All posts by Virginie Selavy

I Eat Cannibals: Atavism, Exoticism and Atrocity

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Man from Deep River

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Mark Pilkington

Date: 12 February 2015

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concs / £50 full season ticket

Miskatonic website

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.

On February 12, Miskatonic London will 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.

About the instructor:
Mark Pilkington is the author of the book and documentary film Mirage Men and Far Out: 101 Strange Tales from Science’s Outer Edge. He has written for The Guardian, The Wire, Sight and Sound, Electric Sheep, Fortean Times, Frieze and The Quietus amongst others. He founded and runs Strange Attractor Press and regularly speaks on esoteric and fringe culture topics.

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. Registration for the full season is £50 and available from WeGotTickets. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

The next course dates are 12 March, 9 April, 14 May, 11 June. For the full details of the courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london@gmail.com.

Black Movie 2015

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Black Movie 2015

Black Movie

16-25 January 2015

Geneva, Switzerland

Black Movie website

From January 16 to 25, the Black Movie Festival returns to Geneva with a focus on the human body and its misadventures, including films from South Korea, Russia, China, Brazil, Ukraine and Japan as well as an animation strand. Geneva’s pioneering independent film festival will present 112 films, including 51 Swiss premieres and 12 European premieres, with as its guest of honour acclaimed chronicler of disaffected China Wang Bing.

The selection includes the new films by Hong Sang-soo, Hill of Freedom, Takashi Miike, Over Your Dead Body, Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain as well as Tetsua Nakashima’s visceral drama The World of Kanako, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s unique sign-language Ukrainian drama The Tribe, Kim Seong-hoon’s Hard Day and Aleksei German’s hallucinatory SF tale Hard To Be a God.

The Art Theatre Guild, the Japanese 60s underground production studio, is the subject of an exhibition of 40 film posters, which will be accompanied by screenings of Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses, Akio Jissoji’s This Passing Life and Susumu Hani’s Nanami: The Inferno of First Love.

‘Microbe: The Little Black Movie’ will showcase the best of international animation through 56 children’s films, with a focus on Brazil.

Other events include the Kino Kabaret, a three-day creative laboratory for artists and technicians, while artist Cetuss will decorate three spaces in homage to Twin Peaks, with the Grütli cinema playing host to the Black Lodge and the Great Northern Hotel.

To find out more about the programme please visit the Black Movie Festival website.

School of Shock: Pain and Pleasure in the Classroom Safety Film

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Fur Coat Club

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Kier-La Janisse

Date: 8 January

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concs / £50 full season ticket

Miskatonic website

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.

About the instructor:

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer and programmer, the founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies and Owner/Editor-in-Chief of Spectacular Optical. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival in Vancouver (1999-2005) and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She has written for Filmmaker, Shindig!, Incite: Journal of Experimental Media, Rue Morgue and Fangoria magazines, has contributed to The Scarecrow Movie Guide (Sasquatch Books, 2004) and Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), and is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012). She co-edited Spectacular Optical Book One: KID POWER! with Paul Corupe, and is currently writing A Song From the Heart Beats the Devil Every Time, about children’s programming in the counterculture era.

The next course dates are 12 February, 12 March, 9 April, 14 May, 11 June. For the full details of the courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london@gmail.com.

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London unveils full Jan-June line-up

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Miskatonic London will be based at the Horse Hospital from January 8

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Pilot season: Jan-June 2015

Dates: 8 January, 12 February, 12 March, 9 April, 14 May, 11 June

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concs / £50 full season ticket

Miskatonic website

THE MISKATONIC INSTITUTE OF HORROR STUDIES – LONDON UNVEILS FULL JANUARY-JUNE LINEUP

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies has revealed the full curriculum for the pilot season of its branch in London, which opens on January 8th, with intensive film classes on a wide range of topics from safety films to cannibals by some of the horror world’s most renowned critical luminaries.

Canadian founder Kier-La Janisse will make a brief UK appearance to launch the season with a lecture on classic classroom safety films and the shocks they deliver. She will be followed in February by Mark Pilkington, who will explore the exotic horrors of cannibal films. In March, Virginie Sélavy will look at 1960s-70s sado-masochistic erotica and the meanings of the various power games represented. The following month, Stephen Thrower will talk about Jesús Franco’s unique style of art, erotic and commercial filmmaking, marking the publication of his new book on the director. In May, Jasper Sharp will investigate the psychological and supernatural significance of landscapes, from Onibaba to Dust Devil. Closing the season, Kim Newman will discuss Gary Sherman’s 1972 Death Line the and the film’s use of cannibalism and political subtext.

