Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London unveils spring 2017 line-up

miskatonic-spring-2017

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Spring 2017 season:
Jan – May 2017

Dates: 19 Jan, 16 Feb, 16 March, 20 April 2017

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concs / £40 full season ticket

Miskatonic website

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London returns to the Horse Hospital from January-May 2017 for another semester of film classes on a range of esoteric topics, led by some of the horror world’s most renowned critical luminaries.

Lindsay Hallam launches the season in January with her lecture on revenge in Australian exploitation cinema, followed in February by returning instructor Jasper Sharp, who will explore the outer edges of Japanese fantastique cinema, which remain little known outside the country. In March, Jon Towlson will reveal the true gruesomeness of 1930s American horror productions before censorship changed audiences’ perception of them. In April, television scholar Amanda Reyes will fly over from Texas to present a class on the golden age of US Made-for-Television movies, joined by select contributors to her new book Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium 1964-1999. And we’ll be closing the season with an examination of colonial-shaped fantasies of voodoo savagery in Haiti by John Cussans, author of a book on the subject. This last class will also act as the graduation ceremony for those who have been with Miskatonic for the full 2016/2017 school year.

Further details on each of the lectures, along with instructor bios, are available on the Miskatonic website.

The spring 2017 semester will also mark the debut of the Diabolique Scholarship – through an arrangement with Diabolique Magazine, which re-launches its print version in March 2017, Miskatonic London will be offering up to five students the opportunity to attend the entire semester free of charge, subject to a juried application process. For more information on how to apply for the scholarship, see the registration page on the Miskatonic website.

Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organisation that started in Winnipeg and Montreal, Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. Miskatonic London operates under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Virginie Sélavy.

All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Registration for the full season is £35. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

For the full details of the courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london@gmail.com.

Electric Sheep Film Show December 2016

arcadia
Arcadia

audioIn this festive Film Show edition, Alex Fitch talks to director Tom Large about his low-budget dystopian drama Arcadia, while Charles Barker discusses his virtual reality thriller The Call-Up in a Q&A recorded at SCI-FI-LONDON. Also, in a talk recorded at London’s Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Maura McHugh explores David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me, in advance of the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks.

The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 5.30-6.30pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 18 January 2017.

This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 21 December 2016.

Clear Spot – 21 December 2016 (Electric Sheep) by Resonance Fm on Mixcloud

Working the Blue Rose Case: Signs, Codes, and Mysteries in David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me

fire-walk-with-me
Fire Walk With Me

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Maura McHugh

Date: 8 December 2016

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £8 concs / £11 door

Miskatonic website

Fire Walk With Me (1992), directed by David Lynch and co-written with Robert Engels, was created to address unanswered questions in the seminal TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91), but instead it offered more puzzles and dream narratives to confound viewers. Its premiere in Cannes was met with boos and jeers from the audience, but over the years critical opinion of this challenging film has matured and developed. Maura McHugh will explore the symbols and themes that underpin Fire Walk With Me and Twin Peaks, and will offer you a refresher course in its characters and strange happenings in advance of the new series of Twin Peaks which will materialise in 2017.

About the instructor:

Maura McHugh lives in the West of Ireland, and began her career in academia. Her first Masters examined Irish nineteenth century supernatural fiction (making her a life-long Dracula nerd). After a sojourn in IT she later explored her love of cinema through a Diploma in Film Studies followed by a Masters in Screenwriting. Her dark fantasy and horror short stories and non-fiction essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in America and Europe. Her two collections – Twisted Fairy Tales and Twisted Myths – were published in the USA, and she’s written award-winning comic book series, including co-writing Witchfinder with Kim Newman for Dark Horse Comics. Her short story ‘Bone Mother’ is being adapted into a stop-motion short film by See Creature in Canada. She has also served on the juries of international literary, comic book, and film awards. Her web site is http://splinister.com and she tweets as @splinister

About the Miskatonic Institute:

Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organization that started in Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. The school currently has branches in Montreal and London, with Miskatonic London operating under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Electric Sheep Founder/Editor Virginie Sélavy.

All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Season ticket is £35 and will be available shortly. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

For full details of the next courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.

Electric Sheep Film Show November 2016

capsule
Capsule

audioInvestigating Genre: In this show, Alex Fitch talks to Lee Broughton about his book Euro-Western, published by I.B. Tauris, which uncovers progressive attitudes to women and minorities in European Westerns, and to director Andrew Martin about his excellent Cold War SF thriller Capsule, recorded at the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival. Plus, Virginie Sélavy discusses this year’s London International Animation Festival (LIAF) with festival director Nag Vladermersky.

The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 5.30-6.30pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 21 December 2016.

This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 16 November 2016.

