Tag Archives: horror film

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Survival is a women’s game: Horror Channel FrightFest 2017

Fashionista
Fashionista

Horror Channel FrightFest 2017

24-28 August 2017

Leicester Square, London

FrightFest website

This year’s edition of Horror Channel FrightFest was dominated by stories of female survivors.

In these times of increased uncertainty and diffuse dangers, it is perhaps no wonder that stories of survival dominated this year’s edition of Horror Channel FrightFest. More specifically, it was female survival that appeared to be a recurring preoccupation in the work of the mostly male directors (only two feature films in the programme were directed by women).

The two high points of the festival, Cold Hell and Lowlife, both centred on complex, resilient and flawed women who must face deadly threats with only their own strength to rely on. In Cold Hell, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters), Turkish-Austrian Thai-boxing champion Özge faces daily racism and sexism in her job as a taxi driver. When she becomes the target of a serial killer, she finds that neither her family nor the police will help her. Uncompromisingly stubborn and more comfortable with punches than words, she is an engaging mix of toughness and vulnerability. Despite the implausibility of some of the plot lines, Cold Hell is exhilarating both because of its efficient, tensely paced action and its deeper emotional and political resonance.

The debut feature of director Ryan Prows, Lowlife also focuses on the plight of people who live on the margins of society, unprotected by the rule of law that most of us take for granted. An excellent ensemble piece created by a tightly knit cast and crew, it weaves three interconnected stories that follow a luchador, a pregnant drug addict and an ex-con as they confront a ruthlessly brutal organ trafficker. At the heart of the film is the relationship between two hardened and troubled women, who must face their demons and learn to join forces to defeat them. Irrepressibly joyful and horrifically brutal, like Cold Hell it uses a genre framework to pass comment on some very real and urgent issues.

Although it also appears to centre on a female survivor, Korean hit The Villainess is the exact opposite of Cold Hell. Shallow and one-dimensional, The Villainess has none of the psychological truth and social relevance of Stefan Ruzowitzky’s film, and its attempt to ground the action in personal drama only results in cloying sentimentality. Even as a straightforward action film, it is disappointing. The opening first-person corridor fight is a substandard retread of Oldboy with a POV gimmick that detracts, rather than enhances, the action; as for the climactic final confrontation, its impact is deadened by the over-reliance on CGI effects.

Less flashy and more thoughtful, Colin Minihan’s It Stains the Sand Red offered an unusual slant on the apocalyptic zombie genre, focusing on a cocaine-sniffing, booze-addled bad girl as she attempts to escape from LA across the desert. As she journeys through the scorched landscape, a strange kind of relationship starts to develop between her and the zombie who doggedly follows her, and this, together with memories of her previous life, causes her to radically reassess the choices she has made. As in Cold Hell and Lowlife, the female lead is characterized by a mixture of strength and weakness, and by an unshakeable determination to survive, her past proving to be both help and hindrance in that aim.

Interestingly, in all three films, the female survivors must fight not only for themselves, but also to protect a vulnerable dependent. Each film explores the complexities of the character’s relationship to her respective dependent, probing social expectations of women’s nurturing role from diverse angles.

One of the least savoury aspects that emerged in relation to the female survival theme, however, was the use of rape scenes to make a point in some of the films. The unnecessarily extensive depiction of sexual assault marred the otherwise thoughtful It Stains the Sand Red. The demonstration of the character’s capacity for survival could have been made just as efficiently with a shorter, less crudely exploitative scene. Even more troublingly, Andrés Goteira’s coldly smug Dhogs disingenuously highlighted the sadism of voyeuristic audiences while indulging in the nasty abuse of its female-survivor character, and in her degradation from attractive, free-spirited, sexually liberated woman to humiliated, whimpering, multiply brutalised victim. It is a point that could have been made with less misogyny, and more originality.

