Ken Hollings Live and In Person at Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies

 

I am excited and delighted beyond words to announce that I will be giving a talk at the  Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies on the evening of March 10. As with all their previous live events, it will be taking place at the Horse Hospital. Please click  here for more details.

 

The talk I am giving is called ‘Terminal Desert: From Trinity Site to the Ends of the Earth (via Bronson Canyon)’ and deals with some of my favourite subjects: deserts, monsters, postapocalyptic survivalists and Tura Satana. 

 

‘Terminal Desert’ begins with the anguish and horror at the end of Eric Von Stroheim’s 1924 silent classic Greed. In the middle of Death Valley, a hundred miles from water or safety, the movie’s tragic protagonist finds himself chained to the corpse of the man he has just brutally murdered. Staring at tinted images of blood-spattered sand and scattered gold coins, he realizes that he is a dead man. Shot on location in Death Valley under torturous conditions, this scene anticipates the development of a movie genre in which the desert becomes a home for monsters and mutations, violent criminals and homicidal drifters. ‘It's alive and waiting for you,’ declares the scientist hero of It Came from Outer Space. ‘Ready to kill you if you go too far. The sun will get you or the cold at night…a thousand ways the desert can kill!’ The first atomic bombs were tested in the Southwest American desert, after all, creating an even greater sense of desolation. ‘Terminal Desert’ visits some of the desert locations used in horror flicks such as The Beast of Yucca Flats, Mesa of Lost Women, Them! and The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes, examining their connection to this wild irradiated wasteland. During the 1950s and 1960s the Mojave Desert and New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto slowly took over from LA’s Bronson Canyon as Hollywood’s low-budget backdrop for alien worlds.

 

Following the monsters, space invaders and mad scientists, came biker movies like Satan’s Sadists that built on the reputation of Russ Meyers ‘roughies’ such as Motorpsycho and Faster Pussy Cat Kill! Kill! The alkaline expanse became a blank screen upon which to project serial fantasies of unspeakable torture, madness and murder. By the 1980s, the desert became the signifier, thanks to foreign imports like Mad Max and The New Barbarians, for the postapocalyptic world of isolated communities of freaks and survivalists attempting to make something out of the desolation. These characters become the inhabitants of an endless postmodern shoreline in movies such as World Gone Wild, which features Bruce Dern, who had starred as a biker in The Wild Angels and The Cycle Savages, Anthony James as a sympathetic cannibal, plus Adam Ant reverently quoting the words of Charles Manson to his own desert-based murder cult. 

 

Further mutant strains include Tremors, in which a desert community make a desperate stand against giant earth-boring creatures, and Resident Evil: Extinction, where zombie crows crowd the skies over the Nevada desert, taking us full circle. ‘Terminal Desert’ questions what constitutes a horror movie and what its aesthetics might include. It reveals how madness, cruelty and violence don’t always lurk in the darkest shadows but in the brightest sunlight. And they are not hidden inside enclosed spaces, but standing out against a flat unforgiving plane.

 

We dare you to see it!

 

Terminal Desert 

at The Miskatonic Institute for Horror Studies

19.00 

Tuesday 10 March 

The Horse Hospital

Colonnade

Bloombsury

London WC1N 1JD

 

Pictured above: Greed, Mesa of Lost Women, It Came from Outer Space, Them!, Beast of Yucca Flats, 
Motor Psycho, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!