Titles of Interest – Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror

0 | November 17th, 2014 | Posted in horror, Titles of Interest

51kg6DdepcL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror (McFarland, 2013), edited by Aalya Ahmad and Sean Moreland

This groundbreaking collection of new essays presents critical reflections on teaching horror film and fiction in many different ways and in a variety of academic settings–from cultural theory to film studies; from women’s and gender studies to postcolonialism; from critical thinking seminars on the paranormal to the timeless classics of English horror literature. Together, the essays show readers how the pedagogy of horror can galvanize, unsettle and transform classrooms, giving us powerful tools with which to consider interwoven issues of identity, culture, monstrosity, the relationship between the real and the fictional, normativity and adaptation. Includes a foreword by celebrated horror writer Glen Hirshberg.

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Titles of Interest – It Happens at Comic-Con: Ethnographic Essays on a Pop Culture Phenomenon

0 | November 17th, 2014 | Posted in Comic Con, comics, Titles of Interest

978-0-7864-7694-7It Happens at Comic-Con: Ethnographic Essays on a Pop Culture Phenomenon (McFarland, 2014), edited by Ben Bolling and Matthew J. Smith

This collection of 13 new essays employs ethnographic methods to investigate San Diego’s Comic-Con International, the largest annual celebration of the popular arts in North America. Working from a common grounding in fan studies, these individual explorations examine a range of cultural practices at an event drawing crowds of nearly 125,000 each summer.

Investigations range from the practices of fans costuming themselves to the talk of corporate marketers. The collection seeks to expand fan studies, exploring Comic-Con International more deeply than any publication before it.

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Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination exhibit

0 | November 16th, 2014 | Posted in Gothic horror, terror

Open until Tuesday, 20 Jan 2015

Two hundred rare objects trace 250 years of the Gothic tradition, exploring our enduring fascination with the mysterious, the terrifying and the macabre

From Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Stanley Kubrick and Alexander McQueen, via posters, books, films – and even a vampire-slaying kit – experience the dark shadow the Gothic imagination has cast across film, art, music, fashion, architecture and our daily lives.

Beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Gothic literature challenged the moral certainties of the 18th century. By exploring the dark romance of the medieval past with its castles and abbeys, its wild landscapes and fascination with the supernatural, Gothic writers placed imagination firmly at the heart of their work – and our culture.

Iconic works, such as handwritten drafts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the modern horrors of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and the popular Twilight series, highlight how contemporary fears have been addressed by generation after generation.

Terror and Wonder presents an intriguing glimpse of a fascinating and mysterious world. Experience 250 years of Gothic’s dark shadow.

See more here.

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Forthcoming Interview with David Lee Fisher on “Nosferatu”

0 | November 7th, 2014 | Posted in horror, independent horror films, Nosferatu, vampire

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Have you heard about the forthcoming independent horror film Nosferatu that will star Doug Jones? TheoFantastique will be interviewing the director David Lee Fisher soon. Take a look at the trailer and consider getting involved in their Kickstarter campaign to finance this film.

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The Harvard Crimson and the value of artistic representations of gore

0 | November 1st, 2014 | Posted in art, horror

The painting SATURN by the Spanish artist GOYA.The Harvard Crimson has an interesting essay posted titled “The Aesthetics of Horror: an investigative essay into the value of artistic representations of gore.” After beginning with a considertaion of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes’ painting “Saturn Devouring His Son,” the analysis begins. Here’s an excerpt from this thoughtful piece:

In other words, is it permissible to show something that inspires horror for its own sake? How committed are we to art for art’s sake, to the abolition of artistic boundaries? There is a modern desire to be near-absolute about the freedom granted to artists, a sincere wish for intellectual consistency and an old-fashioned fairness: one might not always like good art, and condemning something merely because it violates our mores or preferences seems petty.

Yet life rarely cuts so cleanly. Can art for art’s sake be a true guiding principle—or, more specifically, horror for horror’s sake? Yes it can; but as horror shows us, it may demand things of us that we are not willing to concede.

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Ex Machina

2 | October 30th, 2014 | Posted in artificial intelligence, robotics, science fiction

As reported by ScreenCrush.com:

‘Ex Machina’ is the directorial debut of Alex Garland, the talented screenwriter of ’28 Days Later,’ ‘Sunshine,’ ‘Never Let Me Go’ and ‘Dredd.’ With a resume like that, we can’t think of anyone better suited to helming a small and (seemingly) smart science-fiction drama like this. Color us intrigued.

Here’s the official synopsis:

“Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer at an internet-search giant, wins a competition to spend a week at the private mountain estate of the company’s brilliant and reclusive CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Upon his arrival, Caleb learns that Nathan has chosen him to be the human component in a Turing Test – charging him with evaluating the capabilities, and ultimately the consciousness, of Nathan’s latest experiment in artificial intelligence. That experiment is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a breathtaking A.I. whose emotional intelligence proves more sophisticated, seductive––and more deceptive––than the two men could have imagined.”