In contrast, writer-director Simon Rumley offered a stylish, intricate and richly faceted portrayal of a woman in meltdown in Fashionista. The obstacles that April must overcome may not be quite as dramatic as the ones listed above, but they are no less painful and destructive. A fetishistic lover of clothes, April loses sight of herself after a terrible betrayal and must fight for her psychological survival. Amanda Fuller, who was the heart of Rumley’s excellent Red White and Blue, gives an achingly raw performance, its emotional power augmented by the fragmented editing – the film is dedicated to Nic Roeg and its style recalls Bad Timing in particular. Although the concluding message is a little simplistic, overall Fashionista is an affecting exploration of heartbreak and fragile self-fashioning, shot through with disturbing intimations of the darkness that runs just under the surface of everyday life.

Virginie Sélavy

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Cheap Thrills: Women of Exploitation Talk

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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.

Check it out, Festivals

FrightFest 2016 announces line-up

FF_2016_poster-WEB
Poster by Graham Humphreys

Horror Channel FrightFest 2016

25-29 August 2016

Vue Shepherd’s Bush, London

FrightFest website

Horror Channel FrightFest 2016 returns with a packed programme for the bank holiday weekend, 25-29 August, and this year the venue is the Vue Cinema in Shepherd’s Bush. Here’s the line-up announcement from FrightFest:

‘In its 17th year, the world renowned genre film festival will present 62 new feature films, embracing sixteen countries and bringing together established filmmakers, British first-timers and emerging international visionaries from six continents.

The opening night attraction is the European Premiere of MY FATHER DIE, Sean Brosnan’s brutal and beautiful feature debut – an ultra-stylish, uber violent revenge thriller that’s a calling card for Brosnan’s brilliant talents. And our closing night film is another breakneck paced masterpiece – the UK Premiere of TRAIN TO BUSAN, so join ‘The Commuting Dead’ as director Sang-ho Yeon takes you on a first class horror action thrill-ride, mixing slaughter, suspense and splatter with incredible visual élan.

In between these two banner titles are the scream of the crop from all over the globe, strongly represented in our line-up of World Premieres by the incredible Italian supercar tension-ratcheting MONOLITH, the gory Dutch treat THE WINDMILL MASSACRE, the stunning South African nightmare FROM A HOUSE ON WILLOW STREET, Tricia Lee’s creepy Canadian chiller BLOOD HUNTERS and three American shock absorbers KNUCKLEBONES, ENCLOSURE and the Eurotrashy radical BLOOD FEAST remake.

Reflecting a productive year for British horror, there are twelve UK World Premieres, including Shaun Robert Smith’s intensely powerful BROKEN, Jon Ford’s visceral revenge thriller OFFENSIVE, Wyndham Price’s dark fantasy CROW, Kate Shenton’s auto-satire EGOMANIAC, Ben Parker’s claustrophobic THE CHAMBER, Marty Stalker’s shock-doc HOSTAGE TO THE DEVIL and Andy Edward’s sun, sea and sex gore-fest IBIZA UNDEAD.

Five of the UK World Premieres make up the ‘First Blood’ strand, in which home-based directors are given a chance to shine with their debut efforts. These are: Phillip Escott’s harrowing CRUEL SUMMER, Brad Watson’s urban gang shocker HALLOW’S EVE, James Crow’s deadly HOUSE OF SALEM, Stewart Spark’s 666 Short Cuts To Hell entry THE CREATURE BELOW and Lawrie Brewster’s PTSD-inspired THE UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS.

Other festival highlights in the Main Screen strand include the European Premiere of Adam Wingard’s intense chiller of the moment, THE WOODS. destined to be one of the key horrors of 2016. We also have this year’s most ferocious possession movie in Cody Calahan’s LET HER OUT, as well as Todd William’s superb Stephen King adaptation CELL, starring John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson. Then there is the top box office Italian sensation THEY CALL ME JEEG ROBOT, Adam Rifkin’s tour-de-force DIRECTOR’S CUT, starring Penn Jillette, Rob Zombie’s ultra-violent grindhouse slasher 31, ‘Saw’ man Darren Lynn Bousman’s graphic novel inspired ABBATOIR, Simon Rumley’s latest visionary masterpiece JOHNNY FRANK GARRETT’S LAST WORD, Jackson Stewart’s supernatural switcheroo BEYOND THE GATES, the zombie theme park hell ride THE REZORT, the full-blooded cracker RED CHRISTMAS, the cryogenic chiller REALIVE, the home invasion twister MERCY, the darkly unpredictable PET, starring Dominic Monaghan and the beguilling THE MASTER CLEANSE, with The Big Bang Theory’s Jonny Galecki and Anna Friel.

