Our second instalment of horror theory courses focuses on the synesthetic pleasures and sensual pains of horror with five classes devoted to the body and the senses. Course content will include the place of affect theory in horror studies, the revelatory tradition in cinema and photography, Deleuzian bodies without organs, the desire and dread conjured by the Gothic documentary (gothumentary), and a trip through the nightmarish world of Kenneth Anger. We will also screen a wide variety of films and moving-image works, including French cinema of sensation, body horror, B-horror, avant-garde horror, documentary horror, and more. Instructors: Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Kristopher Woofter, Alanna Thain and Ayanna Dozier, Papagena Robbins, Anne Golden Week 1: February 17 – “Affect, Sensation, and Horror Studies” Instructor: Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare Film: Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001) – France (100 minutes) Reading: “Between Meaning and Mattering: On Affect and Porn Studies” by Susanna Paasonen (2014)  Week 2: February 24 – “Horror, the Revelatory and the Gothic ‘Thing’” Instructor: Kristopher Woofter Film: Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2012) – France / USA (87 minutes) Reading: Le Cinéma du diable by Jean Epstein (1947) SPRING BREAK – MARCH 3 Week 3: March 10 – Intensities: David Lynch Between Life and Death Instructors: Ayanna Dozier and Alanna Thain Film: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992) – USA (135 minutes) Reading: 6 – “How do you make yourself a body without organs?” from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980) Week 4: March 17 – “‘Caging the Monster that Will Live for 100,000 Years’ in the Future-Tense Gothumentary” Instructor: Papagena Robbins Film: Into Eternity: a Film for the Future (Michael Madsen, 2010) – Denmark – 75 minutes Reading: “Gothumentary: The Gothic Unsettling of Documentary’s Rhetoric of Rationality” by Papagena Robbins and Kristopher Woofter (2012) Week 5: March 24 – “Mad About the Boy: Kenneth Anger” Instructor: Anne Golden Films: Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954, 38:00), Scorpio Rising (1963, 28:00), and Lucifer Rising (1972, 28:00) – USA. Reading: “Illuminating Lucifer” by Carel Rowe (1974)

Tickets: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/305248  With a screening of Man From Deep River (Umberto Lenzi, 1972) The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a proliferation of increasingly gruesome jungle-set horror thrillers emerge from Italy’s teeming pulp cinema studios. A postscript of sorts to the ever-popular, and equally ethically challenged, Mondo cycle, the cannibal genre was prematurely seeded by Man from Deep River, Lenzi’s gut-busting homage to the international hit A Man Called Horse (1970). Although it would be another five years before the genre really took off (with Ruggero Deodato’s Last Cannibal World in 1977) Man from Deep River contains all the vital ingredients for a cannibal feast – racism and ethnic exploitation, animal abuse, nudity, sex and extreme violence, all presented in the guise of dispassionate ethnographic cinema. Tonight we screen Lenzi’s rarely seen film followed by a series of classic cannibal film trailers to uncover the genre’s roots in the West’s growing interest in environmentalism, atavistic cultures, lost worlds and the perils of the green inferno. Bring a plate.  

The anxiety unleashed by the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century helped propel a new Romantic sensibility regarding the natural sciences. The mixture of both fear and fascination that accompanied the discoveries of new, almost magic-like forces – particularly those in electromagnetism and electrochemistry, as made famous by Luigi’s Galvani’s demonstration of “animal electricity” – have become a persistent theme in the genre of both horror and science fiction from Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818) onward. This course will trace how our current notions of science, which first arose during this period, have served continuously as a cipher for both the anxieties and perceived horrors of modernity in literature and film. The Romantic period was also the beginning of what has been called the “Second Scientific Revolution”, a revolution which began with the investigation of the so-called “imponderable fluids” — that is, electricity, heat, and magnetism. This lecture will discuss how the study of what was regarded as semi-occult forces and ‘fluids’ provided critical impetus to the Romantic imagination’s attempt to explain how matter could be animated to give rise to machines, both biological and mechanical, living and dead. The lecture will demonstrate how a new scientific metaphysics served as a source for the “fantastic” and “uncanny” in Gothic fiction and film, from Frankenstein through to the Gothic-Noir film Blade Runner, thus illustrating how the Gothic can be viewed as the shadow of scientific realism.

