The occult loomed large in British horror films of the latter part of the 20th century. In the Night of the Demon (1957) ancient folklore, arcane writings, séances and a malevolent magician are subject to the skeptical inquiries of a team of international paranormal investigators lead by Dana Andrews. The Witches (1966) follows a school teacher (Joan Fontaine) recovering from a mental breakdown while working in Africa as she takes up a new post in a peaceful and rather conservative English village. She soon finds out that not all is what it seems as she encounters the evil forces and sinister rituals lurking below the surface of an otherwise tranquil rural setting. The Devil Rides Out (1968), based on the novel of Denis Wheatley, gives a glimpse into the occult experiments of the 1920’s British upper-class. A world of ecstatic rituals, esoteric texts, demonic conjurations and the figure of Mocata, a practitioner of the magical arts based on the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. These three films reflect contemporary realities of gender, class, race, colonialism and modernity as post-war Britain dealt with the end of empire and profound social changes. These films also reflect popular conceptions of and reactions to various aspects of the Western occult tradition such as spiritualism, ceremonial magic and Wicca, the set of neo-pagan beliefs that was becoming known to a wider public for the first time as these movies were first released. Films: Night of the Demon (1957); The Witches (1966); The Devil Rides Out (1968)

In 1980s North America, everywhere you turned there were warnings about a widespread evil conspiracy to indoctrinate the vulnerable through the media they consumed. This percolating cultural hysteria, now known as the “Satanic Panic,” was both illuminated and propagated through almost every pop culture pathway in the 1980s, from heavy metal music to Dungeons & Dragons role playing games, Christian comics, direct-to-VHS scare films, pulp paperbacks, Saturday morning cartoons and TV talk shows —and created its own fascinating cultural legacy of Satan-battling VHS tapes, music and literature. As the hysteria moved overseas to the UK, Australia and South Africa, its life extended into the 1990s – and some say it never went away. From con artists to pranksters and moralists to martyrs, this lecture – based on the instructors’ book of the same name, which will be available at the screening – aims to capture the untold story of the how the Satanic Panic was fought on the pop culture frontlines and the serious consequences it had for many involved. Read more about the SATANIC PANIC book HERE.  

This course will examine Joe D’Amato’s body-centred films within the context of Italian cinema, the paracinematic, and genre studies. We will focus on what I call D’Amato’s “Mondo Realist” films, made within a very short period between 1975-1979. D’Amato’s films bridge Neo Realism and the Mondo film, which continue to be understood in almost mutually exclusive terms in film theory. His films offer a way to open up these categories through the embodied and sensual experiences of the porn and horror genres. Films: Emanuelle and Françoise (1975); Emanuelle in America (1977); Buio Omega (1979).

‘An awful lot of people are going to miss all that gusto and kindness and fun,’ reflected distributor Derek Hill when Balch died in 1980. Critic Tony Raynes remembered a ‘lively, interesting, engaged, vigorous’ man who ‘threw a hell of a party’. An extraordinary figure of 1960s-70s British film, Antony Balch was a true original. His love of cinema was infectious and he worked across nearly all the different areas of the business. Best known for directing the camp, grisly Horror Hospital and for collaborating with William Burroughs, he also ran two London cinemas, directed ads, made trailers, wrote reviews and distributed exploitation movies such as Don’t Deliver Us from Evil, Truck Stop Women and Massacre for an Orgy. Horror and weird cinema fans should celebrate him for securing the first ever UK release of Tod Browning’s banned Freaks (with the help of Kenneth Anger). The 70s were a heady time for boundary pushing and he played an important part, resisting criticism whilst calling the press ‘the number one exploiter of fear, horror, hate and violence in the world’. In this wide-ranging illustrated lecture (part of Scalarama 2015), William Fowler will explore Balch’s holistic approach to cinephilia as well as his ideas about censorship. Selected short films by Antony Balch will screen as part of the evening.  