South America is rapidly becoming a major genre player and FrightFest is proud to be presenting seven specialities from Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico. Daniel de la Vega’s WHITE COFFIN is co-written by FrightFest favourite Adrian Garcia Bogliano, Laura Casbe’s BENAVIDEZ’S CASE stretches surrealist boundaries, Patricio Valladares’ DOWNHILL mines H. P. Lovecraft for inspiration, THROUGH THE SHADOW puts Henry James’ classic tale of terror ‘The Turn of the Screw’ through a south of the border filter, THE SIMILARS is pure ‘Twilight Zone’ inspiration, FRANCESCA a thrilling Buenos Aires take on giallo and WE ARE THE FLESH comes with serious artistic endorsements from fellow Mexican filmmakers Alfonso Cuaron and Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

The Discovery Screen strand is as bold as ever and includes a restored version of Shelden Renan’s controversial documentary THE KILLING OF AMERICA, Anna Biller’s gloriously art-directed THE LOVE WITCH, the cursed silent movie FURY OF THE DEMON, the Berlin Film Festival break-out, SHELLEY, the visionary sci-fi fantasy LOST SOLACE and the darkly hilarious ghost-busting ANOTHER EVIL. Then there’s Julian T. Pinder’s chilling murder investigation POPULATION ZERO, Martin Owen’s High-tec underground thriller terror LET’S BE EVIL, Tim Reis’ slimy creature feature BAD BLOOD: THE MOVIE and Michael Boroweic’s acute study of alien paranoia, MAN UNDERGROUND.

Plus, you can witness the stag party from hell in THE UNRAVELLING, the bad taste shenanigans of NIGHT OF SOMETHING STRANGE, , the viral thrills of THE EVIL IN US, the vehicular chills of PARANORMAL DRIVE, the die-hard dystopia of HERE ALONE, the eye-popping shocks of FOUND FOOTAGE 3D, and the ‘goriously’ insane ATTACK OF THE LEDERHOSEN ZOMBIES.

Ahead of its FrightFest Presents DVD release, there is an encore airing for ROAD GAMES, this time with a live interactive commentary with director Abner Pastoll and a London premiere for one of the most popular movies shown earlier this year at FrightFest Glasgow, Sean Byrne’s THE DEVIL’S CANDY.

The Duke Mitchell Film Club is back with the UK premiere of Kim Sang-Chan’s outrageously infectious KARAOKE CRAZIES and a first showing of all three episodes of the mesmerising French TV mini-series BEYOND THE WALLS.

This year’s special events, retrospective programme, the guest list and the Short Film Showcase entries will be announced in the coming weeks.’

Festival and day pass sales go on sale Sat 2 July at noon and are only available to buy on the FrightFest website.

Single tickets will go on sale on Sat 23 July.

For full programme details amd timetables go to the FrightFest website.

Check it out, Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s

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Back Cover Collage of the Satanic Panic: Pop Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s book

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Kier-La Janisse, David Flint, Gavin Baddeley

Date: 8 October 2015

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

In 1980s North America, everywhere you turned there were warnings about a widespread evil conspiracy to indoctrinate the vulnerable through the media they consumed. This percolating cultural hysteria, now known as the ‘Satanic Panic’, was both illuminated and propagated through almost every pop culture pathway in the 1980s, from heavy metal music to Dungeons & Dragons role playing games, Christian comics, direct-to-VHS scare films, pulp paperbacks, Saturday morning cartoons and TV talk shows — and created its own fascinating cultural legacy of Satan-battling VHS tapes, music and literature. As the hysteria moved overseas to the UK, Australia and South Africa, its life extended into the 1990s – and some say it never went away. From con artists to pranksters and moralists to martyrs, this lecture – based on the instructors’ book of the same name, which will be available at the screening – aims to capture the untold story of how the Satanic Panic was fought on the pop culture frontlines and the serious consequences it had for many involved.

