#sorcha ni fhlainn

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Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture 

[barkercast]

447 : Boom Hellraiser P6 plus Quartet of Torment D1

Thanks for listening to the Clive Barker podcast.  The only podcast dedicated to the imagination of Clive Barker. Coming up next on episode 447, We get back to the Boom Studios Hellraiser comics with the Dark Watch 1-4, plus in the last half we review disc 1 of the new Arrow 4K Hellraiser box set, “The Quartet of Torment.”

Sponsor : Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination | ETSY Store

Check out “Bouquet“, “Brushfire” and “Mother and Child II” on his Facebook feed.   

There are some paintings on his Etsy shop to check out. Mother and Child II, The Star Gazer, The Folk Singer, The Pearl, Top of the World.  And don’t forget about is books, The Chimney Sweep’s Tale and Celebrate Imagination

Also Check out “The Eclipse” on his Facebook page

Catching Up

Nightbreed 2CD Deluxe Edition

Jericho stuff from Russell

Phantasmagoria hardcover

Jose’s Nightbreed on-set polaroids

Discussion: Boom Studios Hellraiser

Hellraiser The Dark Watch #1 – February, 2013

W: Clive Barker & Brandon Seifert A: Tom Garcia

Hellraiser The Dark Watch #2 – March, 2013

W: Clive Barker & Brandon Seifert A: Tom Garcia

Hellraiser The Dark Watch #3 – April 2013

W: Clive Barker & Brandon Seifert A: Tom Garcia

Hellraiser The Dark Watch #4 – May 2013

W: Clive Barker & Brandon Seifert A: Tom Garcia, Korkut Oztekin

Discussion: Arrow’s Hellraiser Quartet of Torment, 2023

Overview: Packaging

The Book ‘Ages of Desire’

Disc 1

Hellraiser in 4K

New Commentary W/ Steven Jones and Kim Newman

Old Commentary with Clive Barker, Ashley Laurence, Pete Atkins

Old Commentary with Clive Barker

Power of Imagination with Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and Karmel Kniprath

Unboxing Hellraiser

The Pursuit of Possibilities

Flesh Is a Trap

Newly Uncovered Interviews

Electronic Press Kit

Being Frank – Archival Interview w/ Sean Chapman

Under The Skin – Archival Interview W/ Doug Bradley

Soundtrack to Hell – Archival Interview with Coil Steven Thrower

Trailers and TV Spots

Image Galleries

Draft Screenplays

Show Notes

Episode 441 with Sorcha No Fhlainn and Karmel Kniprath

Patreon Exclusive – Collector’s Corner 1: Jump Tribe

Patreon Exclusive – Patterns of the Dreaming God

Patreon Members Shout-Out (Become a Patron)

David Anderson

Erik Van T’ Holt

Daniel Elven

Returning Sponsor: Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination 

Coming Next 

News Episode

Jericho Squad 77 Returns

A-Z Commentaries Z for Zombies: Evil Dead 2

More Boom Hellraiser The Dark Watch comics discussion / Hellraiser Quartet of Torment Coverage

And this podcast, having no beginning will have no end. 

web www.clivebarkercast.com

iOS App| Android App, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora, Libsyn, Tunein, iHeart Radio, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Radio.com, DoubleTwist and YouTube and Join the Occupy Midian group

Discord Community

Twitter: @BarkerCast| @OccupyMidian 

Buy Our Book: The BarkerCast Interviews Occupy Midian | Hardcover | Kindle | Apple

Become a Patreon Patron

Support the show, Buy a T-Shirt

Music is by Ray Norrish

All Links and show notes in their Entirety can be found at http://www.clivebarkercast.com

            New episode of the Clive Barker Podcast

[dwellordream]

Serial Killers: The Reel and Real History

“Serial killing, contrary to popular belief, was not a product of the twentieth century. The figure of the serial killer in American culture has been noted as far back as the American Revolution, with the Harpe brothers of 1790s Tennessee possibly falling into the category. Such a lengthy genealogy, however, misses the fact that the serial killer, as a phenomenon, became popular in cinema, in films that explored killing in graphic and unique ways on-screen. 