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 £50. 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.

Jason Wood becomes Artistic Director of Film at HOME Manchester

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Plan for the cinema at HOME, Manchester

Electric Sheep friend and contributor Jason Wood has announced that he is leaving Curzon to become Artist Director of Film at HOME, Manchester. Jason will programme the best in international contemporary cinema as well as commissioning, curating and encouraging cross-art form collaboration in conjunction with his co-artistic directors. The film programme at HOME will embrace the evolving the role of cinema space as an environment in which live performance and cross-art events can play an increasingly important role.

Jason takes the role following five years at Cuzon Director of Programming at Curzon. Curzon praised his service to the company, his passionate commitment to cinema, immaculate taste and wealth of expertise and thanked Jason for his contribution to all aspects of the group.

HOME is a £25m new cultural centre for Manchester, opening to the public in Spring 2015, which will produce and present an ambitious programme of contemporary visual art, film and theatre. Formed from the merger of two of Manchester’s cultural organisations, Cornerhouse and the Library Theatre Company, HOME’s programme will directly involve artists and audiences. The new building, designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo, will feature five purpose-built cinema screens as well as digital production and broadcast facilities, a 500-seat theatre; a 150-seat flexible theatre; a 500m2, 4m high gallery space; five cinema screens and a café bar and restaurant.

20th Etrange Festival

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20th Etrange Festival poster by Dom Garcia

L’Etrange Festival

4-14 September 2014

Paris, France

Etrange Festival website

The unique and wonderful Etrange Festival celebrated its 20th anniversary this year with a spectacular line-up, which, as always, defied categories with the latest offerings from Takashi Miike and Marjane Satrapi, special programmes picked by Godfrey Reggio, Jacques Audiard and Sion Sono, musical events, emerging talent, short films and an exhibition on Fumetti.

Among the freaky treats on offer, we loved Kim Ki-Duk’s extreme castration drama Moebius, Bill Morrison’s elegiac The Miners’ Hymns, the Mo Brothers’ action thriller Killers, Fabrice du Welz’s staggeringly intense take on the Honeymoon Killers story Alleluia, atmospheric Irish ghost story The Canal and offbeat Iranian vampire tale A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.

Older treasures included Sergei Paradjanov’s sumptuously poetic Sayat Nova, Jerry Schatzberg’s seminal 70s road movie Scarecrow, Jörg Buttgereit’s ingeniously disturbing The Death King and Blaxploitation rarity Dolemite while the Pere Ubu Film Group’s did a live score to Carnival of Souls.

Marjane Satrapi’s dark animated killer tale The Voices won the audience award and we were particularly excited to discover David Robert Mitchell’s fantastical take on American sexual puritanism It Follows, David Wnendt’s uninhibited erotic comedy Wetlands, Nacho Vigalondo’s found footage thriller Open Windows, Austrian Western The Dark Valley, Aleksei German’s last film Hard to Be a God, hallucinatory French nightmare Horsehead and Austrian experimental dance film Perfect Garden.

To mark its anniversary, the programme also included a selection of the best of 20 years of the festival, including Nikos Nikolaidis’s demented noir homage Singapore Sling, Ian Kerkhof’s avant-garde documentary Beyond Ultra Violence: Uneasy Listening by Merzbow, Harmony Korine’s Gummo, Clive Barker’s Lord of Illusions, the short films of the Quay Brothers, Duncan Jones’s Moon, Hungarian oddity Hukkle, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo and Ben Wheatley’s Down Terrace.

Film4 FrightFest 2014

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FrightFest 2014

15th Film4 FrightFest

21-25 August 2014

London, UK

FrightFest website

The first edition of Film4 FrightFest in its new venue on Leicester Square, the Vue, was a resounding success, with an impressive line-up of films, terrific guests such as John McNaugton, Alan Moore and Jörg Buttgereit, and a lively sense of community. Stylistically and thematically, the programme was diverse, ranging from witty horror comedies to emotionally weighty thrillers and mind-boggling science fiction. After years of zombie domination, the monster of predilection this year was the werewolf, while children in peril and dangerous lovers also featured heavily and there was an underlying current of concern with the medium of film itself.

