Dream Horror – A Halloween Evening of Fear on Film
To celebrate Halloween, the Last Tuesday Society is hosting a presentation on the role of dreams in horror films.
Join Dr Murray Leeder as he examines the role of dreams in horror films and proposes “dream horror” as a mode for horror. The nightmare functions for horror sort of as the fairy tale does for the romantic comedy: as a kind of ur-signifier. Dream sequences have often represented a point of contact between horror and art cinema, since they license moments of avant-garde experimentation couched within narrative. They also represent moments where horror irrupts into other genres (e.g. the dream ballet in Oklahoma! (1955)). But, as we shall see, dreams are also often representations of occluded truths about patriarchal capitalism that need not be woken up from but woken up to. As Rosemary yells in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), ‘This is no dream! This is really happening!’
Bio
Murray Leeder is ATS Assistant Lecturer, Faculty of Arts - English & Film Studies Department, University of Alberta. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (2018). He has published in such journals as Horror Studies, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
