The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies Presents Courses for Spring 2022
- Horror News
Peter Campbell- 0
- 28 minutes read
For those in the southern hemisphere, its summer, which means warm sunshine, perhaps some time camping or at the beach. There are monsters there, too. And whether it be winter or summer or spring, we want everyone to be safe and well. To that end, the city branches have chosen to continue with online classes for this semester. All fingers, toes, claws, and other appendages crossed that these branches will return to live classes in the autumn.
Miskatonic London offers monthly classes and a discounted full semester pass. For our Spring 2022 Online semester, admission to individual classes is £8, and a full semester pass including all five classes curated by Miskatonic London, is £35. Please note students from anywhere in the world can attend. Tuesday January 11th 7:00pm GMTHYPERPOSTMODERN OR JUST PLAIN CAMP? A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPORARY TEEN SLASHER FILMInstructor: Daniel SheppardIn the late nineties, teen slasher films entered their third production cycle following the box-office successes of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2. These films are often described as being “like Scream,” criticized as copycats and cash-ins, in which they have become apolitically synonymous with terms such as “metatextual,” “self-reflexive,” “pastiche,” “postmodern,” etc. While such cynicism suggests that the teen slasher film has become a self-deprecating mockery of itself, Daniel Sheppard brings into consideration the role of the gay screenwriter and, in doing so, demonstrates how Kevin Williamson’s use of camp in Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2 created new generic possibilities for other gay screenwriters, directors and producers working in Hollywood at the turn of the millennium—as well as now—including Silvio Horta (Urban Legend), Don Mancini (Bride of Chucky), Gus Van Sant (Psycho), Jeffrey Reddick (Final Destination), and Aaron Harberts (Valentine). Tuesday February 8th 7:00pm GMT‘PEOPLE ARE GOING TO WANT TO SEE THIS’: THE EVOLUTION OF WITNESSING IN FOUND FOOTAGE HORRORInstructor: Shellie McMurdoPart of found footage horror’s appeal is a lack of loyalty to a specific “look” (although it has revisited several, for reasons I will explore). The subgenre’s construction of terror stems from the fact that these narratives are presented not as adjacent or similar to our reality, but part of it. This class presents the subgenre’s preoccupation with its cultural context – as evidenced through its rapid aesthetic evolution – as a significant contributory component to its longevity as a distinct horror movement. It will outline how the vulnerability of characters in found footage horror is emphasized by the subgenre’s unstable frames, and how they are repeatedly endangered by what lurks in the offscreen space, or punished for their desire to see, to look, to witness, and to know. Tuesday March 8th 7:00pm GMTCASTLEVANIA’S ‘MISERABLE PILE OF SECRETS’: DRACULA ADAPTATIONS AND WHAT THEY CAN TEACH USInstructor: Matthew CroftsThis class will explore just what it is about Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) that makes it eternally relevant for adaptation within a rapidly changing culture. Dracula demonstrates the significance of Victorian anxieties within contemporary culture more than any other novel. Theories of adaptation has moved beyond fidelity to an ‘original’, recognising instead that each new adaptation has its own audience and intention. Dracula adaptations react to the needs and expectations of the era that produced them – providing an invaluable case-study that demonstrates changing attitudes toward Victorian legacies and their synergies of reinvention. This class will examine the extended ‘afterlife’ of Dracula in transformations, identifying shared themes across diverse media, and to demonstrate that reworking Dracula, even making him child-friendly, is a way of coming to terms with problematic nineteenth-century histories. Increased engagement with new media incarnations of Dracula is vital to understanding the appeal of this nineteenth-century vampire to modern audiences of all kinds. Tuesday April 12th 7:00pm BSTNURSING GRIEF: THE MANIFESTATIONS OF GRIEF, LOSS, AND THE SUPERNATURAL BEING IN BELOVED AND HEREDITARYInstructor: Carolyn MauricetteWhen we lose a loved one, it’s a crushing and life-changing event—and the loss of a young child unleashes an indescribable pain for families. Genre films Like Don’t Look Now and The Changeling have captured this emotional upheaval of a life lost too soon, but there are two films that are unlikely bedfellows in representing a mother’s grief: Beloved, the 1998 film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel of the same name, and Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary. In “Nursing Grief”, we’ll take a look at how grief manifests in both films, how the two women react to the deaths of their children, the contrast between Sethe, Annie and the supernatural, Sethe’s experience of grief as a formerly enslaved woman, The child from the “other side” and what they represent in both films, the matriarchs in Sethe and Annie’s lives, and how audiences connect to grief as a catharsis in genre films. Tuesday May 10th 7:00 BSTEXCAVATING THE PENNY DREADFUL: LABOUR EXPLOITATION IN VICTORIAN TRASH FICTIONInstructor: Sophie RaineFrom their inception in the 1840s until their decline in the 1860s, the penny dreadful was a source of derision from both moralist and literary critics. Distributed in weekly penny-parts aimed at the working classes, these serials were hugely popular in the Victorian period with texts such as George W M Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844-46) even outselling Dickens. There has been a resurgence of interest in some of these texts particularly the aforementioned The Mysteries of London and James Malcolm Rymer’s The String of Pearls (1846-47) featuring the demon-barber of Fleet Street, Sweeney Todd, which has been subject to numerous adaptations over the years. It is due to this renewed interest – aided by archival work excavating many of these forgotten texts by the contributions of collectors such as Barry Ono – that we are able to access these texts and gain a deeper understanding of these controversial Gothic serials. This lecture will aim to explore these texts as radical in terms of their political content and demonstrate how these texts show the malleable form of the Gothic mode as they adapt the genre harkening back to older forms and acknowledging their own role within Gothic discourses.