Tickets: http://www.wegottickets.com/event/299642 For many genre fans, a love affair with horror and the grotesque began early on, sometimes fueled by unlikely sources. One of these was the classroom safety film, which for many kids was their first time seeing other children threatened by true danger, being confronted with a combination of gore effects and actual accident footage, and being offered a pictorial glimpse at things their parents didn’t want to talk about. Thousands of these films were made in North America from the 1940s through the 1980s, when companies like Centron, McGraw-Hill, Coronet, Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, Avis Films, Crawley Films, Bell Labs, the NFB and others thrived on the burgeoning market for classroom or workplace educational films. Subjects ranged from safety in and around vehicles, to drug abuse and venereal disease, teaching children scary lessons about everything from dental hygiene to how to spot a pedophile. The most memorable of these films deliberately used horror visuals to entice and/or shock children into paying attention – such as those by prolific producer Sid Davis (1916-2006) – and some were even made by directors with genre film pedigrees, such as Carnival of Souls’ Herk Harvey, a key figure in the industrial film scene. This lecture and screening by Kier-La Janisse, founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, will present some of the most notorious educational films of the 40-year golden age of social hygiene onscreen. We’ll also briefly look at educational television PSAs, from the British Public Information Films through the incredibly grisly Australian drunk driving commercials of the 1990s. The classic era of classroom films may be over, but viewed from today’s perspective, some of these films offer up a fascinating survey of changing social mores and cultural preoccupations (not to mention fashions!). Being safe has never looked so grim. WARNING: This program contains graphic imagery, including real accident and casualty footage.

présenté en français Depuis un siècle, la figure du zombie a changé, s’est transformée, a évolué, s’est adaptée aux différentes cultures qui l’auront invoquée. Pour la culture haïtienne, le zombie aura été la figure cauchemardesque de l’esclavage, d’une servitude faisant de l’individu un simple pantin incapable même de s’arracher à sa condition par la pensée. Il aura aussi matérialisé cet étrange pouvoir, inspiré de la religion catholique, de ramener les morts à la vie. Il aura incarné, en Occident, la figure d’un châtiment divin et le retour des morts à la vie, la métaphore d’une inquiétude quant à un nouvel avatar de la mort – le sida – et la crainte des recherches sur la biotechnologie. Le zombie aura de même figuré l’inquiétude d’une époque, la nôtre, quant au sens de la mort. Le zombie, pour nous, aura été le monstre d’une certaine vacuité, voire d’une certaine fatigue de l’Occident. Le zombie est figure d’inquiétudes – il représente nos craintes, ce que nous préférerions taire. C’est bien en cela qu’il se fait symptôme de ce qui taraude la conscience de notre époque. L’image – le cinéma, le jeu vidéo – n’est pas uniquement une fiction, un divertissement, elle est aussi la marque d’une époque, et en cela le moyen d’une analyse. Voilà pourquoi à côté d’une analyse du zombie comme produit typiquement commercial de notre époque, il importe aussi de l’appréhender comme un produit psychique : on y découvre alors quelques-unes des principales raisons de sa prodigieuse popularité actuelle.

OCCULTISM, MONSTERS, DISMEMBERMENT, CANNIBALISM—these are some of the spectacles that earned Shakespeare star power in his time and continue to secure his cultural authority and commercial worth today. This two-session course will explore Shakespeare’s ongoing relationship to “horror.” In it we will begin with a broad overview of Elizabethan contexts (revenge tragedies, demonological discourse, monster shows); move to a discussion of Shakespeare’s unusual place among 19th-century freak shows; and end by examining 20th- and 21st century “horror” films adapted from or inspired by Shakespeare’s most horrific mindbenders and gore-fests.

Michael Wood returns fresh from his lecture on pseudo-archaeology for our course on H.P. Lovecraft to take on one of HPL’s contemporaries and most frequent correspondents, Robert E. Howard. Despite his enormous influence on popular culture, Howard’s name is barely recognizable as the creator of Conan the Barbarian, and master of the sword and sorcery genre. But the troubled author also produced a significant body of work that was an inventive blend of dark fantasy and horror in tales like Red Nails (first serialized in 1936 in Weird Tales) and “Pigeons from Hell,” the latter tale adapted for an episode of the Boris Karloff-hosted 60s horror TV series, Thriller. Howard also created horror-adventurer, Solomon Kane, in a series of tales that inspired a recent film adaptation, and he produced (upon Lovecraft’s encouragement) numerous tales inspired by Lovecraft’s fictional topography, which helped to generate an intertextual body of fiction that is now dubbed the “Cthulhu Mythos.”

The advent of AIDS coalesced cultural fears around otherness, sexual danger and the tension between nature and science. Horror films often explore the body made unfamiliar through infection or mutation. Blood Born traces the spectre of infected bodies, and their cultural resonance with AIDS – in sexual, racial and border-defying terms. How much did early representations of AIDS borrow from classic horror texts? Do works as diverse as Cronenberg’s films and Charles Burns’ graphic classic BLACK HOLE inevitably demand rereading through the lens of HIV infection?

This course will investigate the locus of horror within avant-garde cinema(s). Beginning with canonical films which are examples of Dadaism and Surrealism, the course will progress through European and American avant-garde horror, including the work of Jean Cocteau, J.S. Watson and Melville Webber, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, Arthur Lipsett, Shirley Clarke and recent examples of Canadian independent media artworks. We will look briefly at manifestos written in the early period of film history. These manifestos were written by Dadaists, Futurists and Surrealists and called for cinema to be both ‘pure’ (Louis Aragon, Guillaume Apollinaire) and a ‘provocation’ (The Futurists).