The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies: Monsters in the Closet
Date: Thursday, November 17th
Time: 7:00pm-10:00pm
Admission: $12 - $40 for full semester
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn NY
Tickets Here: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2598385
Instructor: Maitland McDonagh
With successful branches in London and Montreal, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies makes its first stateside stop at Brooklyns Morbid Anatomy Museum with a pilot semester of horror film, literature and pop culture classes, running from September through December 2016 and featuring classes by some of the most renowned voices in horror film, fiction and criticism.
Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecrafts literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studiesis a community-based organization that offers university-level horror history and theory classes for people of all ages. The Miskatonic is a non-profit endeavour through which established horror writers, directors, scholars and programmers/curators celebrate horror history and culture with a unique blend of enthusiasm and critical perspective.
Monsters in the Closet examines the intersection between gay erotic novels of the 1970s and the conventions of genre fiction formulas that lent themselves to sexually explicit variations, which adults-only publishers mined with exemplary vigor. I began collecting them not for the colorful covers but because they were windows onto a world of familiar stories with a twist, like the European exploitation movies I sought out in Times Square. I gravitated towards horror and thrillers, a natural adult-novel matchconsider the phrase “scared stiff”that produced tales of gay vampires, psycho killers, demonic possession and restless spirits no closet can contain.
And while these books are pulp fictions through and through, they’re far from unsophisticated: The teaser for Vampire’s Kiss, in which a tediously ordinary, suburban wage slave chronicles his induction into the world the queer undead, wonders disingenuously whether he’s “a vampire?Or… merely rationalizing his homosexuality?” Free of the scrutiny afforded gay literary novels, gay pulps dared to be cheeky, to riff on pop culture and flirt with subversiveness: Gay Vampire gives a shout out to supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows, the thriller Man Eater to every dark tale of mirror-image cops and criminals… gay pulps shone a light under the bed, into the corner and, yes, the closets, calling out the monsters in all their fabulous freakiness.
Maitland McDonagh is the founder of 120 Days Books, a small press dedicated to republishing gay erotic pulp novels of the 1970s, a film critic with a predilection for horror and the author of books that including Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: the Dark Dreams of Dario Argento and The 50 Most Erotic Films of All Time.
For further information: www.miskatonic-nyc.com
Tickets are non-refundable unless the event is canceled.