But American gothic literature and other earlier forms do provide a necessary background for reading the serial killer as a particular instantiation of American gothic. The gothic writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially, prefigure this phenomenon by pointing to the darkness within protagonists who struggle with fractured psyches and personal damnations, leading them towards murder and the macabre. 

Unlike European gothic excess, where ruins and dark secrets lead to terrible acts of depravity and murder, often as a response to Catholicism and repression, American gothic turns inward: serial killers in fiction and film tend to be the product of deeply destructive psychological fractures: madness that masquerades just below the surface of everyday normalcy. 

Serial killers act out impulsive and buried desires that have been unleashed – recalling the split gothic self of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (1886) or Edgar Allan Poe’s unreliable murderous narrators in ‘The Black Cat’ (1843) and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843) – filtered through a ferocious, destructive individualism, spawning countless screen and literary imitators. 

This rooting of the serial killer as a psychological product of ‘cultural damage’ or ‘wound culture’, as Mark Seltzer describes, is an important feature if we are to claim modern serial killer cinema as a product of American fascination with violence, excess and psychological trauma. This psychological trauma also serves as a larger allegory for the nation. 

Through the history of cinema, we have witnessed the evolution of the serial killer, from folk tales to news coverage of real murderers, towards the contemporary valorization of the serial killer as a form of celebrity in the American popular imagination. Monsters have moved from the margins to the centre of our world, and it is through the collapse of these boundaries, previously separating them from us, that serial killers have become distorted mirrors of ourselves. 

Serial killers regularly feature as a form of the Other that lies just beneath the facade of the normal in our world. The terror of their aesthetic normalcy, of blending in, is central to understanding their invisibility. Yet serial killers on-screen, much like other filmic monsters such as the zombie and vampire, have evolved beyond their earlier perceived fixed states; unlike these monsters, serial killers have always worked from within society itself, and hide their chimeric faces amongst the crowd. 

The fixation on the psychological is thus foundational to the modern, cinematic serial killer. The image of, and psychologized concept of, the modern American serial killer is largely shaped by the notorious figure of Ed Gein from Plainfield, Wisconsin. Gein’s case, which came to light in 1957, included cannibalism, necrophilia, skinning his victims, grave robbing and decorating his home with body parts of the deceased; it is still figured as a shocking account of desecration and sexual perversion nestled within a small rural farming community. 

Gein’s case featured in Life magazine (2 December 1957), complete with pictures of his filthy home, bringing the case to national attention, and it subsequently became inspirational for numerous screen depictions of serial killers. Gone was the suggestive European strangeness of Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), from Fritz Lang’s M (1931), and his ilk; American serial killers were now found and made in the homeland of Middle America. 

Though Gein was certainly not the first American serial killer since the inception of cinema – H. H. Holmes is believed to have committed at least thirty murders in his gothic ‘Murder Castle’, a labyrinthine hotel which housed unsuspecting visitors to Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893 – Gein remains, without doubt, the most influential on contemporary film. 

He has become ‘multiply interpretable’ (Sullivan 2000: 45) and unfixed, repeatedly cited, re-imagined and revisited as the touchstone in serial killer narratives for its shocking and abject content. While Gein was a partial inspiration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs, to which we will return, perhaps the most famous fictional adaptations inspired by his case are Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel, Psycho, and its 1960 screen adaptation of the same name, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 

Bloch’s novel and Hitchcock’s film both explore psychological trauma and murderous insanity through motel manager and taxidermist Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), an outwardly odd but passive man subject to the whims of his demanding, neurotic mother. That ‘mother’ and Norman are revealed to be one and the same ties Psycho very closely with contemporaneous thought on psychosexual dysfunction, expressed here as a violated and consumed psyche, and murderous impulses. 

Beyond the psychological, Psycho is also the most infamous American film to align serial killing with a psychotic break from reality into a realm of fantasy and consumption, a pairing that finds its material echo in the proliferation of serial killer cinema. Alongside the post-Psycho rise of the slasher film of the 1970s and other representations of excess, serial killer cinema came to dominate in later years by sequelization, commodification and blatant imitation. 

