Is the past revitalizing or killing 21st century horror culture? This lecture is an introduction to the critical lens of hauntology, a philosophical approach that uses the metaphors of ghosts and hauntings to interrogate nostalgia, which has seeped into many aspects of 21st century horror. Subgeneric modes like folk horror and the urban wyrd are significant artistic responses to changing political, social, technological, and economic conditions—and they become increasingly valuable as we move into a future in which human memory and our access to the past are being radically transformed. To explore why idealized pasts and unfulfilled promises of the future feature so heavily in 20th and 12st century genre production, we will examine the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, Alan Moore, Nigel Kneale, and Rod Serling; in films such THE SHINING, DON’T LOOK NOW, and THE LAST WAVE; in television programs such as Sapphire and Steel, and Dark Shadows; and in music from Boards of Canada, Broadcast, The Caretaker, and the Ghost Box Records label. This talk offers a critical analysis of horror culture’s quest to acknowledge, understand, restore, and lay to rest the ghosts of the past and the present, and those that will inevitably haunt the future.

Roberta Findlay’s association with horror cinema rarely extends beyond Snuff (Michael Findlay, 1976): the infamous Manson-inspired exploitation film which, in its promotional ballyhoo, falsely purported to depict the genuine murder of its lead actress. Protests that were sparked in New York City upon the film’s theatrical release, followed by its banning as a ‘video nasty’ in Britain in the early 1980s, has helped transform an otherwise run-of-the-mill exploitation film into an exemplar of boundary-pushing horror cinema. However, despite the film’s infamy, foregrounding Snuff in the way comes at the expense of side-lining Findlay’s directorial efforts in the horror genre: The Oracle (1985), Blood Sisters (1987), Lurkers (1987) and Prime Evil (1988). Findlay’s gender is grounds enough for a scholarly reappraisal of her horror output, given that, as Alison Peirse argues ‘there are a vast number of women filmmakers completely absent from our written horror histories and that by not including the outputs from “half the human race,” our histories are faulty.’ This talk is, in part, a contribution to Peirse’s revisionist project, but not, I should make clear, its sole purpose. Nor is it my intention to champion Findlay’s horror films as offering a ‘perspective’ that challenges patriarchal hegemony, or to claim that they advocate for women or comment on ‘female experiences’. There remains an assumption, which Peirse challenges, that, ‘a woman director… will make a woman-centred film’ or that woman-directed horror films de facto lend themselves to ‘feminist’ readings. It would be frankly disingenuous to fold Findlay’s horror films into this discourse. While Findlay identifies as a woman and her horror films have female leads, she is not a feminist, nor have her films sought to make any political statements about feminism or otherwise. As she told Fangoria in 1985: ‘I don’t know if a movie is one thing or not’. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s argument that Findlay is best understood as an ‘anti-auteur’, is a befitting label in this regard. Unlike the intentions that her horror contemporaries such as Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, and George A. Romero purported, Findlay’s chief driver when making horror movies was economic viability over artist intent. Critics were quick to recognise this too, dismissing her films as ‘horror by-the-numbers’ for the direct-to-video market. However, pejorative though they are, comments such as these bring to light the economic context within which Findlay was operating, and the low-risk investment low-budget horror features held for filmmakers at the beginnings of the video age. This talk, rather than treating The Oracle, Blood Sisters, Lurkers, and Prime Evil as in some way innovative or as worthy of interest because they happen to be directed by a woman, shows instead how these films prove apposite case studies because of what they reveal about contemporaneous industrial practices. Analysis of the films in relation to contemporary trade publications and associated promotional materials enables a broader understanding of the economic context that birthed them and, by extension, leads to a fuller understanding of the industrial history of US horror cinema in the 1980s.

In the late 20th century, fairy tales reemerged in popular culture, often reimagined as gothic fables for adults. These contemporary adaptations examine the false binaries within these tales, while exposing the themes of sexual abuse and recovery encoded therein. “Little Red Riding Hood” provided particularly fertile ground for such explorations, with films such as FREEWAY (1996) and RED RIDING HOOD (2011) following the perils and possibilities for a coming-of-age woman. Rather than passive victims, these protagonists are active, resisting both victimhood and inherited burdens. However, an equally important issue in “Red” adaptations is that monstrosity, like victimization, can be resisted. The figure of the Wolf is not clearly defined in the original tale: Is he an allegory for a predatory Gentleman? Is he a Werewolf? Or is he merely an animal, hungry for a meal? The Wolf may begin as the threatening Other, but his potential for violence can be overcome—or harnessed. This lecture will interrogate a set of deliberately gothic film and television adaptations of “Red Riding Hood” with a particular interest in their messages of recovery and agency.

