Archives: Digital Events

Get Thee Behind Me, Satan – Carl Abrahamsson

Get Thee Behind Me, Satan

Taking a look at some golden era Hollywood films, Carl Abrahamsson ponders the occasional occurrence of Satan in various guises. How come this popular yet stigmatized figure/symbol popped up when and as it did in Hollywood? Expect an infernal rollercoaster through masterpieces like ”Madam Satan”, ”Seven Footsteps to Satan”, ”Angel on my shoulder” and many more. Was Satan merely an entertaining symbol of the Immoral, or perhaps of the Immortal principle of lust for life and proud defiance?

Speaker Bio

Carl Abrahamsson (b 1966) is a Swedish author whose passionate interest in the occult has also made him take creative detours into film-making, music-making, photography, and into founding and running the Institute of Comparative Magico-anthropology.

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Mermaids across the Millennia – a Zoom talk with Professor Sarah Peverley

Elusive, beguiling, dangerous, the mermaid is one of the most popular and long-lived of all the mythical creatures that humans have invented. For over four millennia she has been humanity’s constant companion, swimming through our stories, art and beliefs and appearing in many guises.

This illustrated talk will consider a selection of the most influential, surprising, and less well-known mermaids witnessed around the world. Tracking the development of merfolk across time and continent, it will look at the visual nuances of mermaids depicted by different cultures as well as the expansive mythologies and ideas attached to them. Tapping into religion, politics, art and folklore, the talk is a siren call to all lovers of the sea who want to journey through the fascinating history of the mermaid from her emergence of merfolk in the religions of the ancient Near East right through to the rise of the mermaid economy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

 

Professor Sarah Peverley is academic, writer and broadcaster who divides her time between being immersed in the depths of mermaid history and lost in the medieval world. As professor of medieval literature and culture at the University of Liverpool she teaches across English and History and regularly speaks at festivals and heritage events. She has consulted for organisations like Guinness World Records, and has written, presented or appears in over eighty TV, radio and press features. She is currently writing a cultural history of the mermaid. For more information see www.sarahpeverley.com.

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

TV Adaptations of Dracula – a Zoom talk with Jon Dear

ENTER FREELY AND OF YOUR OWN FREE WILL – TV Adaptations of Dracula

There have been over 80 Dracula films made in the last 100 years but there have been relatively few adaptations of Bram Stoker’s most famous novel made for television. It’s not hard to see why: it’s a grand tale told on an epic scale, and few TV companies have the resources to lavish on such a production. But for those that did, what challenges did they face? What did they decide to focus on, and leave out? And why start in 1968?

In this talk Jon Dear will examine the social factors in play that make bringing Dracula to the small screen a viable option; what it means to bring horror out of the cinema, and its self-selecting audience, and into the intimacy of the family living room; and what Dracula really represents to audiences and how that has changed through time. What really happens when you invite the vampire into your home?

 

Jon Dear is a writer and critic on TV and film. He has written for the BFI, including their Flipside range, Horrified Magazine, Curious British Television and the Fortean Times. He also contributed to We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror and Royal Holloway University’s Forgotten Television Drama project. Jon is the co-host of the podcasts BERGCAST: The Nigel Kneale Podcast and Due Signori in Giallo. His recent work includes commentaries for the Blu Ray Releases of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968) and A Warning to the Curious(1972). He is currently writing a book on the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas Series and is producing a live reading of The Quatermass Experiment at Alexandra Palace for its 70th anniversary. Twitter: @AccordingtoJonD

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com. Twitter: @edward_parnell

Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.

[Image: © Gareth/Adobe Stock]

Looking East: From Folk Horror to Horror of the Folk in Thai Cinema – Katarzyna Ancuta

Looking East: From Folk Horror to Horror of the Folk in Thai Cinema

Folk horror is often said to be about the fear of regression, the fear of going back to ‘the old ways’ and the anxiety that ‘the old ways’ may be right. But what if the old ways and the new ways were very much the same? How does folk horror adapt to animist cultures, where old-age rituals and modern beliefs go hand in hand? Where does it find its ‘monstrous tribe’? Thai horror films reflect the animist orientation of Thai culture but do not situate animism in opposition to official religion and modernity, since animistic beliefs and practices are commonplace in today’s Thailand. Prevalent across the country and practised across all social strata, Thai animism and related with it folklore cannot be used as a designator of difference in the Thai context. If Thai folk horror produces its monstrous tribe, their monstrosity is not the result of regression, evidenced in arcane rituals, but rather a commentary on the existing inequality within Thai society. Thai folk horror is thus primarily invested in representing the rural-urban divide and its profound implication in tensions related to ethnicity and class.