As Brian Jarvis notes, there are numerous types of serial killer films, which cross-pollinate into other film genres, which ensure their endurance: Serial Killer cinema has many faces: there are serial killer crime dramas (Manhunter (1986), Se7en (1995) Hannibal (2001)), supernatural serial killers (Halloween (1978) Friday the 13th (1980), Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)), serial killer science fiction (Virtuousity (1995), Jason X (2001)), serial killer road movies (Kalifornia (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994)), . . . postmodern pastiche (Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)) and even serial killer comedies (So I Married an Axe-Murderer (1993), Serial Mom (1994), Scary Movie (2000)) . . . the serial killer has also become a staple ingredient in TV cop shows (like CSI and Law and Order) . . . (Jarvis 2007: 327–8) 

Serial killers are now so ubiquitous as to be commonplace within multiple genres; indeed, they may even feel clichéd or tired as a metaphor for American malaise. Yet, there is something distinctly uncanny about their generic endurance and destructive individualism that is wholly bound to the foundations of the American imagination. 

Thus, following Psycho, popular serial films of the mid to late twentieth century have linked psychological disturbances, murderous sexual desires and consumerism run amok; these connections give rise to at least a cursory understanding of the direct connection between what is represented as the serial killer’s compulsive desire to kill again and again, and the larger culture that pours over the minutia of the killers’ lives, their methodologies, and victims’ wounds and corpses. 

Seltzer notes, ‘Serial killing has its place in a culture in which addictive violence has become a collective spectacle, one of the crucial sites where private desire and public fantasy cross’ (Seltzer 1998: 253). However, the source or drive of this compulsion has varied substantially on screen from 1960, from sexual deviance to expressions of psychosexual rage, social and economic exclusion, and political and cultural articulations on greed and consumption, through to representations of class, intellect and taste. 

More recently, a near superhero status has been conferred onto twenty-first century serial killers through a highly problematic code of ‘morality’, which allows them to operate and thrive amongst the masses as near guardians of justice. That serial killers are hugely popular in film is unsurprising – those who cross moral boundaries are more interesting and appealing on-screen than those who strive to defend and delimit them. 

The fiction of presenting an embodiment of evil – one that looks like us – contains enormous narrative appeal, and acts as a framing device by which we encounter, experience and eventually contain the psychological or consumerist cultural threat (temporarily) through a filmic frame. Contrary to the majority of film representations of serial killers in American cinema, real serial killers have been documented by reporters, psychologists and biographers as bland interfaces, rather than the monstrous figures we imagine. 

The banality of real-life serial killers in the face of such terrible deeds is in itself uncanny, as we desire the binary equivalence that they must be wholly different and separate from us, entirely other in some capacity, in order to act out in such extreme and violent ways. As Nicola Nixon notes: 

The real . . . Gacys, the real Bundys or Dahmers, unlike the charismatic gothic killers of, say, Thomas Harris’s recent fiction, are deeply dull and blandly ordinary . . . it is precisely their ordinariness, their characteristic of ‘sounding like accountants’ and being employed in low-profile ‘unexciting’ jobs like construction/contracting, mail sorting, vat mixing at a chocolate factory that makes their crimes seem all the more shocking. (Nixon 1998: 223) 

The conjunction between the real-life serial killers who dominated media in the 1970s and 1980s and film representations of charismatic figures and their shocking crimes all becomes blurred when an uninteresting, and distinctly un-cinematic, blank central figure is unmasked – the killer must be made visually interesting yet abject in order to match the gravity of his crimes and transgressions. Abhorring the narrative vacuum that reveals the true banality of evil, serial killers on-screen must present some depth and command attention if they are to contain, reflect or represent our collective cultural fears. 

