HOW TO DELIVER A TERRIFYING INFO DUMP: EXPOSITORY MONOLOGUES IN HORROR
with instructors Gillian Wallace Horvat and Steven Williams
Thursday February 13, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Buy tickets: https://www.
with instructors Gillian Wallace Horvat and Steven Williams
Thursday February 13, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Buy tickets: https://www.
Expository
monologues – the long speeches delivered by a character to provide
backstory or motivation – can be the downfall or the showstopper of a
horror film, and there’s at least one in a vast majority. The purpose of
all these soliloquies is an extended, intense effort to overcome the
unusually high threshold of disbelief concomitant with the horror genre,
generally in an attempt to answer questions for the audience like: How
is this possible? Why did she do this – and in such a convoluted and
oblique way? Why is this not a plot hole?
For
actors and directors in the genre space expository monologues are an
occupational hazard that have the potential to be a moment of cinematic
glory… if you have the right tools. In this presentation for both
performers and filmmakers, we will study the four types of expository
monologues and review instructive examples of each. They comprise:
- Explaining an implausible/supernatural situation (Poltergeist) and possibly encouraging a risky solution
- Tenuous justification for a character’s actions up to this point (usually involves a reveal or twist)
- Providing backstory from previous film(s) to catch up the franchise fan or fully inform a viewer who hasn’t seen the earlier installments
- Retrocontinuity – indispensable for franchises and reboots where the director maybe changing mythology (Scream 3, Jason Goes to Hell)
In
analyzing clips we’ll explore the difference between a naturalistic
approach and “excess” in performance, briefly digressing here into a
discussion of the theories of genre scholars Linda Williams and Kristin
Thompson.
Because a performance
built around excess requires a lot of character work, in the second part
of the class we will focus on more natural techniques when we study our
text: Creighton Duke’s monologue from Jason Goes to Hell. Using
detailed textual analysis – aided by Creighton Duke himself, Steven
Williams, who will appear in person as a special guest – we’ll discover
how to bring emotional authenticity to language dense with proper nouns
and also examine patterns of inflection and breath in relating anecdotes
in our own lives.
*Please note Steven Williams’ appearance is subject to change dependent on his professional schedule.
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HA! AAAH! THE PAINFUL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMOR AND HORROR
with instructor David Misch
Thursday March 12, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Buy tickets: https://www.
with instructor David Misch
Thursday March 12, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Buy tickets: https://www.
From 1920’s Haunted Spooks to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,
the genre of horror-comedy has never really, you should excuse the
expression, died. Yet humor and horror seem pretty different; one’s a
pie in the face, the other’s an axe in the skull. It’s obvious why
watching someone being torn asunder would be horrible but why is the
endless suffering of the Three Stooges funny? Could there be any
congruencies between funny and fear, snickers and screams, gore and
gags, slapstick and slaughter?
Yes.
This
class proposes – carefully, while remaining alert and well-armed – that
the two genres are not mortal enemies. For one thing, people in pain
are a perennial part of every art; to be fascinated with human suffering
is to be human. Both comedy and horror can show us how to live (and, of
course, die); from Psycho we learn that Death can come to anyone at any time. Also, to always shower with a friend.
The
class will examine horror’s relationship with philosophers’
explanations of comedy: Immanuel “Carrot Top” Kant’s Incongruity Theory
(it’s funny when two things that don’t go together go together); Sigmund
“Shecky” Freud’s Relief Theory (comedy is a rapid expulsion of
tension); Thomas “Nutso” Hobbes’s Superiority Theory (“You’re in pain
and I’m not – ha!”); Henri “Giggles” Bergson (comedy requires “a
momentary anesthesia of the heart”); and Mel Brooks (“Tragedy is when I
cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die”).
We’ll explore the mechanics of both using video clips and examples
ranging from Frankenstein and Dracula to Abbott & Costello,
and try to figure out what makes us laugh and/or scream. We’ll see that
both genres love loss of control, anarchy, the breakdown of rules and
conventions – the beast within us set free. And both exploit our
paradoxical feelings about helplessness: seeing someone out of control
can be hilarious (a clumsy person falling) or horrifying (a clumsy
person falling into a snake-pit suspended over a shark-pit next to a
zombie zoo).
