The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is proud to present Mark Jancovich’s class “The Paranoid Woman’s Film“, which will explore the unique genre of film that chronicled women falling for murderous men. The class will take place on March 7th at The Horse Hospital at 7 pm.
The Miskatonic Institute is a celebrated organization with branches in the UK and US that is committed to bringing academic level classes to the public that focus on the genre and themes surrounding horror, while spotlighting some of the genre world’s most renowned critical, literary and filmmaking luminaries.
Lecturer and author Mark Jancovich guides the discussion on the breakout of the paranoid (or Gothic) woman’s film, the psychologically driven features focused around a women leads falling for questionable men, and which took a rise when cinema audiences became overwhelmingly female in the 1940s. His talk will use four films as key references – Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Joan Fontaine’s Jane Eyre, Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady and Val Lewton’s Cat People, and examine how the genre is related to both film noir and horror.
Mark Jancovich is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of several books: Horror (Batsford, 1992); The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (CUP, 1993); Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (MUP, 1996); and The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (with Lucy Faire and Sarah Stubbings, BFI, 2003). He is also the editor of several collections: Approaches to Popular Film (with Joanne Hollows, MUP, 1995); The Film Studies Reader (with Joanne Hollows and Peter Hutchings, Arnold/OUP, 2000); Horror, The Film Reader (Routledge, 2001); Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (with James Lyons, BFI, 2003); Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (with Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis, MUP, 2003); Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (with Paul Grainge and Sharon Monteith, EUP, 2006); Film and Comic Books (with Ian Gordon and Matthew P. McAllister, University Press of Mississippi, 2007); and The Shifting Definitions of Genre: Essays on Labeling Films, Television Shows and Media (with Lincoln Geraghty, McFarland, 2008). He was also the founder of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies; is a series editor (with Eric Schaefer) of the MUP book series, Inside Popular Film; and is a series editor (with Charles Acland) of the Berg book series, Film Genres. After over a decade researching the history of horror in the 1940s, he is now working on horror in the 1960s.
The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London – The Paranoid Woman’s Film will take place on Thursday, March 7, 2019, from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm at The Horse Hospital (Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London). Tickets are £10 in advance and £11 at the door. Tickets and additional information can be found at https://www.miskatonicinstitute.com/events/the-paranoid-womans-film-london/.