Gothic monsters in fiction tend to mask their nightmarish selves by exuding charm, intellectualism and depth to lure unsuspecting victims. This is the fictive construct projected onto serial killers, which in turn contributes to their on-screen appeal, in that ‘gothic paradigms allow for the creation of a compelling narrative and consequently the generation of character and plot out of “bland ordinariness” and incomprehensible randomness’ (Nixon 1998: 226).

-  Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, “Screening the American Gothic: Celluloid Serial Killers in American Popular Culture.” in American Gothic Culture

[theageoffrankenstein-blog]

New post: listen to Dr Sorcha Ni Fhlainn speak about the Creature on screen. Recorded live at the National Library of Scotland in May 2017: http://blogs.napier.ac.uk/the-age-of-frankenstein/

[miriadonline]

EVENT: Gothic Manchester Festival returns 25th - 29th October 2017

The Gothic Manchester Festival returns

After the great success of last year’s Gothic Manchester Festival on ‘The Gothic North’, our attention turns this year to the topic of Gothic Style(s).

At the start of the 21st century, the Gothic is everywhere. Fiction and film, television and graphic novels – full of vampires, zombies and their hunters – have brought the Gothic into the mainstream.

As Victorian Gothic architecture looms large over cities such as Manchester, Goth fashion and music reference the mode whist enlivening our streets, bars, clubs and homes with new Gothic styles of their own.

This year’s Festival will be full of such delights, offering everything from body-beautiful horror in The Neon Demon to real North West street style in a catwalk devoted to extraordinary goths and steampunks.  As usual, our thrilling series of events will centre on a one-day conference of accessible papers delivered by an egalitarian mix of students, seasoned academics, experts and enthusiasts. All the ‘extra’ events are free, with the conference costing just £10 for the full day.

We very much look forward to welcoming you, and your style, to the mix!

Film Screening of The Neon Demon (2016) Film screening with introduction by Jennifer Richards (Manchester Fashion Institute, Manchester Met) Date: 6pm – 8.30pm, Wednesday 25th October 2017 Location: Number 70 Oxford St, Manchester Tickets: Free – more information and tickets available here

When aspiring model Jesse moves to Los Angeles, her youth and vitality are devoured by a group of beauty-obsessed women who will use any means necessary to get what she has. Set in the modern Gothic world of fashion, Nicholas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon is a tale of beauty, narcissism, betrayal and death. The film itself uses many of the traditional modes akin to horror and gothic films but reframes these themes within a contemporary setting for a 21st Century audience. Jennifer Richards is Lecturer in Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research area explores the Gothic within Visual Communication and Fashion. The screening will be followed by a wine reception to celebrate the launch of this year’s MGAG exhibition ‘Black is Such a Happy Colour’.

M:GAG presents ‘Black is Such a Happy Colour’ Exhibition Launch Date: 8.30pm, Wed 25th October Location: Number 70 Oxford St

M:GAG continues its ongoing collaboration with Manchester Met to bring you new art for the Gothic Manchester Festival, with hints of early work lurking in the dark… A celebration of the diversity of Gothic style, from belfries to banshees and Victorians to vampires through a variety of artistic media.

More information available here

Gothic Styles: In Conversation with John Robb Join music and gothic culture aficionados John Robb (Membranes, Louder Than War) and Dr Claire Nally (Northumbria University) for a full and frank discussion on the Gothic past and Goth in the 21st Century. Date: 6.30pm – 8pm, Thursday 26th October 2017 Location: 3MT Venue, 35-39 Oldham Street Tickets: Free – more information and tickets available here Does the ubiquity of Gothic style in everything from Alexander McQueen to All Saints mean that Goth has lost its dark edge and ability to express alienation? O does the massive popularity of shows like The Walking Dead and Penny Dreadful indicate that the Gothic sensibility has a special place in these post- hope, post-truth times? And what of phenomena such as happy-Goth, pastel-Goth and even ‘health-Goth’? Is goth thriving or is Goth finally dead?