Both humor and horror
also share a mordant view of our relationship to pain; an obsession
with the human body and its multifarious fluids; and a subtext of death
and transcendence underlying the eviscerated flesh and fart jokes. What
could be more blood-curdlingly fun?
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THE GHASTLY ONE: ANDY MILLIGAN
with instructor Jimmy McDonough
Thurs. April 9, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Buy tickets: https://www.
with instructor Jimmy McDonough
Thurs. April 9, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Buy tickets: https://www.
Andy
Milligan is one of the most compelling, contentious lone wolfs in
cinema history. A dressmaker, actor and puppeteer, Milligan cranked out
titles like Bloodthirsty Butchers, The Body Beneath, and The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!
on threadbare budgets. He made sexploitation movies, period horror
films (elaborately costumed by Milligan himself) and even a landmark gay
short. Unlike most exploitation filmmakers, he came out of a rarified
NYC arts scene and started his directing career doing shocking
productions at the legendary Caffe Cino. His films were deeply personal
statements, despite limitations which made him the laughingstock of the
42nd street distributors who cashed in on his work. Ever the
outsider, Milligan was homosexual, a sadist and an avowed misogynist,
and all of this is quite present in his creations.
“Am
I sadistic?” Milligan once said to me. “Not really. No more than
anybody else, hee hee. Everybody’s a bit sadistic at times—and
masochistic. Look at the sex act alone. The male part is sadistic, the
female is masochistic. The whole act of sex is sadism and masochism,
basically. Penetration—an act of violence.” This sort of attitude
permeates every frame of Milligan’s work, and it sets him apart from
most of his contemporaries. Andy had a lot to say, and none of it was
pretty. “Life makes you bitter and cynical,” he maintained. “I’m
an injustice collector, babe. I never get over it. You can’t stay nice
in life.”
And yet I loved Andy.
Hell, I even thought he was…nice. Not only was I his biographer, I
worked on his last pictures (even briefly appearing in one) and took
care of him as he died of AIDS. We had a rich –if complex –
relationship, and I will share my personal experiences to hopefully
illuminate why I think Milligan is a fabulous, if deeply flawed
filmmaker. To further that understanding I’ll show some of my favorite
clips from his movies and unlock the secrets that lie within. I’ll also
answer any audience questions about my time with Andy and talk about why
I feel biography is also kind of an illness. By the end of this
lecture, I promise you will feel something, even if it’s just the desire
to kill Andy Milligan. Or me.
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JESÚS FRANCO: SHOOTING AT THE SPEED OF LIFE
with instructor Stephen Thrower
Thursday May 14, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Buy tickets: https://www.
During
a career spanning more than fifty years, Jesús (‘Jess’) Franco created a
strange and unique style of commercial genre filmmaking, bordering at
times on the avant-garde. Obsessed with ‘aberrant’ sex, erotic horror
and the writings of the Marquis De Sade, he took a resolutely personal
approach to movie-making, and after spending the 1960s honing his
technique on slightly more conventional projects he embarked in the
1970s on a sustained period of intensive shooting, making as many as ten
or twelve films in one year. Shooting with a small crew, exclusively on
location, he worked at a speed that allowed little time for the honing
of a perfect finished product, instead creating a cinema of spontaneity,
improvisation and caprice. Franco valued freedom above all: by
combining a rapid-fire series of small-scale commercial film projects, a
‘creative’ approach to finance, and a dedicated passion for the
sensational, he was able to carve his own niche and digress into the
most extraordinary experimental ellipses. In this evening’s discussion,
Stephen Thrower will explore Franco’s ability to juggle the commercial
and personal dimensions of filmmaking through his confrontational works
of horror, sadism and erotic spectacle.
with instructor Stephen Thrower
Thursday May 14, 7:30pm-10:00pm
Buy tickets: https://www.