The cannibal has long been a character archetype depicted in the horror genre, represented as early as the Greek epics and the literary Gothic, and was, arguably, innately typified through the mondo-extreme cannibal films coming from Italian filmmakers in the 1970s. William Arens theorised that, through these films, “cannibalism functions as a mythical device to separate civilized Western man from his barbaric foreign cousins. [It] insights innate disgust and is a potent means to designate the accused a subhuman”. However, it can be argued that the concept of ‘separation’ can be extended even further and be applied to the space of anyone that we deem as ‘Other’, to quote Robin Wood’s theories on the monstrous Other in the horror genre, thereby meaning that we can depict cannibalism being enacted by anyone and for whatever reason, including the eminently romantic. Melvin writes that “the cannibal exists in two extremes. One for the depravity of it and one for the sacredness of the mouth.” It can therefore be argued that because they can occupy the space of two different extremes, of both horror and violence, the depravity, and sacred romanticism, the sacredness of the mouth, the figure of the cannibal can exist as a uniquely queered Gothic figure within the horror genre, a true representative of literary liminality and, indeed, ‘separation’ from the norm, between horror and romance, rich and poor, living and dead, eater and eaten. This class will examine the romantic cannibal as it is specifically depicted in horror narratives such as Der Fan (Schmidt, 1982), Bones and All (Guadagnino, 2022) Preacher’s Daughter (Anhedönia, 2022) and others, and how the figure of the cannibal purveys as an intimately queered figure of Gothic Americana, while also seeking to define how the cannibal and the act of cannibalism can be read as eminently romantic. It will additionally use theory presented by scholars such as Shirley Lindenbaum and Helene Cixious, as a means of establishing a connection to other academics in the field and rooting a little-examined corpus with broader theory of literary criticism, as well as establishing a basis through which to examine the subject of cannibalism and subvert it within a romantic context.

In United States horror cinema, representations of Mexico—or more precisely, of fictional US characters’ experience of Mexico—have contributed to the imagined position of Mexico as a familiar yet subordinate and dangerous Other. Mexico and the US-Mexican borderlands are a locus of danger and tragedy par excellence, as the act of crossing the border embodies a movement toward the unknown. Even when it is initially depicted as a (commodified) paradise characterized by alluring nature, Mexico is shown to be an inhospitable place that endangers protagonists who, after struggling against it, either perish or return to the United States—whose image of moral and cultural superiority is thus reinforced. The geopolitical transformations Mexico has undergone since the mid-1990s are reflected in a number of films, sparked by a renewed interest in topics related to undocumented migration and cross-border organized crime. Focusing on 21st century cinema, this talk will tackle four main themes—Horrific Nature, Haunted Heritage, Borderland Savagery, and Migrant Horror—as seen in films such as BORDERLAND, THE RUINS, THE FOREVER PURGE, THE EYE (2008), and many more.

In one of the first studies of Australian cinema, Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka’s The Screening of Australia Volume 2: Anatomy of a National Cinema, “Australian Gothic” is cited as one of the key trends in Australian film production of the 1970s. For Dermody and Jacka, Australian Gothic is expressed through portrayals of Australian rural spaces revealed to be hotbeds of perversion, populated by grotesques, with the pervasive atmosphere of a living nightmare, typified by films such as Wake in Fright (1971), The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Summerfield (1977). and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978). In this lecture Lindsay Hallam will explore what is meant by “Australian Gothic” and survey its use in films from the 1970s to the present. She will discuss how the representation of Australia as a Gothic landscape reveals the horror that has been enacted upon it through the process of colonisation. In these films the land is revealed to be haunted by secrets, holding within it knowledge of past crimes that are beginning to emerge, seeping into the so-called civilized society that has formed on top of it, twisting relations within families and communities. The original conception of the Australian Gothic viewed it as grounded in a recognisable reality, operating within a Gothic space through an inversion, and perversion, of the everyday. However, there is a wealth of Australian films that use more traditional Gothic elements within a supernatural narrative. Hauntings, possessions, and ghostly visitations occur to expose secrets within a family, in films such as Cassandra (1987), Alison’s Birthday (1981), Next of Kin (1982), Lake Mungo (2008), Inner Demon (2014) and Relic (2020). This focus on the family also leads to a shift in location from rural to urban and suburban spaces, as in Boys in the Trees (2016), Observance (2015), Johnny Ghost (2011) and most notably The Babadook (2014), where the titular monster embodies the rage felt by a grieving mother. The land itself gains sentience in The Last Wave (1977), Long Weekend (1978), In the Winter Dark (1998) and Primal (2010), becoming the ultimate vengeful force and agent of apocalypse. These films don’t feature the rampaging men usually found in eco-horror films, but instead involve people who are ignorant of the power of the land. Even those who seek to gain knowledge of these forces must realise that they are inherently unknowable, their power impossible to comprehend, let alone control. In these films, white settlers must acknowledge not just their guilt at what they have wrought upon the land, but also their fundamental insignificance. While many films look to Aboriginal cultures and spiritualities for inspiration, such as The Last Wave, Dark Age (1987), The Dreaming (1988), and Kadaicha (1988), it must be noted that most representations of Indigenous cultures in Australian horror cinema are primarily in films made by white filmmakers. Indigenous filmmakers are beginning to tell their own stories though, as in Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil (1993), Warwick Thornton’s The Darkside (2013), anthology film Dark Place (2019) and short film The Moogai (2020). These works employ familiar genre tropes and monsters, such as ghosts and vampires, using the conventions of the Australian Gothic and horror cinema to expose and work through historical trauma, while also expressing, and celebrating, cultural identity in a variety of ways that is no longer homogenised.