The festival opened with Adam Wingard’s wildly entertaining homage to 80s slasher/action flicks The Guest, about a mysterious soldier who ingratiates himself into the lives of a family after bringing them a message from their dead son with whom he served in Afghanistan. After a tense, enigmatic first part, the story shifted into black comedy, turning into a fun popcorn horror movie – which was very enjoyable, but it would be nice to see Wingard return to the more serious territory of A Horrible Way to Die at some point. Following the opposite trajectory, Faults started as a comedy about a washed-out cult expert who attempts to de-programme a young woman controlled by a mysterious cult, but turned into an increasingly strange and riveting face-off between the characters, in which roles become reversed. Also of note among the more comedic offerings, the hilarious and bloody Housebound from New Zealand was a blast, with clever twists and hugely satisfying characters, led by delinquent ball of rage Kylie and her well-meaning but clueless chatterbox mother.

The greatest find of the festival was undoubtedly Jennifer Kent’s wonderfully creepy and poignant monster story The Babadook. There were more children in peril in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer director John McNaughton’s return to the big screen, The Harvest, a chilling autumnal fairy tale of sorts.

Fabrice Du Welz’s intense take on The Honeymoon Killers story Alleluia was another heavyweight of the festival and the most accomplished of the unsettling psycho-sexual thrillers in the programme. Ate De Jong’s Deadly Virtues used bondage to explore the bonds of marriage in a story of home invasion with a twist. Despite its flaws, it was a captivating film with ideas and originality. Marriage was also under scrutiny in simmering two-hander Honeymoon. The dark rape-revenge thriller Julia investigated violent catharsis and female empowerment in interesting, if rather muddled ways – director Matthew A. Brown did not seem entirely sure of where he was taking his story. On a lighter note, Hitoshi Matsumoto took a delirious approach to S&M in R100, an insane Japanese comedy about a middle-aged widower who gets more than he bargained for when he joins an underground club whose dominatrixes include The Queen of Spit in an eye-popping musical sequence and The Queen of Gobbling…

With a greater diversity of complex characters, in particular female, than in previous years, the programme also interestingly reflected a strong male anxiety. Deadly Virtues made a point about the wife earning more money than her husband, an important element in the shifting dynamic of their marriage. In the same way, Ivan Kavanagh’s The Canal added a twist to its familiar jealous husband story in that the wife is the one with the high-powered job while his job, seen as lowly, is dismissed by other characters. With physical castration featuring in a number of films in the programme (Julia being the most notable), there seemed to be a simmering unease about the place of men in marriage and society, and a fear of sexual and social emasculation.

The Canal was one of a handful of films concerned with its own medium, probing the ghostly quality of film itself. In R100, the story of the widower is a film being made within the film – and shown to flabbergasted executives. The excellent occult-tinged Hollywood ambition tale Starry Eyes focused on a would-be actress who sells her soul to a satanic production company for stardom. VHS Viral continued the found footage franchise with a great segment by Nacho Vigalondo while Jessica Cameron’s Truth or Dare took on reality TV with the same subtlety as the shows it satirizes. Among the documentaries, David Gregory’s fascinating Lost Soul – The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau was one of the most talked about films of the festival.

It was great to see werewolves used to dig into a variety of themes, even if the results were not always fully convincing. The Samurai, by German director Till Kleinert, was an intriguing, although heavy-handed take on queerness in a small town. It had a very memorable character in the transvestite sword-wielding lone wolf maniac who leads the solitary young local policeman into a journey of bloody self-discovery. Another interesting angle came from Adrian Garcia Bogliano in Late Phases, which stars the brilliant Nick Damici as a cranky blind veteran who moves into a retirement community terrorised by a mysterious creature. With most of its characters above the age of 60, it was a fairly brave, original and entertaining film about ageing, and how to face death with dignity.

Science fiction had a strong presence in the programme this year with Nacho Vigalondo’s mind-puzzler Open Windows, The Signal which closed the festival in beautiful, if somewhat mystifying manner, and James Ward’s convoluted chiller Coherence presented by the Duke Mitchell Film Club. For the first time, the Duke Mitchell brought their inimitable film party to FrightFest, invading one of the cinemas on the Saturday night with their anarchic mix of outlandish clips, excellent guests and wild shenanigans, which was much enjoyed by the packed auditorium.