Rosie Garland: The Night Brother Reading and book signing Date: 6pm – 8pm, Friday 27th Oct Location: The John Rylands Library Tickets: Free – more information and tickets available here Tagged ‘literary hero’ by The Skinny, Rosie Garland is an award-winning poet, novelist and singer with post-punk band The March Violets. Her latest novel The Night Brother (Borough Press) was reviewed in The Times as “A rich and ambitious tale set in late Victorian Manchester… Garland’s prose is a delight: playful and exuberant. There are shades of Angela Carter in the mad world she creates… Full marks.’

Gothic Styles: Gothic Substance Conference Date: 9am – 6pm, Saturday 28th October 2017 Location: Number 70 Oxford St, Manchester Tickets: £11.04 – more information and tickets available here Is there substance to the Gothic’s many styles? Does the Gothic continue to reveal the great unspoken truths of our world? Did it ever? Is the Gothic anything more than a commercial product that may be sold, as a style, to a new generation of consumers? Was it always thus? What cultural function does Goth(ic) style possess? And how has this evolved from the Enlightenment to the neoliberal present? This one-day conference will present 20-minute talks on all aspects of Gothic style. As such, topics may include, but are not confined to:

Literary, Filmic and Popular Cultural Stylistics – Gothic or merely Gothicky?

The Gothic styles of art and architecture

Gothic fashion – from subculture to haute couture

Goth music, clubs and clubbers

The popular perception of Goth(ic) style – from Halloween dress up to hate crime.

Full listings of talks and speakers will be available at the Gothic Manchester Festival website.

Introduced and chaired by Dr Linnie Blake. Dr Linnie Blake is Reader in Film and Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University and Head of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. She has published widely on Gothic literature, film and television and sits on the editorial and advisory board of the journal Horror Studies and Dark Arts and the University of Wales’ Horror Studies series. Her most recent book is the collection Neoliberal Gothic (2017) co-edited with Agnieszka Soltisik Monnet.

Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies Book Launch Date: 6pm – 7pm, Saturday 28th October 2017 Location: Number 70 Oxford St, Manchester Tickets: Free – more information and tickets available here Join the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies  in celebrating the 2017 release of FIVE new publications from our academic staff:

Xavier Aldana Reyes – Spanish Gothic: National Identity, Collaboration and Cultural Adaptation (Palgrave Macmillan)

Eds. Linnie Blake and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet – Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in the Neoliberal Age(MUP)

Chloe Germaine Buckley – 21st Century Children’s Gothic: From the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject (EUP)

Ed. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn – Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (MUP)

Eds. Dale Townshend, Michael Carter and Peter N. Lindfield – Writing Britain’s Ruins (British Library)

Join us for an evening of wine, short speeches and a jaw-dropping celebration cake from the wondrous Conjurer’s Kitchen. The wine reception will be followed by an optional trip to see the Manchester city centre Halloween decorations and spontaneous dinner/drinks (to be arranged on the night).

Gothic Styles Street/Fashion Show Date: 6pm – 7pm, Sunday 29th October 2017 Location: Exchange Square, Manchester Tickets: Free – Just turn up! More info available here Featuring:

Comperes Rosie Lugosi and Liquorice Black

Border Morris from Stone the Crows

ArA DJS

Fantastical make up competition winners from House of Fraser

Join us for an extravagant exploration of what it means to have Goth style! Real-life Goths, punks, steampunks and other assorted ‘weirdo mosher freaks’ will strut, stomp and parade their individual dress sense for the public of Manchester. Interspersed with the street style will be fashion looks from students and alumni of Manchester Met’s Manchester Fashion Institute, showing the pervasive influence of Goth sensibilities in contemporary haute couture. Sound tracked by Goth music, introduced by two queens of Goth-dom – Rosie Lugosi The Vampire Queen and Manchester’s monochrome drag par excellence Liquorice Black – this will be a catwalk to remember and a brilliant way to round off your Halloween weekend in the city. In association with the Sophie Lancaster Foundation. Part of Halloween in the City produced by Manchester BID.

[barkercast]

441: Power of Imagination with Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and Karmel Knipprath

In Episode 441 of the Clive Barker Podcast, do we get a little over our heads with acedemic discourse of Clive Barker?  It’s possible but we love it. We talk to Dr Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and Karmel Knipparth of Manchester University about Clive Barker in a gothic context, and the experience of creating a feature for the Hellraiser Quartet of Torment “Power of Imagination”.   How many of us wish they had courses like this for us when we were in College?  