Bio:

Katarzyna Ancuta is a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. Her research interests oscillate around the interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary Gothic/Horror, currently with a strong Asian focus. Her recent publications include contributions to The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023), Folk Horror: New Global Pathways (2023) and The Transmedia Vampire (2021). She also co-edited two collections – Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (2016) and South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (2022). 

Photo 1: Hoon Payon (dir. Phontharis Chotkijsadarsopon), 2023

Curated by

Ruth Heholt is Professor of Literature and Culture at Falmouth University in lovely Cornwall.

Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, ethnographer and folklorist speaking and writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall. She is the author of Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently working on several Colquhoun related manuscripts. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and she is a curator and host for the Last Tuesday Society lecture series.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

England’s oddest fairy encounter: the Wollaton Gnomes – Zoom talk by Dr Simon Young

The Wollaton Gnomes was a classic anomalous encounter. On the 23 September 1979 – 44 years ago today – a half-dozen primary school children went for an evening walk in Wollaton Hall Park in Nottingham (in the English Midlands). A number of these children were then chased by thirty gnomes in small cars!

It’s a fascinating incident not least because it is so well documented. We have an interview transcript of the children recorded less than 48 hours after the sighting and two pictures drawn by witnesses. There were newspaper reports with interviews: a couple of the kids even got on the TV on John Craven’s Newsround. Later a report was written by the Fairy Investigation Society.

On the 44th anniversary of this famous run in with the impossible, British folklore historian Simon Young unpicks the Wollaton encounter, and puts it in a broader context: an overlooked rash of gnome sightings in the area. Had Nottinghamshire’s Generation X read too many Noddy books? Is this a case of Midland social contagion? Or were there really supernatural gnome drivers among the trees in Wollaton Hall Park?

 

Dr Simon Young is a British folklore historian based in Italy. He has written extensively on the nineteenth-century supernatural. His book The Boggart (from Exeter University Press) and The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends (from Mississippi University Press) are both due out in 2022. He is the editor of Exeter New Approaches to Legends, Folklore and Popular Legends and teaches history at University of Virginia’s Siena Campus (CET). Over the years he has run courses on the History of Christianity, Italian Food History, Italian Media History, Contemporary Italian History, the Second World War in Italy and Italian Renaissance History.

Your host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland(William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you can’t make it live on the night – the event will be recorded for ticket-holders and a link sent out valid for the next two weeks for you to watch at your leisure.

[Image generated by Craiyon.com, before being adapted.]

The World of Flemish Folklore – Zoom talk with Signe Maene

Enter the dark and wonderful world that is Flemish folklore!

On the road you’ll meet the alvermannekes who are kind-hearted gnomes, but love to blow out the light in your eyes. In the woods and meadows, we’ll encounter Kludde, one of the most skilful shapeshifters whose transformations into bats, monstrous dogs, birds and even devilish trees ensured that people stayed in their homes when the sky was at its darkest. We’ll enter cottages overgrown with devil’s claw and bramble bushes where witches concocted potions, brews and sinister plans, and often outsmarted those who dared to oppose them. A visit to the water devils and spirits who haunted the canals, rivers and the sea should not be missed either. And just as importantly, the forgotten folklorists who collected these tales and ensured that the rich, but little known about storytelling traditions of Flanders were preserved for future generations.

 

Signe Maene is a Belgian writer and audio dramatist of stories mainly based on Flemish folklore. She’s very passionate about anything relating to folk horror, myths and legends and blogs about Flemish folktales on Substack. Signe is currently working on a short story collection inspired by Flemish folktales and is the co-founder of Salt & Mirrors & Cats, a literary zine publishing stories, poems and art connected to superstitions.

Your curator and host for this event will be the writer Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward lives in Norfolk and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He is the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s folklore-strewn first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com

Don’t worry if you miss the event on the night – the next day we will send you a recording that will be valid for two weeks.

