Notice Board

Join us as we delve into the multi-faceted aspects of horror tales, examining the political, sociological and cultural implications these narratives carry.

Monday, Oct. 30 | 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Mountain Time 

Virtual, RSVP for Zoom link 

For more information: Visit WSSS Website or email Chelsea.ekstrand@uleth.ca, miranda.leibel@uleth.ca

Panel Abstracts:

Latines love horror and this passion has led to big profits. A 2012 Nielsen study found that Latines make the highest audience share of horror/thriller film releases. The 2016 article Scare up Success with Hispanic Horrorphiles by Diana Rasbot presents that “Hispanics are 42 per cent more likely than non-Hispanics to be horror fans.” Such is the power of Latine horror fans that the 2018 horror film, The Nun, which starred Mexican actor Demian Bichir, broke box office records for the Conjuring franchise thanks to Latina/o audiences who made up 36 per cent of theatre goers. Unfortunately, the love is not reciprocated by Hollywood which continually profits from Latine audiences yet rarely tells Latine stories or includes Latine actors and creators. Until recently, Latines were either relegated to background characters, predictable villains, and stereotypes or completely invisible. If Latine characters and stories are few and far between in traditional U.S. horror films, where does Latine horror exist? In this presentation, I provide an initial definition of Latine horror and show how the genre is about reading against the grain and beyond generic borders. 

The 19th Century was obsessed with categorization. The development of the first Natural History museums in England coincided with rapid imperial expansion, and the collection of specimens took on colonial energies. Symbolically, the museum sought to impose order on the world, and thus reiterate the superior intellectual might and controlling powers of England. But are humans so neatly categorized and defined as the subjects of the Victorian museum? Surprisingly, we might locate some answers to this question in the era’s vampire fiction—ghoulish tales of monsters whose bodies, simultaneously living and dead, animal and human, often unrecognizably gendered, etc., defy all rational biological categorization. My presentation examines Carmilla, the mid-Victorian lesbian vampire novel that inspired Dracula, to examine the vampire as an ambivalent Queer alternative to the labelling, categorizing imperial gaze embodied by 19th Century museums.

nêhiyaw actor Michael Greyeyes asserts, “Who would be the best survivor in an actual apocalypse? Us. We actually lived through the apocalypse: the colonial settler state is another kind of apocalypse for us.” Although it may be surprising that Indigenous horror is having a moment right now, Indigenous writers and filmmakers use horror to draw people in to highlight the ongoing effects of colonization. By using Indigenous ways of knowing like the Métis rougarou, a werewolf-like creature, or setting an alien invasion film in Pangnirtung, Nunavut, horror is being Indigenized. We’ll explore some common horror tropes to appreciate how Indigenous artists are making the genre their own.

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Orquidea Morales is an assistant professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television at the University of Arizona. Her work on border violence, Latinx media, and horror has been published in journals such as Film Quarterly and Flow. Her work looks at the intersection of Latine, Latin American, and Horror Studies. She is currently working on a manuscript that traces the movement of La Llorona in Mexican and U.S. film. 

Lin Young’s dissertation examined the dual influence of science and object theory on the 19th Century ghost story. Her dissertation won the A.C. Hamilton Prize for top English dissertation of 2020 at Queen’s, as well as Queen’s’ “Outstanding Humanities Thesis” for the Governor General Gold Medal Competition in 2020. She has also been awarded the 2018 Mary Eliza Root Prize from the Victorian Popular Fiction Association, and is the author of the 2016 Hamilton Prize-winning essay, “To Talk of Many Things: Chaotic Empathy and Taxidermy Anxiety in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” in Victorian Review. She is currently Assistant Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta and is working on a book about Victorians in videogames.

Dr. June Scudeler (Métis, she/her) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, cross-appointed with the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, located on the territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) Nations. Her research encompasses queer Indigenous studies, literature, film and art. She is currently delving into Indigenous horror, particularly the Métis rougarou, a creature who is a mixture of French werewolf or loup garou, and Cree and Anishinaabe shapeshifters.