The Miskatonic London 2015 pilot semester has now wrapped, but we would like to invite all our graduates (those who were with us for the whole semester) to a screening of The Dead Eyes of London at the fantastic Masonic Temple in Liverpool Street on Saturday 4 July at 1pm (part of the East End Film Festival). This will be followed by a panel discussion on krimi films with Kim Newman, Jim Harper and Alex Fitch, after which the graduates will receive their Miskatonic diplomas from the hands of Kim Newman. The screening is ticketed for the general public (see details and ticket links for the full day’s programming at the temple below), but Miskatonic graduates have free admission with RSVP. IMPORTANT: Please email us at miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com to reserve your place. It is essential that you reserve your place by FRIDAY 26 JUNE. Congratulations to the graduates of the first Miskatonic London semester! Antony Caiger Ralph Dorey John Etherington Brian Graham Duncan Hopper Graham Humphreys Justin Merritt Tom Oldham Anthony Page Bradie Poole Mat Rowlands Stephanie Scaife Matthew Tilt Justin Woodman Find out more about the Masonic Temple HERE. MASONIC TEMPLE: FROM MURDER TO MIND CONTROL Descend into the eerie confines of a masonic temple for this devilishly unsettling combination of screenings and events: taking you from murder and mayhem into the sinister sinews of the brainwashed and their puppet-masters… Saturday 4 July SESSION 1 | Ticket Price: £10 | BUY TICKETS 1 PM | ELECTRIC SHEEP PRESENTS: The Dead Eyes of London + Talk Director: Alfred Vohrer | USA | 1961 | 104 min Nothing is as it looks in this murder mystery lead by a mysterious reverend. Followed by a special talk on krimi cinema hosted by Electric Sheep’s Alex Fitch, who will be joined by author and critic Kim Newman, and author Jim Harper. Miskatonic Graduation A ceremony for the graduates of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London __ SESSION 2 | Ticket Price: £10 | BUY TICKETS 4 PM | CIGARETTE BURNS PRESENTS: The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (16MM) Director: Sergio Martino | Italy | 1971 | 90 min This deliciously macabre setting paired with a lustrous 16mm projection make this a rare opportunity to sample this devilishly entertaining 70s thriller as a millionaire dies in a mysterious freak accident leaving his widow set to enjoy the rich spoils. EVENING SESSION | Ticket Price: £25 | BUY TICKETS 8 PM | MACABRE MASONIC MASQUERADE + SCREENING OF JUDEX Director: Georges Franju | France | 1963 | 98 min Join us for a macabre night of ballroom play, immersive cinema and murder mystery masquerade featuring a screening of Favraux’s thrilling pulp-hero remake of the 1916 French film serial of the same name.

TICKETS: https://www.wegottickets.com/event/319653 During a career spanning more than fifty years, Jesús (‘Jess’) Franco created a strange and unique style of commercial genre filmmaking, bordering at times on the avant-garde. Obsessed with ‘aberrant’ sex, erotic horror and the writings of the Marquis De Sade, he took a resolutely personal approach to movie-making, and after spending the 1960s honing his technique on slightly more conventional projects he embarked in the 1970s on a sustained period of intensive shooting, making as many as ten or twelve films in one year. Shooting with a small crew, exclusively on location, he worked at a speed that allowed little time for the honing of a perfect finished product, instead creating a cinema of spontaneity, improvisation and caprice. Franco valued freedom above all: by combining a rapid-fire series of small-scale commercial film projects, a ‘creative’ approach to finance, and a dedicated passion for the sensational, he was able to carve his own niche and digress into the most extraordinary experimental ellipses. In this evening’s discussion, Stephen Thrower will explore Franco’s ability to juggle the commercial and personal dimensions of filmmaking through his confrontational works of horror, sadism and erotic spectacle. **UPDATE: Due to a late shipment, the publisher of Stephen Thrower’s new book MURDEROUS PASSIONS: THE DELIRIOUS CINEMA OF JESUS FRANCO will not have the books available at the Miskatonic class. He will have an advance copy available for viewing and will be able to take pre-orders. HOWEVER! Our pals at Cigarette Burns are presenting a screening of Franco’s VAMPYROS LESBOS at the Prince Charles Cinema on June 29th, introduced by Stephen Thrower, and rumour has it the books should arrive in time for that! Here is the link to their event: http://www.facebook.com/events/103274273345634/  