Sponsor : Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination | ETSY Store

Discussion: Sorcha’s feature included in Quartet of Torment box set

Show Notes

Clive Barker Dark Imaginer on Amazon

The Quartet of Torment

Follow Sorcha @vampiresorcha | MMU Profile

Follow Karmel @goth_milllk

Gary Hoppenstand’s Imagination As Metaphor In Clive Barker’s Books of Blood

Suzanne J. Barbieri Clive Barker Mythmaker for the Millenium

Hellraiser remake Roh

Clive Barker: The Man Behind the Myth

Patreon Members Shout-Out (Become a Patron)

David Anderson

Erik Van T’ Holt

Returning Sponsor: Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination

Coming Next

Hellraiser Quartet of Torment

Jericho Squad 77 Continues

More News & Interviews

Hellraiser Boom Comics continue

A-Z Commentaries Z for Zombie: Evil Dead 2

And this podcast, having no beginning will have no end. 

web www.clivebarkercast.com

iOS App| Android App, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora, Libsyn, Tunein, iHeart Radio, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Radio.com, DoubleTwist and YouTube and Join the Occupy Midian group

Discord Community

Twitter: @BarkerCast| @OccupyMidian 

Buy Our Book: The BarkerCast Interviews Occupy Midian | Hardcover | Kindle | Apple

Become a Patreon Patron

Support the show, Buy a T-Shirt

Opening Music is by Ray Norrish

End Credits Music by Matt Furniss

All Links and show notes in their Entirety can be found at http://www.clivebarkercast.com

New episode of the Clive Barker Podcast

[barkercast]

354 : Horrifying Hulu Hellraiser Halloween Hextravaganza

Thanks for joining us at  the Clive Barker Podcast. If you’re a fan, why not subscribe or follow so you never miss a release. In episode 354, Jose and Ryan have some breaking news about the Hulu Hellraiser film, plus some cool stuff from Doug Bradley, Dr. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and Pete Atkins. 

Sponsor Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination 

This episode is sponsored by Don Bertram’s Celebrate Imagination. Don Bertram is a long-time friend of Clive, and advocate of his art, but Don’s unique and inspiring paintings are for sale, and up to 50% of the proceeds go to the arts in medicine program at the Texas Children’s Cancer Center.  Click the side-banner and follow the link to the etsy shop to have. A look!  

From The Reef

Hellraiser (Hulu) news from Ed Martinez Roving Reporter: 

Halloween Release (Hulu Halloween)

Now picture locked. 

New Book from Dr. Sorcha Ni Fhlainn and Edinburgh University Press

Doug Bradley, Hollow Podcast by Violet Hour Media

Doug Bradley narrates “Scorn” video game. 

Pete Atkins’ story “The Thing About Cats” will appear in Midsummer Macabre

The Fantasy World of Clive Barker

LSF is followed by Tony Todd!

Discussion

Reddit

OakTown43

If a film of Imagica [sic] were announced, would you be excited, ready to be disappointed, ready for it to never actually come to completion? 

Discord

General / Raul: Discussion about Clive’s output and switching projects mid-stream. 

Coming Next 

Jericho Squad 77

A-Z Commentaries: V for Vice Versa – Nightbreed (Theatrical Cut)

More News and Interviews

And this podcast, having no beginning will have no end. 

web www.clivebarkercast.com

iOS App| Android App, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, Spotify, Pandora, Libsyn, Tunein, iHeart Radio, Pocket Casts, Google Play, Radio.com, DoubleTwist and YouTube and Join Facebook and the BarkerCast Listeners & Occupy Midian group

Discord Community

Twitter: @BarkerCast| @OccupyMidian

Support the show, Buy a T-Shirt

All Links and show notes in their Entirety can be found at http://www.clivebarkercast.com

New episode of the Clive Barker Podcast