Clear Spot – 16 November 2016 (Electric Sheep) by Resonance Fm on Mixcloud

Little Terrors: Children’s Horror on Film and Television

the_man_from_nowhere
The Man from Nowhere

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Catherine Lester

Date: 10 November 2016

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £8 concs / £11 on the door

Miskatonic website

Children and horror: two things that are usually not considered to go together. Very often, it is assumed that if children are exposed to horror, they will be psychologically ‘corrupted’ in some way, and so they should be protected from it at all costs. However, for many horror fans, our fascination with all things spooky began in childhood – whether because we watched something that we really weren’t supposed to, or were introduced to horror through children’s content such as Scooby Doo, Goosebumps, or classic Disney fairy tales like that scene from Pinocchio. With recent films such as ParaNorman, Frankenweenie and Hotel Transylvania, and children’s toys like the Monster High dolls, horror for children is becoming increasingly mainstream.

This class will explore in detail the area of horror films and television programmes created specifically for children in the UK and the US. Aspects of this topic that will be covered in the class include:

How horror for children emerged and how the subgenre has developed and changed across time, from early cinema to the present day;

Key academic theories on or relating to frightening media for children;

The defining characteristics of children’s horror stories on film and television;

How children’s horror is able to be both ‘scary’ enough to be classified as horror, but ‘safe’ enough to be considered ‘child-friendly’;

Similarities and differences between children’s horror and adult horror;

The possible functions and benefits that horror might provide children.

This class aims to show that the relationship between children and horror is as complex as it is fascinating and that, far from being incompatible, children and horror are actually an ideal match. Films and programmes discussed range from the popular to the obscure, the good to the bad, the expected to the unexpected, and the surprisingly disturbing to the downright fun. Examples may include Disney’s The Watcher in the Woods, cult-favourite The Monster Squad, 70s CFF chiller The Man From Nowhere and the British anthology series Dramarama Spooky.

About the instructor:

Catherine Lester is completing her PhD on the children’s horror film at the University of Warwick, and has taught and spoken widely on this topic. Outside of this research, Catherine is interested in children’s media culture more broadly, particularly in representations of gender and sexuality, and has done some recent work in relation to this on Disney’s Frozen. In March 2016 she co-organised an academic conference on ‘Girlhood, Media and Popular Culture, 1990-present’ at Warwick. She has written film reviews and essays for the site alternatetakes.co.uk and you can find her tweeting about popular culture, feminism and occasionally her pet rabbits @CineFeline.

About the Miskatonic Institute:

Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organization that started in Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. The school currently has branches in Montreal and London, with Miskatonic London operating under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Electric Sheep Founder/Editor Virginie Sélavy.

All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Season ticket is £35 and will be available shortly. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

For full details of the next courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.

Electric Sheep Film Show October 2016

the-beyond
The Beyond

audioDeath and Beyond: In this month’s show, Virginie Sélavy caught up with Death Waltz Records’ Spencer Hickman and legendary composer Fabio Frizzi at this year’s Horror Channel Frightfest to talk about Frizzi’s scores for such classic Italian horror films as The Beyond and Zombi 2 in the light of his upcoming new London live show Chills in the Chapel, a show that includes new orchestrations of his scores for cult films by Lucio Fulci, mixed with explorations of his work outside of his longstanding collaboration with the Italian director. Also in this show, Alex Fitch takes part in a Q&A with director Justin Schein about his film Left on Purpose which documents the life and death of ‘Yippie’ activist Mayer Vishner, recorded at Leeds International Film Festival 2015.

The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 5.30-6.30pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 16 November 2016.

This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 19 October 2016.

Clear Spot – 19 October 2016 (Electric Sheep) by Resonance Fm on Mixcloud

Cheap Thrills: Women of Exploitation Talk

humanoids-from-the-deep_barbican_pic
Humanoids from the Deep

Format: Talk

Date: 29 October 2016

Time: 3-4pm

Venue: Barbican, London

Barbican website

As part of the Barbican’s ‘Cheap Thrills’ season, our editor Virginie Sélavy examines the unique women directors who worked in the golden age of exploitation cinema, their struggles and successes, and the singular works they created in this one-hour lecture.

Stripped and slashed, sometimes both at the same time: this is the fate usually reserved to women in exploitation films. Generally made by male filmmakers for male viewers, the low-budget sex and violence fare of the 1960s-70s does not exactly come across as female-orientated on first view.

And yet, one of the most prolific pornographers of the period was sexploitation queen Doris Wishman, while legendary shocker Snuff was made by actress and filmmaker Roberta Findlay with her husband in 1971. For all its obsessive focus on the female body, exploitation film offered a way in to maverick women directors who could never hope to break into conservative, monolithic Hollywood.

This was particularly true of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. Priding itself on being anti-authoritarian and countercultural, New World Pictures were at the same time making exploitative pictures that put female nudity centre stage. This contradiction defined the company’s relationship with its first two female directors, Stephanie Rothman and Barbara Peeters, resulting in fascinating films such as Terminal Island (1973) and i> (1972), where sleaze and feminism uneasily cohabited.

For the full ‘Cheap Thrills’ programme go to the Barbican website.