This class has been cancelled and replaced with Vampirism Gone Viral: Medical Misinformation and Vaccine Hesitancy. Ticket buyers and passholders have been contacted via email. Horror always reflects the perils and anxieties of its own time, and yet in spite of decades of innovation in popular media, the genre has never strayed far from that ur-scape of terror and torment: A place called Hell. Dr. D. W. Pasulka will take on the role of Virgil, leading you through a tour of the variegated hells, purgatories, and otherworlds in select horror films and recent media. We will journey through the sadomasochistic dungeons of Clive Barker’s HELLRAISER (1987); the existential techno nightmare of EVENT HORIZON (1997); the Basque fantasy world of ERREMENTARI (2017); and the fact-based (however fantastical) B- movie franchise THE CONJURING, among other media. Along the way we will learn about the historical precedents for these images. The Catholic view of a punishing afterworld has shifted in meaning and consequence over time; there is the latter day conceit that Purgatory is a spiritual “condition of existence”, and there is the older idea of its absolutely material reality. This course will explore why the specific aesthetic derived from medieval Catholicism survives today and forms a template that informs much of the horror genre.

Vampires are carriers for the contemporary anxieties of the cultures that created them. The modern vampire originates in the 1980s, a decade defined in no small part by HIV/AIDS, when society was preoccupied with blood as the medium of monstrosity, and misunderstanding spread like a virus. One cannot demand medical accuracy from narratives predicated on blood-drinking undead aristocrats, but one might expect more from actual humans; however, when threatened, the many people abandon scientific evidence in favor of panicked fear-mongering even in relation to, for example, vaccines for preventable childhood illness. This lecture will consider how post-AIDS crisis vampires in film and television, from the time of BLADE (1998) to the cusp of COVID-19, have reflected our fears of infection, contagion, and containment. Examples will include the television series American Horror Story: Hotel and The Strain, the 2006 TV movie version of DRACULA, and the films BLADE, THIRST, and I AM LEGEND. These narratives utilize a layperson’s scientific awareness to identify vampirism as a disease—a natural condition that doctors, pathologists, geneticists, and the occasional hematologist mutter about in their laboratories as the virus (or gene, or bacteria, or some combination thereof) behaves in ways that no virus ever has. These fantastic contagions are analogous to the real-world monsters of weaponized misinformation, scientific denialism, and vaccine hesitancy.

In early American horror cinema, the primary antagonist was always positioned as an external or non-human threat in films like The Curse of The Cat People (1944), Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954), The Werewolf (1956), Dracula (1958), and The Mummy (1959). However, in the 1960s, with the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), the threat was now recognised not as external but as coming from within. The monster’s identity was now human, and more terrifyingly, the monster was now part of the family. In American horror films of the 1970s, in particular, came a rise in the representation of bad fathers. These fathers range from the “father as a cannibal” (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974; The Hills Have Eyes, 1977);, the father as Satan (The Omen, 1976), the father as possessed (The Amityville Horror, 1979) to the father displaying monstrosity when he is absent (The Exorcist, 1973; Carrie, 1976). These fathers are positioned as figures of contempt rather than figures to be praised and revered. These nihilistic representations of fatherhood seemed to reflect the societal changes of the time, as the “traditional nuclear family” and traditional family model were seen as prone to collapse. The structures had grown weaker due to a range of societal factors, including the emergence of second-wave feminism challenging patriarchal authority and nihilism over the state of the economy as Vietnam ended and gas prices soared. In turn, traditional patriarchal institutions such as the church, the government, and even the family were seen as collapsing. The Ferocious Father was born out of the power of the patriarch, which started to wane. This talk aims to showcase how the complexity of the portrayals of fatherhood in 1970s American horror cinema showcases the cultural anxieties and social changes of the era and the multifaceted nature of fatherhood itself.