Women Horror Directors, Shirley Jackson, Slasher Films, and West Coast Cult Horror!

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – Montréal is proud to present its Fall 2016 / Winter 2017 lineup of courses. Welcome to another year of peeling back the bloody layers of the genre we love so well!

Kicking off an entire Fall 2016 semester devoted to women working in the horror genre, our six-week course, “Women Horror Directors,” features five different instructors discussing a slate of important women artists working in horror. Filmmakers include Ida Lupino, Kathryn Bigelow, the Soska Sisters, and Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. For the final class of this course, we welcome instructor and Montréal filmmaker Maude Michaud—one of the subjects of the documentary, Bloody Breasts, focusing on women working in the horror industry—for a screening and discussion of her work, which includes the films Dys- (2014) and Snuff (2010).

Next up, we turn back the clocks to focus on one of the grandmothers of literary horror with “Shirley Jackson’s Weird.” This three-week course is devoted to the work of the reclusive Vermont author whose brutal short story, “The Lottery,” still holds the record for the most letters of protest sent to The New Yorker for publishing it. Come along with instructor Kristopher Woofter as we walk through the haunted spaces of Jackson’s four major works: The Lottery and Other Stories (1949), and her “uncanny house trilogy,” The Sundial (1958), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). A major influence on authors like Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, Jackson’s work has gone relatively unacknowledged by scholarship that relegates her to obscurity as a writer of “thrillers.” This course brings her back to acknowledge her place as one of America’s—and without question one of horror’s—greatest writers.

In Winter 2017, Miskatonic-Montréal goes back to “basics” with “Slasher Theory: Reassessing an Undervalued Subgenre,” a seven-week course taught by six different instructors. In the first class, all six instructors weigh in on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as an urtext for the Slasher film. Following this, we trace a Slasher genealogy extending from Psycho’s monstrous feminine(s) and other horrors that lead us through Halloween (1978), Friday the 13^th, Part 2 (1981), Sleepaway Camp (1983), and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985), among other delights.

Wrapping up the year is our “Final Guy,” Mike Wood, with California Screaming: West Coast Cult Horror. Mike, a historian and archaeologist by profession, and expert on Indonesian culture and politics, has been devouring films like Psych-Out (1968), Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), and Mephisto Waltz (1971), since he was in his teens. In this course, he turns his youthful cinephilia into an exploration of the alternative religious movements and cults in 1960s and 1970s California that spawned a whole subgenre of films.

All Miskatonic-Montréal courses are hosted by Microcinema Etre (6029a, ave du Parc). A suggested donation of $7 per class can be paid online or at the door. Significantly discounted rates for those who wish to pay for an entire semester can be paid online or at the door.

For further information, check our website at http://www.miskatonic-montreal.com/, our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/miskatonicinstitute/?fref=nf, or email us at [email protected].

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 with sites in Montréal, London, and, soon, New York.