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.

DAVID FLINT is a freelance writer, sometime filmmaker and full time angry misanthrope who has edited Sheer Filth, Divinity and Headpress, authored Babylon Blue, Ten Years of Terror and Zombie Holocaust and written for publications ranging from Rapid Eye, Bizarre and Skin Two to Penthouse, Loaded and Mayfair.

GAVIN BADDELEY is an English writer specialising in the devilish and decadent, with a special interest in the darker fringes of history. He’s penned ten books and written for numerous periodicals. An honorary priest in the Church of Satan, Baddeley’s in demand as a speaker in both academic and media circles.

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. 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 of the autumn semester are 12 November and 10 December. For the full details of the course please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.

Check it out, Festivals

Film4 FrightFest 2015 Review

Nina Forever-1
Nina Forever

16th Film4 FrightFest

27-31 August 2015

Vue West End,
Prince Charles Cinema, Phoenix, London

FrightFest website

This year again, Film4 FrightFest offered a brilliantly diverse programme that encompassed all aspects of horror and fantasy, with some great category-defying gems. Interestingly, female protagonists widely dominated the line-up, and many of them were appealingly diverse, complex and nuanced characters, ranging from troubled temptresses to tragic mothers, babysitters to scientists, confused teenagers to imperious mistresses.

One of the highlights was Ben Cresciman’s beautifully crafted psychological thriller Sun Choke, which was the most cinematographically and thematically accomplished of the festival. An ethereal, dreamlike, elliptical portrayal of a possibly psychotic young woman, it intelligently and chillingly explored the tortuous, ambivalent relationship she has with her domineering carer, played by the superb Barbara Crampton.

Sun Choke is available on the premium streaming video service Shudder from 9 March 2017.

Darkly erotic and intemperately stylish, Goddess of Love was also centred around a psychotic woman. Co-scripted by lead actress Alexis Kendra, it plunged into the delusional obsessiveness of an unstable woman as she increasingly loses her grip on reality after her lover leaves her. Sadly, the overly explanatory ending undermined the seductively unstable reality created until then.

For its part, Nina Forever offered a highly unusual take on female darkness. One of the great surprises of the festival, it was a bittersweet, melancholy and inventive tale of love, grief and the difficulty of getting rid of one’s ghosts. When morbidly inclined checkout girl Holly falls in love with the suicidal Rob, it seems like he may finally be able to put the death of his girlfriend Nina behind him. But Nina won’t go away so easily, and they have to deal with her very tangible, bloody, sardonic presence in their bed. Although the tone shifting between offbeat comedy and horrific drama is at times a little clumsy, it is a truly original, and very affecting film that treads a fresh path.

Not all female-led films were successful. After a compelling, unsettling first part, in which a new babysitter introduces chaos and sexual tension into the conventional suburban world of her charges, Emelie descended into an unconvincing and predictable thriller fodder about thwarted maternal desires. Also themed around maternity, Bruce McDonald’s Halloween tale Hellions, his follow-up to 2008’s Pontypool was equally disappointing. On Halloween, a teenager who has just found out she is pregnant must fight evil childlike monsters who come knocking on her door, demanding not sweets, but her unborn child. As she steps out into the strange light of a blood moon, the image is drained of colour and becomes startlingly artificial. This is not a bad thing in itself, but with a plot that jerks incoherently into varying directions, the visual effects that are meant to support it remain contrived and hollow.

Interestingly, Bernard Rose’s modern update of Frankenstein transferred the focus of the monster’s love and anguish from the male creator to the scientist mother figure, making explicit the maternal anxiety that had originally fed Mary Shelley’s novel. Extrapolating on the possibilities of modern technology while based on a close reading of the novel, the film is seen from the perspective of the inarticulate creature. Originally given perfect beauty, he falls from grace and is forced into desperate, squalid survival after a flaw in the procedure of its creation causes horrific disfigurement. A visually ravishing poetic take on the misunderstood hideous monster despite a somewhat bombastic ending.

