THE BAD TRIP: PSYCHEDELIC HORROR CINEMA, 1967-1972 (NYC online)
Within psychedelic culture the threat of the bad trip hovers like an ominous presence. Psychedelic or ‘Mind-clearing’ drugs may promise wisdom, visionary insight or a fabulous holiday for the brain, but they can also release the horrors of the id, tear the veil of sanity and pull you into the void. This class will chart the emergence of psychedelia across the Sixties and will examine the incorporation of its visual language in horror cinema during the period 1966-1972. Rather than seeing the films in question as acts of exploitation, the talk will frame them as radical works of acid horror, a from which in the case of The Dunwich Horror is used to conjure the cosmic vertigo integral to H. P. Lovecraft’s writing. Further, the talk will also read back from the films to the wider drug culture to uncover a sense of horror underpinning the psychedelic experience as a whole.
MISKATONIC INSTITUTE OF HORROR STUDIES MOVES TO ONLINE FORMAT FOR FALL SEMESTER
The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, established in 2010 to offer classes in horror history, theory and production with branches in London, New York and Los Angeles, will be moving to exclusively online classes for all three of its branches for the Fall 2020 semester. Attendees from anywhere in the world can mix and match […]
Monster, Vampire, Cannibal: Queer Horror and the Gothic (NYC online)
Since the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic has included themes of transgressive sexuality. Queerness is embedded in the roots of Gothic fiction, and conversely gothicism has become a means of creating a “queer world” in art, literature, and culture. Though Gothic themes and tropes have morphed over the years to reflect shifting cultural anxieties and desires, gothicism along with its inherent queerness has persisted in various forms up to the present. Horror often contains Gothic elements such as monstrosity, cannibalism, haunting, live burial, torture, subterranean passages, and sexualized power dynamics that signal overt or sub-textual queer content. This class asks students to consider how and why gothicism emerges in queer horror contexts.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HORROR: ANDY NYMAN IN CONVERSATION (London online)
Accomplished actor, writer and director Andy Nyman (Ghost Stories, Peaky Blinders, The Woman in Black) joins Den of Geek’s Rosie Fletcher to explore the part that psychology plays in horror cinema and theatre. What makes one scare work when another does not? How have themes of mental health played into his own work including the incredible stage play and later film adaptation of Ghost Stories? And how does his deep understanding of what makes people tick feed into his work with illusionist Derren Brown? This intimate conversation will explore Andy’s career, his personal love of horror and what makes him tick, as a performer, creator and as a fan.
Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror (LA online)
Can we say the Great War created the horror film? In many respects yes. The idea of the terrifying supernatural, of course, has its roots in the earliest human civilizations and probably back to the first ceremonial burials. But we will learn how modern horror received a special impetus from what happened to the human body, what could be done to the human body, by the terrifying tech introduced in the Great War. The Great War transformed the modern world. The Great War also filled that world with nightmares, some old as time but made new in the ghastly aftermath of the conflict. Join us in exploring the wasteland.