LATER LIFE LEARNING
SERIES B: Sunken Places: Horror Cinema in Context
Fridays at 10:00 am, September 24 to December 3, 2021 No class Friday, November 12 for Reading Week
Virtually via Zoom
Lecturer: Adam Nayman
September 24: Sunken Places A close reading of Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning horror-comedy Get Out, with additional material about his film Us
October 1: Birth of Horror (1900-1930) The roots of horror cinema, including earliest genre films and adaptations and the relationship of German expressionism to incipient fascist ideology
October 8: Monster Movies/B-Movies (1930s-40s) Universal Pictures turns monsters into cult heroes and pop cultural celebrities (Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolf Man); elsewhere, producer Val Lewton emerges as The Man in the Shadows
October 15: Things from Another World: As technology and modernity keep escalating in the postwar era, horror and sci-fi merge into a series of sleek, forbidding visions
October 22: A Good Hard Look at Psycho (Psycho, Peeping Tom) Alfred Hitchcock's landmark thriller invents the modern slasher film and opens the floodgates for a new era of horror movie technique (and gore)
October 29: American Nightmares (1960s-70s) Directors like George A. Romero, Roman Polanski, Bill Gunn and Tobe Hooper stretch the aesthetic and political possibilities of horror before William Friedkin and Steven Spielberg ‘blockbusterize’ it in The Exorcist and Jaws
November 5: Morning in America (1970s-80s) Dead teenagers, haunted suburbs, and barely disguised alien invaders; Reagan's America is a fertile breeding ground for sinister visions
November 12: Reading Week – No class
November 19: Canadian Case Study: David Cronenberg An unexpected cultural warrior ventures forth from Toronto to rewrite the rules of gore and horror movie psychology, from The Brood to The Fly to A Dangerous Method
November 26: Horror at the Millennium (2000s) Bold new horror movie visions from Japan, Korea and the UK set the tone -- and create a market -- for an explosion of unsettling, millennial moviemaking; The Blair Witch Project proves that less is more and imagination is everything
December 3: Elevated Horror? The marketing and reception of horror films striving for artistic greatness; does self-awareness make something scarier?
Innis College University of Toronto 2 Sussex Avenue Toronto, ON M5S 1J5 Website: https://llltoronto.org/ Email: [email protected]