Category Archives: Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

Video Dungeon: How to Talk about Psychotronic Cinema

blood-freak-main-640x420

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London
Instructor: Kim Newman
Date: 12 October 2017
Time: 7-10pm
Venue: Horse Hospital
Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD
Prices: £10 advance / £8 concs / £11 door
Miskatonic website

In his introduction to the important collection of film essays King of the Bs, Todd McCarthy quotes Andrew Sarris’s dictum ‘eventually we must speak of everything if there is enough time and space and printer’s ink’. Sarris was working up to an assessment of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Daughter of Dr Jekyll (1958).

Continue reading Video Dungeon: How to Talk about Psychotronic Cinema

Virgins & Vampires: Gothic Damsels and Final Girls in the Cinema of Jean Rollin

Fascination

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Marcelle Perks, Virginie Sélavy

Date: 14 September 2017

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

Mixing art cinema, fantastique and exploitation, Jean Rollin created a unique cinematic world, transgressive and oneiric, and dominated by the feminine. His films, steeped in the roman noir of the 18th and 19th century via his love for Surrealism, are peopled by damsels in distress who reveal themselves much less vulnerable than they initially appear.

Electric Sheep editor Virginie Sélavy will look at the way in which Rollin’s films use Gothic motifs such as the castle and the vampire to question social and moral norms and subvert conventional gender expectations. She will also explore the conflation of exploitation and aesthetic vision in his work, and the insight it offers into the tensions around the representation of the female body in the sexual liberation era.

Longtime genre critic Marcelle Perks will investigate Final Girl strategies in the films of Rollin, looking at the ways his predominantly female protagonists depart from the tropes emerging from the slasher films of the time, as analysed by Carol Clover in her 1987 essay ‘Her Body, Himself’, which became the basis of the seminal Men, Women and Chainsaws. Perks will also examine Rollin’s unique approach to concepts of contagion and infection, with an emphasis on Les raisins de la mort (1978) and La nuit des traquées (1980).

Both Marcelle Perks and Virginie Sélavy contributed to the new book Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin, edited by Samm Deighan and written by entirely women critics, scholars and film historians, which will be available for sale at the screening.

About the instructors:

Marcelle Perks

Marcelle Perks is a British author and journalist. Since 1993 she has contributed freelance articles to magazines such as Redeemer, Fangoria, Shivers, Flesh and Blood, SamHain, Kamera, Rue Morgue, Nerve.com, Film Maker magazine, The Dark Side and Videoworld. She has an MA in Media Studies and has taught creative writing at Leibniz University. She has contributed to The BFI Companion to Horror, British Horror Cinema, Gothic Lifestyle, Cinema Macabre, and Alternative Europe: Eurotrash & Exploitation Cinema since 1945. She’s also written how-to guides on sexuality and writes erotica and crime novels. Since 2001 she has lived in Germany.

Virginie Sélavy

Virginie Sélavy is the founder and editor of Electric Sheep, the online magazine for transgressive cinema. She has edited the collection of essays The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, and has contributed to World Directory Cinema: Eastern Europe and written about Victorian London in Film Locations: Cities of the Imagination – London. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Sight&Sound, Rolling Stone France, Cineaste and Frieze.

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.

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

Miskatonic Fall Season 17

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Fall 2017 season:
Sept – Dec 2017

Dates: 14 September, 12 October, 9 November, 14 December

Time: 7-10pm (Doors 7pm, no admittance after 7:30)

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concs / £35 full season ticket (includes Miskatonic student card)

Single advance and season tickets are on sale now at WeGotTickets.com

Miskatonic website

THE MISKATONIC INSTITUTE OF HORROR STUDIES – NEW LONDON PROGRAMME REVEALED FOR AUTUMN 2017

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London returns to the Horse Hospital from September to December this year for a new term of film seminars, covering a range of exciting and esoteric topics, led by renowned critical luminaries from the world of fantastique and horror cinema. After closing the spring season last May with author John Cussans’s sold out class, Chimerical Optics: Haiti, Colonialism and Voodoo Terror, a new programme of provocative and thrilling lectures awaits daring audiences.

The term will launch with a seminar examining the oft-misunderstood auteur of the French fantastique, Jean Rollin, hosted by Miskatonic London co-director and Electric Sheep Magazine editor Virginie Sélavy and genre journalist Marcelle Perks (Fangoria, Kamera, The Guardian), from Germany. Both presenters are contributors to the new book Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin, which reappraises Rollin’s oeuvre from a uniquely female perspective.

In October, expert film critic and prolific author Kim Newman discusses various current and historical approaches to the criticism of what Michael Weldon termed ‘psychotronic cinema,’ and the role of the independent curator in shaping this discourse. This event will also launch his new book, Video Dungeon, published by Titan Books.