The focus was also on the mother in New England ghost story We Are Still Here. An openly referential film that played like a cross between House by the Cemetery and The Fog, it stars Barbara Crampton as a grieving mother who moves to an old isolated house with her husband in a bid to get over her son’s death. Expressive and poignant, Crampton was ably seconded by Larry Fessenden, who was his usual brilliant self as one half of the hippie couple who try and help her to contact the spirit of her dead son. All slow-burn creepiness in the first part, culminating into a blood bath at the end, it was a well-crafted, enjoyably eerie tale that used its influences smartly.

After the emergence of Israeli horror in the last few years, the surprise geographical discovery this year was Georgia with Landmine Goes Click. One of the most divisive films of the festival, it set a trio of American tourists up for trouble in a remote Georgian mountain when one of the party accidentally steps on a mine. After apparently heading for a rape and revenge kind of story, it veers unexpectedly away to offer instead a scalpel-cold study of the terrible chain of causes and consequences that leads to the shocking, tragic ending. In a world dominated by betrayal, distrust and abusive power, the main characters are all guilty and provoke their own downfall through the cruel games they play with one another.

Among the documentaries, the fascinating story of Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD was more than worth a look while our friends at the Duke Mitchell Film Club presented the excellent Remake, Remix, Rip-Off, about low-budget Turkish remakes of Hollywood blockbusters in the 1960s-70s. This was followed by the Duke Mitchell Film Party, which proved as deliriously entertaining as last year’s extravaganza, with guests, among which Barbara Crampton, presenting clips of new work or hilariously dubious trailers.

The diverse retrospective programme included Brian Clemens’s 1970 Hammer swashbuckling horror adventure Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, Sergio Martino’s seductively perverse giallo Your Vice Is a Locker Room and Only I Have the Key, with the stunning Edwige Fenech, Clive Barker’s classic Hellraiser, Philip Ridley’s startling 1990 debut The Reflecting Skin and Uli Lommel’s 1970s serial murderer tale Tenderness of the Wolves.

Virginie Sélavy

Check it out, Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

Freaks, Hippies and Witches: the obsessive, salacious cinema of Antony Balch

horror hospital 1
Horror Hospital

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: William Fowler

Date: 10 Sept 2015

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

‘An awful lot of people are going to miss all that gusto and kindness and fun,’ reflected distributor Derek Hill when Balch died in 1980. Critic Tony Raynes remembered a ‘lively, interesting, engaged, vigorous’ man who ‘threw a hell of a party’.

An extraordinary figure of 1960s-70s British film, Antony Balch was a true original. His love of cinema was infectious and he worked across nearly all the different areas of the business. Best known for directing the camp, grisly Horror Hospital and for collaborating with William Burroughs, he also ran two London cinemas, directed ads, made trailers, wrote reviews and distributed exploitation movies such as Don’t Deliver Us from Evil, Truck Stop Women and Massacre for an Orgy.

Horror and weird cinema fans should celebrate him for securing the first ever UK release of Tod Browning’s banned Freaks (with the help of Kenneth Anger). The 70s were a heady time for boundary pushing and he played an important part, resisting criticism whilst calling the press ‘the number one exploiter of fear, horror, hate and violence in the world’.

In this wide-ranging illustrated lecture (part of Scalarama 2015), William Fowler will explore Balch’s holistic approach to cinephilia as well as his ideas about censorship. Selected short films by Antony Balch will screen as part of the evening.

This is the first lecture of the autumn semester of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London.