‘Ex Machina’ is set to open on April 10, 2015.

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Titles of Interest – Body, Soul and Cyberspace in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema

0 | October 26th, 2014 | Posted in cyberspace, science fiction, Titles of Interest, virtual reality

9781137399403.inddI am on my way back home from a symposium at Baylor University in Waco, Texas on faith and film. I enjoyed many of the presentations and sessions, including one on science fiction. One of the presenters was Sylvie Magerstädt, Senior Lecturer in Media Cultures at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She presented a paper that distilled some of her discussion in her book

Body, Soul and Cyberspace: Virtual Worlds and Ethical Problems
Palgrave MacMillan, 2014

Body, Soul and Cyberspace explores how recent science-fiction cinema addresses questions about the connections between body and soul, virtuality, and the ways in which we engage with spirituality in the digital age. The book investigates notions of love, life and death, taking an interdisciplinary approach by combining cinematic themes with religious, philosophical and ethical ideas. Magerstädt argues how even the most spectacle-driven mainstream films such as Avatar, The Matrix and Terminator can raise interesting and important questions about the human self and our interaction with the world. Apart from these well-known science fiction epics, her analysis also draws on recent works, such as Inception, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, Aeon Flux, Total Recall (2012), Transcendence and TRON: Legacy. These films stimulate an engaging discussion on what makes us human, the role memory plays in understanding ourselves, and how virtual realities challenge the moral concepts that govern human relationships.

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Call for Presentations – Monstrous Geographies: Places and Spaces of Monstrosity

0 | October 13th, 2014 | Posted in call for papers, monsters, monstrous

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Sunday 22nd March – Tuesday 24th March 2015, Lisbon, Portugal

Call for Presentations

This inter- and multidisciplinary conference focuses on the relationship between the monstrous and the geographic. We welcome proposals by academics, teachers, independent researchers, students, artists, NGOs and anyone interested in manifestations of monstrosity in space. Possible topics may include topics as diverse as ancient burial sites, haunted houses, post-apocalyptic landscapes, and even recent topographical manifestations of the Gaza conflict or the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Even if they no longer bear the physical markers of violence, devastation and human suffering geographical locations are often imbued with memories of horror that are passed on from generation to generation through various textual, audial and visual media.

Apart from historical events of monstrosity the scope of our conference entails imagined monstrosities and future landscapes of annihilation and death. Philosophical discussions are just as much welcome as artistic performances and explorations of literary, filmic or musical case studies of evil and the monstrous. The following questions may trigger ideas for presentations: What is the relationship between evil and the monstrous? Is the monstrous always rooted in the element of evil? Can disasters caused by nature be regarded as evil? Can we talk about geographies of poverty, hunger and homelessness in relation to monstrosity? Can evil and/or monstrosity be immanent to place or are they performed by cultural discourse, rituals and practices of memory? How do the monstrous and the geographic intersect in architecture, the arts, popular culture, politics, and the sciences?

We welcome presentations, papers, reports, performances, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels from all academic disciplines. Presentations may include but are not limited to the following topics:

  • Unknown worlds
  • Dystopic landscapes
  • Sites of heterotopia
  • Malevolent regions
  • Bodies as maps and maps as bodies
  • Places of isolation, incarceration and madness
  • Places of rituals and incest
  • Sites of experimentation
  • Evil planets and dimensions
  • Worlds as dark reflections/twins of Earth
  • Alien landscapes
  • Sites of environmental disasters (both natural and manmade)
  • Sites of starvation, disaster and pestilence
  • De-militarized zones and no-man’s lands
  • Monstrostiy and liminality
  • Religion, ritual and monstrosity
  • Haunted sites and spectral spaces
  • Graveyards
  • Sites of conflict and violence
  • Terrain vague, abandoned buildings
  • The architecture of death and destruction (sites of torture and extermination)
  • Geographical manifestations of the uncanny
  • Tourism and monstrous geographies
  • Monstrous Dreamscapes
  • Mazes
  • Monstrous materialities
  • Ethics and morality in relation to monstrosity and evil
  • Monstrous geographies of the body and the mind

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals.

What to send:
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 31st October 2014. All submissions are minimally double blind peer reviewed where appropriate. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 23rd January 2015. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: MG4 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

László Munteán: l.muntean@let.ru.nl
Rob Fisher: mg4@inter-disciplinary.net

The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook.  Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation.