November will see Nag Vladermersky, Director of the London International Animation Festival, examining the largely untapped history of horror in animation, including some rarities from the LIAF vaults. We will close the season – rather fittingly – with a celebration of holiday horror as renowned author and musician (Coil) Stephen Thrower, broadcast scholar Derek Johnston and special guests, talk Santa slashers and ghost stories for Christmas to coincide with the new book Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television. This festive-themed conclusion will also feature the UK premiere of a new Christmas horror short called We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea, written and directed by Sean Hogan in the wintry tradition of the classic M.R. James hearthside tales.

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.

Chimerical Optics: Haiti, Colonialism and Voodoo Terror

Undead

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: John Cussans

Date: 18 May 2017

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

Since the first descriptions of bizarre ceremonies witnessed by the French colonial historian Moreau de Saint-Méry, Haitian Vodou has been characterized by most European and American commentators as a deplorable and dangerous African atavism that, if allowed to flourish, could eventually corrupt and destroy the economic and social order of the New World. Such omens were spectacularly affirmed by the Haitian Revolution of 1791, which, according to legend, was triggered by a Vodou ceremony in which a blood-sacrifice was offered to the ‘demon gods’, and the slaves, in a state of trance-like possession, butchered their white masters in a ‘racial holocaust’. Since then Haiti has held a special place in colonial imaginings of all that is macabre, sinister and maniacally savage, a land of irredeemable barbarism and ‘Voodoo Terror’.

This class will trace a history of such representations, discussing how they continue to shape xenophobic and neo-colonial imaginings of Haiti as a country mired in superstition and incapable of enlightened self-governance, and the importance of the zombie figure for these ‘chimerical optics’.

About the instructors:

John Cussans

John Cussans is an artist, writer and researcher based in London. Since 2009 he has been involved with the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, often working with the Haitian video collective Tele Geto. He is the author of Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie-Complex (Strange Attractor).

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.

Tele-terrors: The Real and Imagined Horrors Inside the Made for Television Movie

Miskatonic April
Bad Ronald

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Amanda Reyes, Jennifer Wallis, Kier-La Janisse

Date: 20 April 2017

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

Often considered the bastard step-child of the theatrical motion picture, TV movies have long been relegated to the dusty corners of our childhood memories. However, despite its scorned status, telefilms could be thoughtful and, at times, subversive. And, in this compact, mass marketed form, the TV movie reached millions of viewers, generated discussion, and aided in the development of our collective consciousness.

Some of the dismissive tone of critics may come from the fact that made for TV films look surprisingly superficial, relying heavily on B movie film techniques to produce and market themselves. Using tawdry titles such Satan’s School for Girls (1973) or salacious taglines like, ‘He’s found the perfect prey… A young defenseless human’ (Savages, 1974), telefilms sought to grab audiences by any means necessary. And, it was this desire to entertain and win Nielsen rating points that allowed the medium to cross over into a wide spectrum of sub-genres, tackling everything from the supernatural to the very real terrors of everyday life. This lecture offers an exploration into several facets of the made for television movie, surveying its cultural touchstones and analyzing the influence the telefilm had on Americans during the run of the network made for television movie produced between 1964 – 1999.

This class will be taught by visiting TV scholar Amanda Reyes, along with Jennifer Wallis and Miskatonic founder Kier-La Janisse, who both contributed to her new book Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium 1964-1999 from Headpress, who will have copies available for sale at the event.

About the instructors:

Amanda Reyes

Archivist by day, film lover by night, Amanda Reyes is also a freelance author who has been published online and in print. She recently edited Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium: 1964-1999 (Headpress, 2017) which celebrates the made for television film, and expands upon her TV movie-centric blog, Made for TV Mayhem and its companion podcast.

Jennifer Wallis

Jennifer Wallis is Lecturer in Cultural and Intellectual History at Queen Mary University of London where she teaches modules on the history of psychiatry, Victorian values and controversies, and the history of the supernatural. She also writes on film and music and has contributed to several volumes in recent years including Are You in the House Alone? (2016) and Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation (2013). She is the editor of Fight Your Own War: Power Electronics and Noise Culture (Headpress, 2016).

Kier-La Janisse

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 recently co-edited and published the anthology booksKid Power! (Spectacular Optical, 2014) and Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (Spectacular Optical, 2015). She is currently working on A Song From the Heart Beats the Devil Every Time, about children’s programming from 1965-1985.

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.