About the instructor:

William Fowler is a writer, film historian and musician. He is Curator of Artists’ Moving Image, BFI National Archive and the co-founder and co-programmer of The Flipside at BFI Southbank. His seasons and restoration projects at the BFI have included GAZWRX: the films of Jeff Keen, Queer Pagan Punk: Derek Jarman and This Is Now: Film and Video After Punk, the latter of which is currently touring internationally through LUX. He has written for The Guardian, Sight&Sound and Frieze, appeared on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, and he also contributed chapters to Inside Out: Le Cinéma de Stephen Dwoskin and The Edge is Where the Centre: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen (which he co-edited). He programmes the monthly BFI strand Essential Experiments and has since 2013 been the co-programmer of Experimenta in the London Film Festival.

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.

Check it out, Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

Jesús Franco: Shooting at the Speed of Life

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Eugenie de Sade

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Stephen Thrower

Date: 11 June 2015

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

The final class of this season’s Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London is a special treat that is not to be missed: leading horror authority Stephen Thrower will launch his gorgeous and extensive new book on legendary exploitation figure Jesús Franco with a talk exploring the Spanish director’s singular approach to filmmaking and his lifelong passion for horror and erotica. Tickets are now on sale.

During a career spanning more than fifty years, Jesús (‘Jess’) Franco created a strange and unique style of commercial genre filmmaking, bordering at times on the avant-garde. Obsessed with ‘aberrant’ sex, erotic horror and the writings of the Marquis De Sade, he took a resolutely personal approach to movie-making, and after spending the 1960s honing his technique on slightly more conventional projects he embarked in the 1970s on a sustained period of intensive shooting, making as many as ten or twelve films in one year. Shooting with a small crew, exclusively on location, he worked at a speed that allowed little time for the honing of a perfect finished product, instead creating a cinema of spontaneity, improvisation and caprice. Franco valued freedom above all: by combining a rapid-fire series of small-scale commercial film projects, a ‘creative’ approach to finance, and a dedicated passion for the sensational, he was able to carve his own niche and digress into the most extraordinary experimental ellipses. In this evening’s discussion, Stephen Thrower will explore Franco’s ability to juggle the commercial and personal dimensions of filmmaking through his confrontational works of horror, sadism and erotic spectacle.

About the instructor:

Stephen Thrower, writer and musician, was born in Lancashire in 1963. After moving to London in 1985 he began writing reviews for the seminal horror magazine Shock Xpress, before launching his own film periodical Eyeball in 1989 with contributors including novelist Ramsey Campbell, filmmaker Ron Peck, and critics Kim Newman, Daniel Bird and Alan Jones. His first book, Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, was published in 1999, followed by The Eyeball Compendium (2003) and Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (2007). His most recent work is Murderous Passions; the delirious cinema of Jesús Franco, published by Strange Attractor in March 2015.
Thrower and his partner Ossian Brown are founders of the avant-garde music group Cyclobe, who recently recorded new soundtracks for three Super-8 films by the British filmmaker and queer activist Derek Jarman (Sulphur, Tarot and Garden of Luxor). As a solo artist, Thrower scored Pakistan’s first gore film, Zibahkhana aka Hell’s Ground (2007), contributed electronic music to Down Terrace (2010) by Ben Wheatley, and was commissioned by the BFI in 2012 to score three silent short films by the pioneering director of gay erotica Peter De Rome.

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. 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.

Check it out, Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

Engulfed by Nature: Psychological and Supernatural Landscapes

symptoms-455
Symptoms

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Jasper Sharp

Date: 14 May 2015

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

‘There is magic all around us’, Udo Kier famously states at a key point in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), a sentiment reiterated by one of the characters in Richard Stanley’s Dust Devil (1992), which sees its protagonists drawn out of their mundane suburban environment in small-town South Africa into the heart of the Namib desert to be confronted by their darkest demons.

Stanley’s film in particular presents a sublime example of how landscape and elemental conditions can be evoked to express dangerous forces existing beyond man’s perceptual and belief systems, but also, in contrast, how heightened psychological states can be given visual form through use of such timeless spaces, taking the viewer out of their comfort zones and back into nature at its most wild, mysterious and untamed.

In an ever-urbanising world, the textures, rhythms and sounds of nature can be made to seem increasingly alien and alienating on film, making us realize we are but a small part of a wider world beyond our control. Works ranging from Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) through José Larraz’s Symptoms (1974) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1978) reframe our perceptions, interrogating the boundaries between the physiological and the supernatural, as interior worlds collapse beneath the weight of exterior ones.

