Echoes from the Sleep Room: Medical Terror in Canadian Horror Cinema

Saturday + Sunday Nov. 19 + 20
Noon-5pm
at Blue Sunshine – 3660 St-Laurent, 3rd Flr
Montreal, PQ
www.miskatonicinstitute.com / www.blue-sunshine.com

Visiting Instructor : Paul Corupe (of Canuxploitation.com!)
Course Cost – $35 (includes two classes)

They were some of the darkest, most disturbing revelations in Canada’s recent history. In the 1940s and ’50s, the Québec government and the Catholic Church sent thousands of orphans to psychiatric institutions where they were subject to http://www.fingermedia.tw/?p=1322779 isolation, electroshock therapy, lobotomies and abuse. At almost the same time, the CIA was conducting brainwashing and mind control experiments on unwitting volunteers at McGill University using similar techniques. These latter experiments, known as Project MK-ULTRA, included erasing memories and preparing test subjects for psychological reprogramming by triggering drug-induced comas in what was called the “Sleep Room.”

This course will explore how Canadian horror cinema has tapped into national anxiety over these incidents of physical and psychological torture, which uncomfortably recall the Nazi medical atrocities of just a internet pharmacy propecia few years earlier. From deadly doctors and mind control to unauthorized surgical procedures and patient revenge, we will discuss how medical terror has become one of the defining themes of Canada’s horror films. In addition to the CBC docudrama THE SLEEP ROOM, this course will consider a wide spectrum of Canadian horror on film since the 1960s, including DR FRANKENSTEIN ON CAMPUS (1970), THE BRAIN (1988) and MINDFIELD (1989).

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The “Terror” Films of Val Lewton

Wednesdays Nov 23 + 30, Dec 7 & 14
at BLUE SUNSHINE – 3660 St-Laurent, 3rd Flr
Montreal, PQ
www.miskatonicinstitute.com / www.blue-sunshine.com

Instructors: Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare and Kristopher Woofter
Course Cost $35 (includes all 4 classes)

With the popularization of “auteur theories” very few producers get to carry the mantle of auteur, which is usually reserved for directors. Val Lewton is an viagra to order exception. The nine horror films that Val Lewton produced for RKO studios between 1942 and 1946—including Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Seventh Victim (1943), and Isle of the Dead (1945)—are traditionally described as indicative of a decidedly non-sensationalist, even poetic approach to the horror film. The more subtle style and independent, collaborative spirit evidenced in Lewton’s productions is in part the result of Lewton’s reaction to a show-all horror tradition established by Universal’s larger-budget monster movies in the 1930s that Lewton knew well and disliked. There is, in the Lewton horror film, an emphasis on dread and terror rather than shock and horror. Monstrous presences are suggested and ambiguously revealed. The Lewton films’ visual and aural characteristics—chiaroscuro lighting effects, deep shadows and silences, a baroque mise-en-scène, and distinctive music such as lullabies and folk songs—give the films a dream-like, meditative quality.

It is the visionary quality of the films under Lewton’s collaborative guidance that we will explore in this course. We will also look at Lewton’s output in the context of film noir and the “woman’s film” immensely popular at the time, and influential on Lewton’s brand of 40s horror. Furthermore, the course will highlight aspects of Lewton’s cinema through the lens of postcolonial theory, examining the notion of the unknown and unruly “wilderness,” such as the Balkans and the Caribbean, as a site of political transgression. At least three of the Lewton-produced films will be screened in their entirety: Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Seventh Victim (1943).

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).