 

[Image adapted from the following Wikimedia Comons artwork: Léon Spilliaert (1881-1946) Boom in de winter. Brafa 2019 31-01-2019 – houtskool en potlood op papier 68,5 x 48,5. Photographed by Paul Hermans.]

Unveiling The Digital Occult: Forty Super-Duper Ancient Years of Arcana – Heather Freeman

Unveiling The Digital Occult: Forty Super-Duper Ancient Years of Arcana

Magical practitioners from across time and cultures have used diverse technologies for spirit communication and interaction, ranging from oracular trances to Ouija boards.

With each technological advancement, magical tools have also evolved, such as with metallurgy or the moveable-type press.

The digital age is no exception, as practitioners explored online rituals on Bulletin Board Systems in the 1990s, digital temples in video games in the 2000s, digital divination apps in the 2010s, and today use AIs as oracular mediums.

Current digital technologies are inherently liminal tools, facilitating instantaneous communication and physical action across both time and space. And as virtual reality, generative AI, and other digital tools become increasingly accessible to non-technologists, more practitioners experiment with these tools in their magical workings.

In this talk, artist, magician, technologist, and podcaster Heather D. Freeman will survey the history of magical experimentation with digital technologies. She will then present a range of specific examples and approaches, such as digital divination apps, group-based ceremonial magic, micro-controller scrying devices, and generative AIs as spirit familiars. We’ll wrap it up with some online digital magic ourselves by exploring techniques accessible to the novice practitioner, non-programmer, idly curious, and expert techno-mage alike.

Bio

Heather D. Freeman (b. 1974) is Professor of Art in Digital Media in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Rutgers University (2000) and a BA in Fine Art and German Studies from Oberlin College (1997). She is former Director of D+ARTS, the College of Arts + Architecture’s Digital Arts Center, and acting director of Charlotte Night Owl Interactive, a games and XR cooperative housed within the College.

Freeman works in digital and mixed-media print, 2D and 3D animation, film, mobile and desktop app design, and podcasting. Within these plural forms, Freeman combines traditional and digital technologies, weaving together the symbolic forms of magic, science, mythology, and popular culture. Freeman engages in several magical practices (both solitary and initiatory) that dovetail in her creative works. While some works observe the history and sociology of magical practices, many more are magical actions in themselves, intersecting the Visible and Invisible and actualized by the audience. Her animations, podcasts, and apps have been screened internationally and won numerous awards. Her prints and mixed-media works have also appeared in group and solo exhibitions across North America and internationally. She is currently the creative producer on the forthcoming podcast series “Magic in the United States” created in collaboration with PRX and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. More about Freeman, her art, and writing may be found at https://linktr.ee/heatherdfreeman

Curated and Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, ethnographer and folklorist speaking and writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall. She is the author of Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently working on several Colquhoun related manuscripts. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and she is a curator and host for the Last Tuesday Society lecture series.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Image:

Heather D. Freeman (b. 1974)

Öccane 00, 2023

Watercolor, ink, graphite, salt, and Florida Water over digital print on watercolor paper.

Visual Aesthetics of Folk Horror – Tanya Krzywinska

Visual Aesthetics of Folk Horror

Character, theme and narrative are often centralised in the literature on Folk Horror; but what of its visual aesthetics? Can we trace Folk Horror aesthetics within older painting traditions and styles? The concern of this talk is to explore relationships between the Folk Horror of film, TV and videogames, and landscape painting. I will focus most intently on Gustav Courbet’s late landscapes and Andrew Wyeth’s work; along the way other forms of painting will provide touchpoints within this investigation of the way that folk horror translates its anti-pastoralism and pessimism into its visual sightlines. I will focus therefore on Folk Horror’s concern with the otherness of the landscape, nature, failed/misguided agency, and rural culture, arguing that an inherent pessimism drives Folk Horror’s ‘jamming’ of normative bucolic representations and therein subverting man’s surety of sovereignty over nature. In seeing Courbet’s anti-human animism and Wyeth’s rural othering backwards through the lens of Folk Horror, I seek to widen the scope of what we now regard as Folk Horror.

Bio

Tanya Krzywinska has written extensively on the Gothic and Horror across multiple platforms, focusing on magic and gender. She is an artist who works in traditional mediums as well as designing and researching augmented and virtual reality apps for art, museum, and heritage contexts. Since 2012, she has been Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Games and Culture (Sage) and is a professor at Falmouth University, Cornwall UK in the Games Academy.