Synthetic Flesh/Rotten Blood: The Turn to Gruesomeness in American Horror Films, 1931-1936

Miskatonic March 2017

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Jon Towlson

Date: 16 March 2017

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

‘Too dreadfully brutal, no matter what the story calls for […] it carries gruesomeness and cruelty just a little beyond reason or necessity.’ – Review of Frankenstein, Motion Picture Herald, 1931

‘The type of picture that brought about censorship.’ – Review of Mad Love, Motion Picture Herald, 1935

‘Quite the most unpleasant picture I have ever seen […] it exploited cruelty for cruelty’s sake.’ – Review of The Raven, London Daily Telegraph, 1935

Is the thirties horror film more akin to graphic modern horror than is often thought?

Critics have traditionally characterised classic horror by its use of shadow and suggestion. Yet the graphic nature of early 1930s films only came to light in the home video/DVD era. Along with gangster movies and ‘sex pictures’, horror films drew audiences during the Great Depression with sensational screen content. Exploiting a loophole in the Hays Code, which made no provision for on-screen ‘gruesomeness’, studios produced remarkably explicit films that were recut when the Code was more rigidly enforced from 1934. This led to a modern misperception that classic horror was intended to be safe and reassuring to audiences.

Taking a fresh look at the genre from 1931 through 1936, this class examines ‘happy ending’ horror in relation to industry practices and censorship. Early works like Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) and The Raven (1935) may be more akin to the modern Grand Guignol of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Hostel (2005) than many critics believe.

Tracing the development of classic horror to the deployment — and subsequent censorship — of on-screen ‘gruesomeness’, Jon Towlson will illustrate the discussion with memos, letters and censorship reports from the studio archives and other research conducted for his new book, The Turn to Gruesomeness in American Horror Films, 1931-1936 (McFarland, 2016). Aspects of the topic to be covered in the class will include:

The emergence of the 1930s cycle in an industrial context, showing how various stresses during the Great Depression, such as censorship controversy over sex and crime films, declining audiences and growing opposition to unfair business practices, formed a backdrop of ideological rupture and contradiction in the lead up to horror’s first golden age;

The ways in which cash-strapped studios pushed for increasingly gruesome and sensational screen content to attract audiences, whilst simultaneously placating the Hays Office with moral endings; critics of the genre at the time called such studio tactics ‘Five Reels of Transgression Followed by One Reel of Retribution’;

The pervasive influence of Grand Guignol on the thirties cycle: how filmmakers deployed gruesomeness and brutality through the use of offscreen space, monster make-up, sound, and shadow play;

The changing ways in which the Hays Office responded to gruesomeness in the 1930s, from relatively light interference in the early days to heavily influencing the allowable level of gruesomeness from July 1934 following the Reaffirmation of the Production Code;

How pre-Code horror films were censored for reissue after 1935, and the implications of these becoming the only known versions by a whole generation of fans in the 1950s/1960s;

Why many modern critics have misread the 1930s cycle, and how a re-evaluation of thirties horror based on its transgression has only recently begun to take place.

The class will be illustrated with clips and/ or studio archive material from canonical films like Frankenstein (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Dr. X (1932), Island of Lost Souls (1933), Murders in the Zoo (1933), Mad Love (1935), Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and The Walking Dead (1936); as well as from such lesser known titles as Night of Terror (1933), The Monkey’s Paw (1933), Maniac (1934), Black Moon (1934), The Ghost Walks (1934), The Clairvoyant (1935), Condemned to Live (1935), Le Golem (1936) and The Human Monster (1940).

Jon will be signing copies of his book, The Turn to Gruesomeness in American Horror Films, 1931-1936 after the class.

“Ridiculously informative […] This is not only one of the best horror history books I’ve read this year, but stands as one of the best on the golden age ever written” – Gavin Schmitt, THE FRAMING BUSINESS

About the instructor:

Jon Towlson is a film critic and the author of THE TURN TO GRUESOMENESS IN AMERICAN HORROR FILMS, 1931-1936 (McFarland, 2016), CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (CONSTELLATIONS) (Auteur/Columbia University Press, 2016) and SUBVERSIVE HORROR CINEMA: COUNTERCULTURAL MESSAGES OF FILMS FROM FRANKENSTEIN TO THE PRESENT (McFarland, 2014). He is a regular contributor to Starburst Magazine, and has also written for the BFI, Paracinema, Exquisite Terror, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Shadowland Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal, Offscreen and Digital Film-Maker Magazine. Jon contributed to the recent edited collection LOST SOULS OF HORROR AND THE GOTHIC (eds. Bernice M. Murphy & Elizabeth McCarthy, McFarland, 2016). He is currently writing a monograph on the film CANDYMAN for Auteur/Columbia University Press. www.subversive-horror-films.com. @systemshocks

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.

