Please note that this is a LIVE, IN-PERSON ONLY EVENT, and students will need to purchase tickets from the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. This one-off class is not included with either of the MIHS semester passes. As any vampire scholar, and most vampire fans, will tell you, the figure of the vampire is inherently queer. John Polidori based Lord Ruthven (“The Vampyre,” 1818) on the indiscriminately licentious Lord Byron; J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (“Carmilla,” 1872) still dominates the lesbian vampire genre; and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Dracula, 1897) tells his three brides that Jonathan Harker “is mine”. Their non-normative reproduction, the pleasure that they take in penetration and feasting, their seduction of victims into voluntary acquiescence, and their capes and ruffles and air of languid dissipation…vampires are queer. But so what? This lecture will first establish cinematic vampires as almost universally queer-coded and explore the significance of this specific intersection of monstrosity and sexuality. The talk will then explore the alignment of vampire cinema with the queer liberation movement of the 1960s-70s, covering films such as Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy (The Vampire Lovers [1970], Lust for a Vampire [1971], and Twins of Evil [1971]) and its much gayer spiritual relatives including Daughters of Darkness (1971), The Blood Spattered Bride (1972), and Vampyres (1974), as well as recent titles like Bit (2019), Thirst (2020), and So Vam (2021). Through the work of queer theorists including Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, this lecture with Dr. Leah Richards will explore the ways that vampires can contribute to discourses around queer identity, modes of being, and futurity.

In this lecture, we deep dive into the analysis of key characters in horror cinema, their stories, and the traumas they reflect within five key categories: Possessed, Vengeful, Grief-stricken, Hysterical, and Objectified. By exploring these portrayals, I aim to shed light on how horror films mirror real-life fears and societal anxieties through their female characters. The female presence in horror has generated not only a mass of financial revenue for the genre, but also created a mainstay of horror focus. They are the main protagonist, the victim, the villain, the antagonist and the expendable but within these roles we can clearly classify them into five distinct categories, which can be taught as a whole or separately.

Even as the great Werner Herzog reimagined NOSFERATU in 1979 and deepened the tragic isolation of Dracula, his vision was fast becoming an anachronism. That same year the film ALIEN spoke to a new kind of visceral horror that was rising to ascendancy as the tragic monster would finally give way to chest-bursting gore. A year before, George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD had turned monsters inside out. In lurid colors, the enigmatic zombie once controlled by Bela Lugosi in WHITE ZOMBIE became an intestine-eating killer, breaking through walls to get at their victims. There was no mystery here, no eerie pleasure to be gleaned from shadows, no creeping dread. The monster newly became a force of nature without meaning, empty of metaphor. We now sublimated our anxiety for giddy delight in torture. Films like John Carpenter’s 1982 THE THING attempted to merge the classic creature feature with gore and blood, but the focus was still on all the terrible things that could happen to the human body. As Famous Monsters of Filmland passed the horror movie magazine torch to Fangoria, pop culture embraced body horror and explicit violence, putting Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy back in their respective graves. Scholar Peter Bebergal will explore how in the late 1970s, the beloved monster of the creature features lost ground to the horrors of exploding heads and summer camp killers, and discuss possible reasons why.

Book Launch for Sinophagia. There has been so little consideration of Chinese Horror. Neither those inside the country nor around the world seem to have paid much attention to the genre, except for maybe some works of cinema. Within China, there has been a decade long period where Horror has been out of vogue for various reasons. Nevertheless, as people with very lively imaginations, rich and varied beliefs, there have always been a stream of remarkable tales of fright being created in this region, throughout history. Chinese Horror needs to be viewed in the cultural frameworks of not only ‘global horror’, but what in its heritage, makes it distinct. In this lecture, I will introduce you to the fascinating history of China’s horror storytelling, its development from the tales of the strange, for which Pu Songling became so celebrated, to the rise of urban legends during the Tang Dynasty; from the beginnings of modern horror in early cinema, to the recent periods of domestic boom, and the incredible materials that inspired these. We will explore the contemporary horror landscape, which both diverges from and re-connects with older forms, and look at some of the works featured the new anthology, Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror.

Peter Bebergal, author of “Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll,” will present a multi-media presentation on how the aesthetics and mythos of rock and roll have been deeply influenced by the occult imagination. Bebergal will narrate a secret occult history of bands and artists, including David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Hawkwind, Arthur Brown, Psychic TV and Sunn0))) that owe their mystique to people like Aubrey Beardsley, Austin Osman Spare, and Aleister Crowley, as well as the pomp and circumstance of magic fraternities, UFOs, conspiracy theories, and neo-pagans. Underlying it all is pop culture’s frenzied love of occultism, and Bebergal will showcase stills, concert footage and film clips.  

