women filmmakers has been very welcome, when it comes to horror especially there’s often a subtle suggestion that women who make these kinds of films are some kind of novelty, a cute little curio often approached by mainstream critics with an unspoken air of “can you believe women today even make horror films?”. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and as any horror fan worth their mettle will tell you it is hardly a new phenomenon.  But outside the usual suspects who appear with near-uniform regularity on the token listicles that pop up every time a woman-directed horror film makes a splash, there is a long, diverse history of women’s filmmaking in the horror genre. While researching and writing her upcoming book 1000 Women in Horror, Australian film critic and author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas was struck by the scope of women’s horror filmmaking. That scope lead to some important – and sometimes difficult – questions: are horror films made by women necessarily ‘feminist’? What do we mean when we talk about ‘feminism’ anyway? What can we learn from art history? Do women make necessarily different kinds of horror films to men and represent violence in different ways? And who has told us which women horror filmmakers’ matter – and, through their omission from popular memory, which ones don’t? Rather than presenting a singular alternate history of women’s horror filmmaking, Heller-Nicholas seeks to blow open the way we think about this subject more broadly, looking at a range of examples from around the world from 1898 to 2018 in order to think through ways we can collectively rethink the history of horror more broadly to be more inclusive, more representative, and more fun. Image: Cover detail from Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ forthcoming book 1000 Women in Horror.  

Online tickets for this class are now closed, but you can still get tickets at the door! The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is proud to open its LA branch with a career talk with one of the most important independent directors of American genre cinema, the man whose imagination brought us The Tall Man, whose KENNY & COMPANY and PHANTASM gave pre-teen genre fans an indelible image of empowerment in the form of actor Michael Baldwin, and who adapted the books BUBBA HO-TEP and JOHN DIES AT THE END into instant cult classics. With a new biography on the horizon – True Indie: Life and Death in Filmmaking, due out October 2 – Don Coscarelli has agreed to sit down with us at Miskatonic, and over the course of a three-hour discussion with Dead Right Horror Trivia’s Jared Rivet, will explore the key influences, collaborators and filmmaking lessons of his life, from being a young filmmaker navigating Hollywood to dealing with themes of loss, aging and brotherly companionship in his films, his deviation from the genre with SURVIVAL QUEST and the BEASTMASTER film, having the esteemed honor of being a part of the Masters of Horror gang and the current state of the business. Photo by Robert Raphael

TICKETS HERE >> ‘When reality came too close, when danger or desire threatened that illusion – he dressed up, even to a cheap wig he bought.’ (Psycho, 1960) From Ed Wood’s Glen Or Glenda (1953) to the Boulet Brothers’ Dragula (2017-), drag and transvestism have appeared as a recurring theme in genre cinema and television. This history of representation could be argued to have been broadly delineated into two categories: the ‘deviants’ and the divas. Appropriately, perhaps, the double-Ds. A recurrent representation of cross-dressing/gender subversion in horror has been that of the opposite gender embodying the protagonist’s murderous or ‘deviant’ impulses. ‘And so Warren created Emily, a homicidal maniac who did his killing for him’ (Homicidal, 1961) Simultaneously, however, some of genre cinema’s greatest anti-heroes have simply just been transvestite (get over it), or played by iconic drag queens. This lecture will explore key cinematic and televisual genre representations, identifying shared symbolic themes and imagery. Progression of representation will be considered in the context of societal change and increased visibility. The lecture will explore scenes from films which may include A Blade in the Dark (1983), Sleepaway Camp (1983), Homicidal (1961), Der Samurai (2014), Psycho (1960), Switchblade Romance (2004), Dolly Deadly (2016) and Dressed to Kill (1983), alongside the televisual delights of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-) and Dragula (2017-). There may also be a Divine sprinkling of John Waters and the chance to chew over O’Brien/Curry’s Frank’n’Furter. We will explore the two key categories of representation, while also considering those who fall in between, and what that difference signifies. Angela, Linda, Bobbi, Warren… Male to female and female to male transvestism will be explored. Are there thematic links between drag and horror and what are the recurrent elements? The culture of subversion? Of extremity? The ‘fear of the other’ which is a recurrent narrative driver in genre cinema? In contemporary society where representations of drag are crossing into the mainstream (RuPaul’s Drag Race, 2009-) and cross-dressing represents less of an extreme counter-cultural revolt, what has been the impact on that relationship? And did some of the more progressive filmmakers representing drag reflect this in earlier representations?  