Lost Treasures of Japanese Genre Filmmaking

Mummys Love

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Jasper Sharp

Date: 16 February 2017

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

Very little of Japan’s vast cinematic output has made it onto foreign shores, perhaps not too surprising given that its industry stretches right back to the genesis of the medium and turns out on average about 500 titles a year. Genres such as sci-fi, horror and fantasy have generally been well represented abroad, but the boom in J-horror films in the wake of titles such as The Ring (1998) and Audition (1999) have crowded out discussions about how and when the fantastique first took root in Japanese cinema.

In this illustrated talk Jasper Sharp will explore the out reaches of Japanese fantasy cinema, from the embryonic trick films of ‘The Father of Japanese Film’ Shozo Makino through oddball homegrown sub-genres such as the prewar ‘ghost cat’ (bakeneko or kaibyô) films and the ama cycle of sexy pearl diver films such as Girl Divers at Spook Mansion (1959), some long-lost Japanese takes on the movie monsters of Universal Studios, the pink film-horror of directors like Tetsuji Takechi and Kinya Ogawa and much, much more, all peppered with a liberal amount of clips of some truly bizarre titles that remain either unseen or unseeable to modern audiences outside of the country.

About the instructor:

Jasper Sharp is a writer, curator and filmmaker. He is the co-founder of Midnight Eye.com, since 2001 the premier online resource in the English-language about Japanese cinema. His book publications include The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (Stone Bridge, 2003), joint-written with Tom Mes, Behind the Pink Curtain (FAB Press, 2008) and The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Film (Scarecrow 2011). His writing has appeared in publications all over the world, including Sight & Sound, The Guardian, Variety, The Japan Times, Kateigaho and Film International, and he has contributed liner essays, commentaries and interviews to numerous DVD releases. He has curated high profile seasons and retrospectives with organisations including the British Film Institute, Deutches Filmmuseum, Austin Fantastic Fest, Cinematheque Quebecois and Thessaloniki International Film Festival. Between 2010-14, he was the director of Zipangu Fest, established to showcase Japanese independent film in the United Kingdom, and between 2014-2016, the artistic director of Asia House Film Festival. He is the co-director, with Tim Grabham, of The Creeping Garden (2014), a documentary about slime moulds and the people who study and work with them, to be released by Arrow early in 2017, and the author of the book of the film, The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds (Alchimia Publishing, 2015).

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.

“Nature Found Them Guilty”: Revenge in Australian Exploitation Cinema

miskatonic-long-weekend
Poster art for Long Weekend

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Lindsay Hallam

Date: 19 January 2017

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

In the 1970s the Australian film industry underwent a boom that is still unprecedented to this day, experienced two-fold with a strain of respectable arthouse period dramas, and a bunch of down-and-dirty, violent and sexy exploitation films. This lecture will explore how Australian horror cinema of this period incorporates a subversive streak that critiques Australian history and culture through the theme of revenge. It is a theme that is prevalent throughout these films, in particular in the spate of eco-horror films, exemplified by the likes of Long Weekend (1978), and Razorback(1984), where nature itself, often in the form of a rampaging nonhuman animal, seeks to avenge the past exploitation and abuse perpetrated against the land and its native inhabitants.

As well as nature seeking revenge, the fight for survival against human or supernatural forces is also presented in films such as Wake in Fright (1971), The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), The Last Wave (1977) Patrick (1978), Roadgames (1981), and Fair Game (1986), and vengeance even comes from beyond the grave in Next of Kin (1982) and BeDevil (1993). Given that Australia’s colonial past is one that encompasses genocide of the indigenous population, mass animal extinction, environmental destruction, and the glorification of masculine ‘mateship’ that carries a nasty undercurrent of misogyny, this lecture will discuss how it is in these revenge narratives that the darker aspects of Australian national identity are explored and indicted. The class will further investigate how this fascination with revenge for past (and present) wrongs still continues in contemporary Australian genre cinema, in films such as Dying Breed (2006), The Horseman (2008), The Loved Ones (2009), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and Red Christmas (2016).

About the instructor:

Lindsay Hallam is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of East London. She is the author of the book Screening the Marquis de Sade: Pleasure, Pain and the Transgressive Body in Film (McFarland 2012), and has directed the documentary Fridey at the Hydey (2013). Lindsay has contributed to the collections Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), Dracula’s Daughters: The Female Vampire on Film (Scarecrow Press, 2013), Fragmented Nightmares: Transnational Horror Across Visual Media (Routledge, 2014), Critical Insights: Violence in Literature (Salem Press, 2014), and the journals Asian Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Cine-Excess and Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies. She is interested in all aspects of horror cinema, having written on topics such as female vampires, torture porn and post-9/11 trauma, mad science films, Italian horror, Australian eco-horror, and the television series Twin Peaks.

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.

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.

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.