This class was originally scheduled for January 2024. Ticket buyers and passholders have been contacted via email. Horror is frequently considered “inappropriate” and “offensive.” Very often that is exactly the point. But what and where is the real harm exactly? Given society’s unhelpful propensity to conflate inappropriate and offensive with harm, horror becomes the perfect scapegoat to map harm onto and deflect larger more complex social issues. However as this talk will illustrate, the fact of the matter is that after thousands of sensational headlines and decades of state-sponsored research, there is NO definite proof that horror or any other form of popular culture products such as video games harms. But why then does this myth persist? And why, if we can’t define “harmful” we continue to use the label as a means of censure and blame. Horror occupies a rather unique position in society as a form of mainstream entertainment that is constantly under pressure to curb, suppress and censor that which initially made it so popular; its ability to disgust and horrify. An allegory for the “evil” that exists in mankind and not its embodiment, one of the key tropes of the genre is the representation of societal ills as a means of release, exploration and belonging. Yet time and time again the genre is found at the centre of controversy charged with the very corruption it seeks to represent. Blaming the mirror for what it reflects, the myth that the genre poses harm to children is as powerful now as it was when in 1796 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge decried Matthew Lewis’ Gothic Romance The Monk “a Mormo for children, a poison for youth, and a provocative for the debauchee.” Introducing a cultural paradigm, known as the Myth of Harm, this talk will interrogate the meaning of harm by focusing on major controversies beginning with the 1930s Golden Age of Horror Cinema and moving on to the Horror Comic Hearings of the 1950s, the Video Nasty era of the 1980s, 1990s video game controversies and on into the more contemporary Cyber-Gothic horror. Drawing upon cases such as the James Bulger murder and the Slenderman stabbing, the Myth of Harm explores how horror has been repeatedly cast as a harmful influence upon children at the expense of scrutinising other, more complex, social issues. Furthermore, it seeks to expose how fears concerning negative media effects are often part of a larger narrative pertaining to the regulation of children’s pastimes, moral entrepreneurship, political scapegoating, media sensationalism and genuine fears obfuscated by a centuries-old myth about the horror genre and its ability to harm.

For most of his life, Howard Phillips Lovecraft called Providence, Rhode Island his home, drawing upon it for the creation of his unique cosmogony. However, a formative chapter in Lovecraft’s biography has long been overlooked: his two years living in New York City between 1924 and 1926. Contrary to the narrative presented by many scholars and even Lovecraft himself, his collective New York experiences—including his marriage to Ukrainian-Jewish émigré and milliner Sonia H. Greene; his relationships with queer and leftist creatives and intellectuals; and his encounters with immigrants and ethnic minorities—shaped Lovecraft both as an individual and as a writer. His interactions with the city revealed both his admirable traits (e.g., his generous friendships) and his deplorable beliefs (e.g., his strident racism), and helped spur Lovecraft to develop into the author known and enjoyed by a contemporary global audience. Scholar David Goodwin will review Lovecraft’s stories in light of New York’s influence, with reference to the original research published in his book Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft In Gotham. He will also address a short selection of film and television productions that he has inspired, ranging from Stranger Things to the Hellboy franchise. The audience will come away with an appreciation of the complexity of Lovecraft’s biography and an understanding of the importance of the urban environment to his writing.

This class aims to explore how eighteenth-century Gothic texts have influenced contemporary horror cinema by establishing the origins of both the ‘found footage’ genre and the female experience of being trapped in a house where safety has been corrupted by hostility. I will establish the principles of the Gothic form, the theoretical concepts of ‘horror’ and ‘terror’, and how their characteristics influence the experience of fear, particularly as a gendered phenomenon. Initially focussing on two seminal ‘found’ Gothic texts, The Castle of Otranto (1764) and The Monk (1796) I will then move towards a discussion of Ann Radcliffe’s work. Radcliffe has been named the ‘Mother of the Gothic’ and her depictions of Gothic heroines trapped in patriarchal structures of control have become synonymous with what is loosely termed the ‘Female Gothic’. Narratives of women trapped in domestic spaces are still prescient in horror cinema today, with many ‘haunted house’ films featuring a female protagonist who is the focus of paranormal activity, which I will read as an expression of female entrapment and oppression. Paranormal Activity (2009/10), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), Crimson Peak (2015), and Insidious (2011) are the main films on which I draw to elucidate the links between Radcliffe’s work, the Female Gothic more generally, and modern horror cinema. I will examine how her eighteenth-century texts have influenced and been transformed by the horror genre, articulating similar fears which are inherently gendered through their utilisation of the domestic space as unsettling and therefore unsafe for women. The Female Gothic thus becomes an intrinsic element to the haunted house narrative in its close association with patriarchal structures and the pressures they exert on women. Their critical divergence from Radcliffe’s work is their positioning of the supernatural as reality, but I argue that this is further indebted to women’s Gothic. Female protagonists are those most likely to experience the initial hauntings, and therefore carry the psychological burden of seeking affirmation from their male counterparts. Haunting thus functions as a call-back to past Gothic heroines who were also at the mercy of male authority figures, indicating that patriarchy’s oppressive structures remain (mainly) intact. True fear lies in the terror the female protagonists experience, largely in isolation, as it relates to the larger phenomenon of women’s oppression. This class will demonstrate how the contemporary haunted house narrative is thus indebted to a tradition of Gothic texts authored by women.

We are born into a world of which we know nothing other than the certainty of our own death. That is the primal basis for horror: We appear to inhabit a universe whose architect either does not exist or is remote enough to not care. So, we construct shelters to protect ourselves from external evils, but we are inevitably inspired by the architecture of the natural world; thus, the fears that motivate us to build a house, a castle, a church, an office tower, are invariably wed to the structure itself. Lecturer Vincenzo Natali, whose film CUBE famously focuses on monstrous architecture, will examine how this drama plays out in horror fiction, dissecting the relationship between character and environment in horror cinema beginning with German Expressionism and leading into late 20th Century films like ROSEMARY’S BABY, SUSPIRIA, THE SHINING, and ALIEN. He will explain how these films use cinematic tools to create immersive environments with a heightened atmosphere that invites the uncanny. Finally, he will show how metaphor and anthropomorphism in architectural structures reflect the fears of protagonists moving through these spaces.