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.

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.

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.