Vulgar Structures; or Andrzej Żuławski’s Love Triangles

miskatonic-possession
Possession

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Daniel Bird

Date: 13 October 2016

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £8 concs / £11 on the door

Miskatonic website

Writer and filmmaker Andrzej Żuławski, who passed away earlier this year, worked in many different genres: war films (The Third Part of the Night), gothic horror (The Devil, Possession), melodrama (The Most Important Thing: Love, My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days, La Fidelite), thrillers (La Femme publique, Cosmos), science fiction (On the Silver Globe), costume dramas (La Note bleue),crime films (L’Amour braque), erotic dramas (Szamanka) – even musicals (Boris Godunov). However, all of Żuławski’s films share the same fundamentally vulgar structure: the love triangle. This class looks at the love triangle fundamental to all of Żuławski’s films and squares it with this remarkable director’s life and loves.

About the instructor:

Daniel Bird is a writer, filmmaker, and one of the world’s leading scholars on Eastern European cult cinema. He has curated numerous retrospectives, overseen film restorations, participated in DVD commentaries and is best known as the biographer of both Walerian Borowczyk and Andrzej Żuławski. Daniel Bird first interviewed Żuławski for Eyeball magazine with Stephen Thrower back in 1997. He organised ‘A Weekend with Andrzej Żuławski’, the first Anglo-phone overview of Żuławski’s films, at the Cine Lumiere in 1998. The following year he visited the set of Żuławski’s La fidelite in Paris and worked with with Anchor Bay Entertainment to release Possession on DVD in the U.S., for which he also moderated a commentary track with the director. Over the years he continued to work with Żuławski, liaising with festivals, distributors and producers on retrospectives, DVD releases and film projects. Last year he made the English subtitles for Żuławski’s Cosmos and produced a restoration of On the Silver Globe.

About the Miskatonic Institute:

Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organization that started in Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. The school currently has branches in Montreal and London, with Miskatonic London operating under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Electric Sheep Founder/Editor Virginie Sélavy.

All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Season ticket is £35 and will be available shortly. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

For full details of the next courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.

BFI London Film Festival 2016 Preview

lff-2016

60th BFI London Film Festival

5 – 16 October 2016

London, UK

LFF website

Running from 5 to 16 October with screenings spread across central London, a brand new temporary venue at Embankment and a number of participating local cinemas, the 60th edition of the BFI London Film Festival opens lightly with Amma Assante’s romantic drama A United Kingdom and closes with a bang with Ben Wheatley’s action comedy thriller Free Fire, starring Cillian Murphy, Brie Larson, Michael Smiley and Armie Hammer in a twisted story about an arms deal going horribly wrong. In between those two opposing sides of the film spectrum, this year’s line-up is packed with a wealth of thrills, chills and oddities.

Our top picks this year include Park Chan-wook’s intriguing and masterfully shot new film The Handmaiden, social-SF drama The Untamed by Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante, Ulrich Seidl’s latest documentary Safari, along with the French cannibal coming-of-age tale Raw and absurdist Russian fable Zoology, which screened at L’Etrange Festival and TIFF last month.

Other titles seen on the festival circuit include Boo Junfeng’s tense prison thriller Apprentice, Olivier Assayas’s underwhelming ghost drama Personal Shopper, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest offering Creepy, Na Hong-jin’s supernatural epic The Wailing, Pablo Larrain’s festival hit Neruda, and Nicole Krebitz’s new film Wild, about a young woman who finds herself drawn to a wolf and gradually breaks free from the conformist society that surrounds her.

We especially look forward to the packed ‘Cult’ strand, which this year includes a trip down memory lane with Peter Braatz’s Blue Velvet Revisited along with a rare screening of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm: Remastered, next to a number of promising debuts by young filmmakers such as Lorca Finnegan’s Without Name and Liam Gavin’s first feature A Dark Song. There are also new and exciting works by more established filmmakers, including Billy O’Brien’s chilling and darkly humorous study of adolescent alienation I am Not a Serial Killer, and Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski’s brand new slice of retro terror, ‘The Void’.

This year’s archive screenings, which are always worth a look, include Cy Endfield’s superb low budget thriller Hell Drivers (1957) and the BFI National Archive’s latest silent film restoration The Informer (1929), based on Liam O’Flaherty’s novel about betrayal amidst the revolutionary environment of the newly independent Ireland in 1922.

Pamela Jahn

For more information about the programme and how to book tickets visit the LFF website.

Electric Sheep Film Show September 2016

creature-designers
Creature Designers: The Frankenstein Complex

audioFear and Fantasy: The Electric Sheep Film Show is back tonight with a packed programme. Virginie Sélavy talks to Secretary director Steven Shainberg about his new film Rupture and takes part in a Q&A with director Guillermo del Toro about the documentary Creature Designers: The Frankenstein Complex, recorded at Fantasia Festival, Montreal. Plus, Alex Fitch discusses the comprehensive history of Tarzan on Film published by Titan Books, with author Scott Tracy Griffin.

The Electric Sheep Film Show is broadcast every third Wednesday of the month, 5.30-6.30pm at Resonance FM 104.4. Next date: Wednesday 19 October 2016.

This show was first broadcast on Wednesday 21 September 2016.

Clear Spot – 21 September 2016 (Electric Sheep) by Resonance Fm on Mixcloud