Curated by

Ruth Heholt is Professor of Literature and Culture at Falmouth University in lovely Cornwall.

Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, ethnographer and folklorist speaking and writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall. She is the author of Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently working on several Colquhoun related manuscripts. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and she is a curator and host for the Last Tuesday Society lecture series.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Photo 1: Blood on Satan’s Claw Piers Haggard, 1971.

Photo 2: ‘Stream in the Jura Mountains‘ (The Torrent), 1872–73, Honolulu Museum of Art

Sunny Landscapes, Dark Visions: Folk Horror and the Weird Imagination of E. F. Benson – Ruth Heholt

Sunny Landscapes, Dark Visions: Folk Horror and the Weird Imagination of E. F. Benson

What is ‘Folk Horror’? Who bothered to define it and why and how useful is it to see it as a sub-genre? One of the answers to these latter questions is that it is great fun. Ruthlessly ‘using’ folklore and ramping up the horror, Folk Horror makes both seem almost believable. People get in some terrible pickles, very often by going ‘too far’ – venturing where they really shouldn’t. If horror fans scream ‘don’t go into the cellar!’, Folk Horror folk venture ‘too far’ in the pursuit of knowledge, in unearthing that which really should stay buried, in intruding into communities that might be welcoming but for all the wrong reasons. Don’t pull that long-buried artefact out of the ground! Don’t open that old ‘forbidden’ book! Don’t assume these ‘picturesque’ villagers are benign! And really, I wouldn’t stay in that house that is surrounded by standing stones! My favourite ‘spook’ story writer E. F. Benson knew all the tricks. A lesser-known contemporary of M. R. James, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood (the main writers associated with historical folk horror), Benson gives us ‘sunny’ horrors. Benson’s ghost stories are often set in hot, still summers and he toys with folk horror where dark, old horrors appear in sunny, beautiful landscapes, making the horrors far, far worse. From Cornwall to Suffolk, Benson’s folk horror tales give pause and can make you look over your shoulder even in the most luscious of landscapes.

Bio

Ruth Heholt is Professor of Literature and Culture at Falmouth University in lovely Cornwall.

Curated and Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, ethnographer and folklorist speaking and writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall. She is the author of Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently working on several Colquhoun related manuscripts. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and she is a curator and host for the Last Tuesday Society lecture series.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day

Photo: The Mowing-Devil; or Strange News out of Hertfordshire, August 22, 1678

UFO Religions and Spirituality – Benjamin E. Zeller

UFO Religions and Spirituality

UFO religion are out of this world. Or are they? In this talk, Ben Zeller discusses the history and context of UFO religions and UFO spirituality, from their origins in mid-twentieth-century flying saucer culture through contemporary ufology, conspiracism, and alternative religious practices. We start with the origins of UFO and flying saucer culture and mythology, including the Roswell incident and the birth of both scientific ufology and the contactee/abductee movements.

We consider the Cold War context of the emergence of the first UFO religions, groups like the Aetherius Society (UK) and the Unarius Academy of Science (USA). We then look to the transformations within UFO spirituality that came with the rise of conspiracy thinking and “conspirituality,” as well as the integration of New Age spiritual practices and beliefs within UFO religions, as seen in such groups as Heaven’s Gate (USA) and the Raelians (France). Finally, we look to contemporary UFO religiosity as found within today’s starseed and channelling movements. Throughout, we consider themes of millennialism, apocalypticism, and utopianism.

Bio

Benjamin E. Zeller is Professor and Chair of Religion at Lake Forest College (Chicago, USA). He researches religious currents that are new or alternative, including new religions, the religious engagement with science, and the quasi-religious relationship people have with food. He is author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion (NYU Press) and Prophets and Protons: New Religious Movements and Science in Late Twentieth-Century America (NYU Press), and has edited or co-edited four other books. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard University. He is co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. He lives in suburban Chicago, Illinois, and when he has time for it, he makes his own cheese.

Curated and Hosted by

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer, curator and critic, ethnographer and folklorist speaking and writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall. She is the author of Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor 2020) and is currently working on several Colquhoun related manuscripts. She is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has contributed gallery texts and essays for a number of institutions including Tate, Camden Arts Centre, Art UK, Arusha Galleries, Heavenly Records and she is a curator and host for the Last Tuesday Society lecture series.

don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day