TICKETS: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/315971 ‘There is magic all around us’, Udo Kier famously states at a key point in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), a sentiment reiterated by one of the characters in Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil (1992), which sees its protagonists drawn out of their mundane suburban environment in small-town South Africa into the heart of the Namib desert to be confronted by their darkest demons. Stanley’s film in particular presents a sublime example of how landscape and elemental conditions can be evoked to express dangerous forces existing beyond man’s perceptual and belief systems, but also, in contrast, how heightened psychological states can be given visual form through use of such timeless spaces, taking the viewer out of their comfort zones and back into nature at its most wild, mysterious and untamed. In an ever-urbanising world, the textures, rhythms and sounds of nature can be made to seem increasingly alien and alienating on film, making us realize we are but a small part of a wider world beyond our control. Works ranging from Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) through José Larraz’s Symptoms (1974) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1978) reframe our perceptions, interrogating the boundaries between the physiological and the supernatural, as interior worlds collapse beneath the weight of exterior ones. This lecture and screening by Jasper Sharp will look at how such mysterious invisible forces of nature are given vent in a number of films depicting the rupture between these rational and irrational domains. It will explore how pantheistic belief systems that hold that spirits reside in everything, such as Japan’s Shinto religion, overlap with a British folk tradition of supernatural writers such as Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson, and how foreign directors often have a keener, more nuanced eye for the expressive potential of the English landscape to portray characters off-kilter with their environment.

TICKETS: https://www.wegottickets.com/event/312733  Kim Newman will screen and talk about Gary Sherman’s 1972 British horror film, Death Line (aka Raw Meat), one of the first British horror films to compete with the wave of stronger, more politicised American splatter movies that came in the wake of Night of the Living Dead. A series of disappearances on the London Underground Railway are traced back to the inbred, cannibal descendants of navvies trapped by a cave-in during the building of the tunnels. A human monster (Hugh Armstrong) who looks like a scabrous tramp haunts the Piccadilly Line, picking off and eating the odd commuter, trying to keep alive his diseased wife. Tea‑drinking copper Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence) is called into the case with his sidekick sergeant (Norman Rossington) when the latest victim (James Cossins) turns out to be a high-ranking civil servant fresh from a neon-lit sleaze spree in Soho, and has to cut through bureaucratic red tape (represented by Christopher Lee in a bowler hat). Meanwhile, down in the tunnels, the last of the monsters lives out his pathetic, horrid leftover life, expressing himself through the only words he knows, ‘mind the doors’. It includes a wonderful, apparently improvised drunk scene from Pleasence and a breathtaking 360º pan around the cannibals’ dripping, dank, corpse-strewn underground lair. Less makeshift than a lot of its rivals from the 1970s, it has solid, witty dialogue, a memorably funky music score and the sort of urban legend premise that people will swear is based on truth rather than new-minted for the movie. American writer-director Gary Sherman also made the cloying New Seekers ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ ads, and used his share of the fee from that to finance this gutsy, gritty debut. The discussion will highlight the film’s political subtext, transgressive use of cannibalism as metaphor and for shock value, black humour, performance styles, relationship with American and other British films on similar subjects (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Frightmare) and exploration of London lore and locations. The Horse Hospital is just round the corner from Great Russell Street Station, so attendees who come by tube will pass through the film’s main setting before and after the class.

This 3-week course will revisit The Birds (Hitchcock 1963) as an approach to two unique films on the edge of the apocalyptic tradition: Safe (Haynes 1995) and Take Shelter (Nichols 2011). Like The Birds, these are relatively quiet melodramas overtaken by an uncanny horror that scrambles space and subject, defying explanation and leaving cinematic representation up for grabs. Together, the three films will let us consider the boundaries of the horror genre as well as its capacity to intervene in other modes and complicate the project of realism.