The Black Museum: Series Three (part one)

It's back! The Black Museum, Toronto's premiere horror lecture series is back for a third season of erudition. This year, lecturers and audience members will enjoy the comforts of the Royal cinema on College. New again is the lecture schedule, which has switched to a monthly event.

This year's series kicked off on in early Feb with a screening of Carnival of Souls, and will pick up with a lecture by Black Museum alumnus Alexandra West about French New Wave Gore.

March 12, 2014
Quelle Horreur! The Films of the New French Exremity
with Alexandra West

Alex takes apart New French Extremity, a movement in the Gallic cinema that makes torture porn look quaint. Films such as Martyrs, Them, High Tension, and Trouble Every Day stand in opposition to tourist-attracting confections like Amelie, poised instead to explore the troubled identity of a country that knew the Grand Guignol, the Theatre of Cruelty, and a cultural landscape torn by riots over thirty years of political strife and unrest.

April 9, 2014
Where Life is Cheap! Snuff Movies and the Evolution of Genre
with Yours Truly

Since 1976, the notion of filming murder for profit has outraged, disgusted, and fascinated audiences. Aided and abetted by sleazy marketing tricks, "snuff" film provided traction for feminist and anti-pornography movements, also inspiring that most steadfast and contentious of urban legends: the myth transmitted through media. I this lecture, I consider snuff's origins and aspirations, tracing its roots from early theatre to Slaughter, Hardcore, Tesis, 8MM, The Butcher, and beyond.

May 14, 2014
One of Us: The Transcendent Rise of Religious Cults in Horror 
with Alison Lang

From Satanists to Scientologists, Moonies to the Manson Family, a cinematic curiosity for cults endures. Broken Pencil's Alison Lang advises initiates that the cult trope allows reflection or commentary on wider sexual, spiritual and moral politics of an era. See: The Wicker Man and Ticket to Heaven. And sometimes the mirror held to society's scabbed visage stares hard at the truth, as in Helter Skelter and Race with the Devil--the latter purportedly starring actual Satanists as themselves.