York’s Basement at City Screen Picturehouse is very excited to be offering a six-week film course investigating the contemporary horror film.

From Hollywood to Europe to Asia, the horror film is thriving. With recent international hits like It Follows (2014), The Babadook (2014), Big Bad Wolves (2013), Painless (2012), The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (2013) and Flu (2013), filmmakers in countries as diverse as USA, Australia, Israel, Spain, France, Japan, Hong Kong, India and South Korea are using the horror genre to address the fears and anxieties of their cultures.

This six-week course will investigate contemporary horror cinema around the globe. Focusing on a different national cinema each week, the course looks at what terrifies the people of these nation states and ways in which horror crosses over to international audiences. With film clips and discussion, the course will explore the genre’s unique capacity to break cultural boundaries and speak to social, political and personal anxieties in a world cinema context.

Each session includes a presentation/lecture followed by a tutorial where discussion is encouraged. Advance viewing is optional; select scenes and montages will be shown during weekly sessions.

Course leader Jon Towlson is a film critic for STARBURST and the author of Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present (McFarland & Co, 2014); Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Constellations) (Auteur/Columbia University Press, 2016) and The Turn to Gruesomeness in American Horror Films, 1931-1936 (McFarland & Co, 2016)

Course dates: Every Tuesday from 25 October to 29 November. DOORS 7PM. SESSION STARTS 7:30PM. TICKETS £45/£43/£40.

Tickets available by clicking here.