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Call for Papers – Daughters of Fangdom: A Conference on Women and the Television Vampire

0 | October 13th, 2014 | Posted in call for papers, conference, vampire

WillowVamp_answer_2_xlargeCourtesy of Open Graves, Open Minds

Daughter of Fangdom:
A Conference on Women and the Television Vampire
18 April 2015
The University of Roehampton
London

Following the success of TV Fangdom: A Conference on Television Vampires in 2013, the organisers announce a follow-up one-day conference, Daughter of Fangdom: A Conference on Women and the Television Vampire. Though Dracula remains the iconic image, female vampires have been around at least as long, if not longer, than their male counterparts and now they play a pivotal role within the ever expanding world of the TV vampire, often undermining or challenging the male vampires that so often dominate these shows. Women have also long been involved in the creation and the representation of vampires both male and female. The fiction of female writers such as Charlaine Harris and L.J. Smith has served as core course material for the televisual conception and re-conception of the reluctant vampire, while TV writers and producers such as Marti Noxon (Buffy) and Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries and The Originals) have played a significant role in shaping the development of the genre for television.

Since vampires are not technically human, the terms male and female may apply, but representation of gender has the potential to be more fluid if vampires exist outside of human society. Given the ubiquity of the vampire in popular culture and particularly on TV, how is the female represented in vampire television? What roles do women have in bringing female vampires to the small screen? In what ways has the female vampire been remade for different eras of television, different TV genres, or different national contexts? Is the vampire on TV addressed specifically to female audiences and how do female viewers engage with TV vampires? What spaces exist on television for evading the gender binary and abandoning categories of male and female vampires altogether?

Proposals are invited on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• TV’s development of the female vampire
• Negotiation of gender and sexuality
• Evading binaries
• Female writers/ directors/ producers/ actors in vampire TV
• Adaptation and authorship
• Genre hybridity
• Female vampires in TV advertising
• New media, ancillary materials, extended and transmedia narratives
• Intersection with other media (novels, films, comics, video games, music)
• Audience and consumption (including fandom)
• The female and children’s vampire television
• Inter/national variants
• Translation and dubbing

We will be particularly interested in proposals on older TV shows, on those that have rarely been considered as vampire fictions, and on analysis of international vampire TV. The conference organisers welcome contributions from scholars within and outside universities, including research students, and perspectives are invited from different disciplines.

Please send proposals (250 words) for 20 minute papers plus a brief biography (100 words) to all three organisers by 15th December 2014.

s.abbott@roehampton.ac.uk
lorna.jowett@northampton.ac.uk
mike.starr@northampton.ac.uk

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Witches and Wicked Bodies at the British Museum

0 | October 7th, 2014 | Posted in Body, Paganism, Wicca, Witchcraft

witches_624From the website of the British Museum:

25 September 2014 – 11 January 2015

This exhibition will examine the portrayal of witches and witchcraft in art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. It will feature prints and drawings by artists including Dürer, Goya, Delacroix, Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, alongside classical Greek vessels and Renaissance maiolica.

Efforts to understand and interpret seemingly malevolent deeds – as well apportion blame for them and elicit confessions through hideous acts of torture – have had a place in society since classical antiquity and Biblical times. Men, women and children have all been accused of sorcery. The magus, or wise practitioner of ‘natural magic’ or occult ‘sciences’, has traditionally been male, but the majority of those accused and punished for witchcraft, especially since the Reformation, have been women. They are shown as monstrous hags with devil-worshipping followers. They represent an inversion of a well-ordered society and the natural world.

The focus of the exhibition is on prints and drawings from the British Museum’s collection, alongside a few loans from the V&A, the Ashmolean, Tate Britain and the British Library. Witches fly on broomsticks or backwards on dragons or beasts, as in Albrecht Dürer’s Witch Riding backwards on a Goat of 1501, or Hans Baldung’s Witches’ Sabbath from 1510. They are often depicted within cave-like kitchens surrounded by demons, performing evil spells, or raising the dead within magic circles, as in the powerful work of Salvator Rosa, Jacques de Gheyn and Jan van der Velde.

Francisco de Goya turned the subject of witches into an art form all of its own, whereby grotesque women conducting hideous activities on animals and children were represented in strikingly beautiful aquatint etchings. Goya used them as a way of satirising divisive social, political and religious issues of his day. Witches were also shown as bewitching seductresses intent on ensnaring their male victims, seen in the wonderful etching by Giovanni Battista Castiglione of Circe, who turned Odysseus’ companions into beasts.

During the Romantic period, Henry Fuseli’s Weird Sisters from Macbeth influenced generations of theatre-goers, and illustrations of Goethe’s Faust were popularised by Eugène Delacroix. By the end of the 19th century, hideous old hags with distended breasts and snakes for hair were mostly replaced by sexualised and mysteriously exotic sirens of feminine evil, seen in the exhibition in the work of Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Odilon Redon.

The exhibition will also include several classical Greek vessels and examples of Renaissance maiolica to emphasise the importance of the subject in the decorative arts.

(Artwork: Agostino Veneziano (fl. 1509–1536), The Witches’ Rout (The Carcass). Engraving, c. 1520. © The Trustees of the British Museum.)

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