Online tickets for this event are now closed, but there are still tickets at the door! There are those who have formally studied their craft—at Universities, though mentorship tin pursuit of a vocation through the brush, the scalpel; the camera. There are others that hone the craft as an Outsider, picking up the tools of the Masters to endeavor their own marks, without training guided only by the need to express and to make—to overturn rocks by hand and discover the forbidden. Joe Coleman has been the Outsider—a Brooklyn artist, carny, once charged with harboring an “infernal device,” picked up these very tools of Creation—the pen and the brush—to create a maelstrom of images and words. He, possessed by arcane narratives, conjures his paintings as they unfold into tapestries of killers, sinners, self-portraits, counter culture saints and marytrs. His hand untrained but true. There is an intersection, by accident or intent, where the Master and the Outsider create symbols and works that mirror. There are places where The Master is unsure to go but the Outsider without the boundaries of convention walks into dangerous territory where the soul is confronted and everything is changed and what is a dream and what is real is combined and elevated. To understand this borderland we must compare objects and acts. And in this unique live conversation moderated by film writer and producer Heather Buckley, Joe Coleman will investigate a series of films and the ways that concepts of high and low art intersect in and around them. The first will be Gerald Kargl’s Angst (1983) and JohnParker’s Dementia aka Daughters of Horror (1955) —exploring the serial killer story. Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) —a comparison of cast and similar iconography over both works. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Charles Brabin’s Beast of the City (1932) —a look at the depiction of violence; realism vs expressionism. And finally, an exploration of autopsy as performance and in cinema, the trained hand vs. the Outsider.

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and the Motel X International Horror Film Festival welcome Andy Nyman, co-writer/director of the chilling and unsettling new British film Ghost Stories, in a discussion moderated by Stephen Thrower. Ghost Stories began life as a stage play written by Nyman and The League of Gentlemen‘s Jeremy Dyson, which premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse in 2010 before transferring to London for a year’s run at the Duke of York Theatre. Their successful film version opened at the London Film Festival in 2017. The project sees the confluence of two artistic influences: the British ghost story tradition, and the Amicus portmanteau horror films of the 1960s and 1970s. From these elements, Dyson and Nyman have created a story that engages with some of the deeper currents of the supernatural tradition: belief vs. doubt, psychological explanations vs. supernatural explanations, and the role of traumatic guilt in shaping a person’s outlook and character. These rich themes are present in many of the best British ghost stories and find a vivid echo in Dyson and Nyman’s storytelling. Topics of discussion will include the process of adapting a stage play to the screen, the different challenges inherent in scaring a live audience vs. a cinema audience, and the personal journeys of the two writers in realising their project, first as a stage play and then as a movie. Discussion will also delve into the storytelling traditions from which the film draws, and the techniques employed by horror filmmakers to frighten or disturb the viewer. For instance, pivotal to Ghost Stories is the notion of scepticism, a feature of many classic ghost stories in which the protagonist is frequently someone who does not believe in the supernatural. Why is the sceptic such an important figure in ghost stories? How is it that one can scare or unsettle an audience who do not always believe in the premise of the fiction? Do psychological readings of classic ghost stories distort the text, or are the stories ripe for interpretation along such lines? What makes the short story (and the portmanteau film format) so well suited to the horror genre? And given the nature of cinema, in which the demand is for things to be seen, how can filmmakers retain the element of ambiguity or uncertainty, an element that is so important to the creation of uncanny moods in literary ghost stories? Since 2001, Andy Nyman has worked in close collaboration with psychological illusionist Derren Brown, conceiving and writing his hugely popular stage and TV spectaculars: these sometimes shocking and controversial shows gleefully manipulate the forces that shape an audience’s perception of reality. What is it that draws he and his collaborator Jeremy Dyson to dark and horrific subject matter? And in what way does their black sense of humour counterpoint their taste for the nightmarish and disturbing?