Tuesday January 18th 7:30pm ESTTHE HOLOCAUST AND ITS DOUBLE: WRITING FICTION IN THE MEDIUM OF GENOCIDEInstructor: Tony BurgessPrimo Levi responded to Adorno’s startling statement that “after Auschwitz poetry is an act of barbarity” with a slight shift into possibility: “after Auschwitz there can only be poetry about Auschwitz”. In the past twenty years or so, Holocaust Studies has emerged as its own formidable discipline. Despite unique pressure, and possibly because of it, Holocaust Studies has made increasingly relevant advances in most fields of theoretical practice. This lecture attempts a preliminary examination of how these practises and strategies might hyphenate into other areas of study. Themes include the problem of emplotment, modelling exceptional history within history, the productive effect of silence and repression, hybridization, the false opposition of mystification and demystification, fiction and non-fiction, intentionalism and structuralism. This lecture is part confessional, part academic slurry with a literary horror fiction and film focus. Tuesday February 15th 7:30pm ESTDON’T DREAM IT’S OVER: UNRELIABLE NARRATORS, DEATH DREAMS, AND DETERMINISM IN HORRORInstructor: Robyn CitizenThe already dead or damned unreliable narrator, and the similar path of characters immersed in death dreams – initially popularized by Ambrose Bierce’s short story, “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” – allow for philosophical explorations on the nature of reality, consciousness, the grim inevitability of death and occasionally, the possibility of an afterlife. This class asks students to consider horror narratives in popular cinema and TV with characters who negotiate their impending / past deaths by constructing alternate scenarios in which they have escaped their fates going on to avenge themselves or make different choices entirely with their second chances. In a media landscape where sci-fi and fantasy multiverses and their defining ‘what ifs’ are central to a significant number of family friendly, mainstream entertainment, what is the source of the horrific being mined in horror characters’ departures from objective reality? Tuesday March 15th 7:30pm EDTTHE SOILED BODY: GORE, PORNOGRAPHY, AND BODILY FLUIDSInstructor: Éric FalardeauGore and pornography are united by a spectacular exhibitionism of bodily fluids. Their exhibition, fetishized by the close-up, acts as a revealer of the ambiguous relationship that the subject, the spectator or his cinematographic double (the characters with whom he identifies or not), maintains with his carnal envelope. This lecture will address different issues (anthropological, sociological and psychological) through the analysis of the representation of bodily fluids. Objects of disgust and fascination, they are the expression of an existential angst that gore and pornography insidiously force us to face. Tuesday April 19th 7:30pm EDTSUBTERRANEAN HORRORInstructor: Leo GoldsmithFrom bowels of Hell to Dracula’s crypt to the New York City sewer system, horror is obsessed with the dark, mysterious inner substructures of the planet. Across a wide array of media, for folklore and literature to painting and cinema, horror explores these underground locales both as sinister settings — obscure origins or grim resting places — and as a symbolic terrain that mirrors the hidden, repressed, or lurking forces of the human psyche, the supernatural, or history itself. Navigating the lairs, mines, caverns, and hollows of this subterranean subgenre, this lecture shines a light into these dim spaces, mapping the ways the underground landscape has indexes the suppressed impulses of human consciousness, the literally buried traumas of the past (as in the highly dubious trope of the “Indian burial ground”), physical architectures of class hierarchy and warfare, and Nature’s revenant energies in an age of anthropogenic climate change. Reference texts include literary works such as Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow,” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear,” and films including Quatermass and the Pit, Plague of the Zombies, The Descent, 10 Cloverfield Lane, and C.H.U.D.