This lecture and screening by Jasper Sharp will look at how such mysterious invisible forces of nature are given vent in a number of films depicting the rupture between these rational and irrational domains. It will explore how pantheistic belief systems that hold that spirits reside in everything, such as Japan’s Shinto religion, overlap with a British folk tradition of supernatural writers such as Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson, and how foreign directors often have a keener, more nuanced eye for the expressive potential of the English landscape to portray characters off-kilter with their environment.

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 is currently the programme director of Asia House Pan-Asian 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, which won the Best Documentary Filmmakers Award at Fantastic Fest in Austin. A book of the film, The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds, is due for publication by Alchimia in the Spring of 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. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

The final course date is 11 June. For the full details of the course please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.

Check it out, Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

London Underground: Death Line

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Death Line

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Kim Newman

Date: 9 April 2015

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

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

Miskatonic website

Kim Newman will screen and talk about Gary Sherman’s 1972 British horror film, Death Line (aka Raw Meat), one of the first British horror films to compete with the wave of stronger, more politicised American splatter movies that came in the wake of Night of the Living Dead.

A series of disappearances on the London Underground Railway are traced back to the inbred, cannibal descendants of navvies trapped by a cave-in during the building of the tunnels. A human monster (Hugh Armstrong) who looks like a scabrous tramp haunts the Piccadilly Line, picking off and eating the odd commuter, trying to keep alive his diseased wife. Tea-drinking copper Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence) is called into the case with his sidekick sergeant (Norman Rossington) when the latest victim (James Cossins) turns out to be a high-ranking civil servant fresh from a neon-lit sleaze spree in Soho, and has to cut through bureaucratic red tape (represented by Christopher Lee in a bowler hat). Meanwhile, down in the tunnels, the last of the monsters lives out his pathetic, horrid leftover life, expressing himself through the only words he knows, ‘mind the doors’. It includes a wonderful, apparently improvised drunk scene from Pleasence and a breathtaking 360º pan around the cannibals’ dripping, dank, corpse-strewn underground lair.

Less makeshift than a lot of its rivals from the 1970s, it has solid, witty dialogue, a memorably funky music score and the sort of urban legend premise that people will swear is based on truth rather than new-minted for the movie. American writer-director Gary Sherman also made the cloying New Seekers ‘I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke’ ads, and used his share of the fee from that to finance this gutsy, gritty debut. The discussion will highlight the film’s political subtext, transgressive use of cannibalism as metaphor and for shock value, black humour, performance styles, relationship with American and other British films on similar subjects (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Frightmare) and exploration of London lore and locations. The Horse Hospital is just round the corner from Great Russell Street Station, so attendees who come by tube will pass through the film’s main setting before and after the class.

About the instructor:

Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne), The Man From the Diogenes Club, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the d’Urbervilles and An English Ghost Story under his own name and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as Jack Yeovil. His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People, Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (writing Empire’s popular Video Dungeon column), has written and broadcast widely, and scripted radio and television documentaries. His stories ‘Week Woman’ and ‘Ubermensch’ have been adapted into an episode of the TV series The Hunger and an Australian short film; he has directed and written a tiny film Missing Girl; he co-wrote the West End play The Hallowe’en Sessions. Following his Radio 4 play ‘Cry Babies’, he wrote episodes for Radio 7’s series The Man in Black (‘Phish Phood’) and Glass Eye Pix’ Tales From Beyond the Pale (‘Sarah Minds the Dog’). He scripted (with Maura McHugh) the comic book miniseries Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland (Dark Horse), illustrated by Tyler Crook; it’s a spinoff from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series. His official web-site is at www.johnnyalucard.com. His forthcoming fiction includes the novels The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange and Angels of Music. He is on Twitter as @AnnoDracula.

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. 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 14 May and 11 June. For the full details of the courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london[at]gmail.com.

Check it out, Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

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.