Virginie Sélavy

All the Colours of the Dark + The Carpenters

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All the Colours of the Dark

All the Colours of the Dark + talk & live music

Date: Wednesday 24 September 2014

Doors: 7pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Price: £7 on the door/£5 advance

Horse Hospital website

Buy tickets

Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor present All the Colours of the Dark (Tutti i colori dei buoi, Dir Sergio Martino Italy/Spain 1972 88 mins) on Wednesday 24 September 2014 at the Horse Hospital as part of Scalarama.

Hallucinatory satanists infest swinging London in this hard-to-find psychedelic giallo from one of its boldest proponents, Sergio Martino (The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, Torso, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I have the Key). All the necessary ingredients are here, including giallo queen Edwige Fenech as the troubled victim of a psychopathic stalker, exotic West London locations and a psyched-out sitar heavy theme from Bruno Nicolai.

Read our review of the All the Colours of the Dark soundtrack.

PLUS

The Carpenters – Your favourite horror film themes played live by Filmbar 70’s Justin Harries and friends.

Buy tickets

Scalarama takes place from 1 to 30 September over 250 venues across the UK and Ireland. Among the 400 events already confirmed are screenings of Polyester in Odorama, The Last House on the Left on 35mm, Nekromantik, Daisies, Branded to Kill and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. For the full programme and to buy tickets, please visit the Scalarama website.

Watch the Scalarama 2014 trailer:

Support Close Up’s new independent cinema

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Close-Up Cinema

Support our friends at Close-Up and their new independent cinema in Shoreditch showcasing classic, contemporary, documentary, experimental and artists’ films. As other cinemas are converting to digital, Close-Up will continue to offer 16mm and 35mm reel-to-reel as well as digital projection.

Your donation is vital to the success of their project! Please donate on the Close-Up website.

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2014 Preview

KVIFF 2014
KVIFF 2014

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

4 – 12 July 2014

Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic

KVIFF website

The 49th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival opens tonight with the premiere of Mike Cahill’s (Another Earth) sci-fi mystery I Origins. With the festival’s location, it is no wonder that a large part of the programme is dominated by films made in Central and Eastern Europe, but Karlovy Vary has proven in the past that it is a place where discovery and surprise are almost guaranteed, and this year seems no exception.

We are particularly looking forward to the uniquely comprehensive Tribute to Elio Petri, showing 10 films by the seminal and vigorous Italian filmmaker, including The 10th Victim (1965), Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion (1969), his early Kafkaesque detective thriller The Assassin (1961), the murder mystery (and one of the first Italian films about the Mafia) We Still Kill the Old Way (1967) and the dazzlingly experimental A Quiet Place in the Country (1968), alongside two documentaries: Elio Petri: Notes on a Filmmaker, based on the reminiscences of friends and colleagues, including Paola Petri, Ennio Morricone, Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave; and Only One Name in the Headlines, a documentary portrait of screenwriter and author Ugo Pirro, one of Elio Petri’s consistent collaborators.

Another exciting festival highlight is the appearance of special guest William Friedkin, who will receive the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema and present a restored version of one of the central films of his career, Sorcerer.

Peter Strickland (Katalin Varga, The Berberian Sound Studio) and Nick Fenton will be on hand for the gala presentation of Biophilia Live, a documentary of Björk’s concert at London’s Alexandra Palace, which completed her 2011 Biophilia tour and multimedia project.

Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer screens as part of the Horizons strand alongside some of the best films from this year’s Berlin and Cannes selections, including David Michôd’s The Rover and Xavier Dolan’s Mommy.

The Midnight Screenings equally offer a delirious choice of recent festival favourites such as Andreas Prochaska’s Austrian take on the Western genre, The Dark Valley, Cannes surprise hit It Follows and Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play in Hell. Also screening in this section are Gareth Huw Evans’s The Raid 2: Berandal alongside Tobe Hooper’s newly restored slasher classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the promising What We Do in the Shadows, directed by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement.

Tickets are on sale now. For more information about the programme and how to book tickets visit the KVIFF website.