'Trash: An Autobiography' Is Now Available Online

 

 

 

I am very pleased to announce that the edition of Bad Punk broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM on Friday 10 July is now available on Mixcloud – and you can find it by clicking here.

 

The show went out live at 22.00 BST on a very hot night. There was nobody else in the studio apart from Johny Brown and me, and we had to switch the aircon off while we were broadcasting. It was a very special occasion, not just because of the heat and the sense of that Johny and I were the only ones in the studio late on a Friday night. It became a piece of live theatre. I was reading extracts from all the three volumes of The Trash Project – from Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise – and from essays that had previously appeared in Noon and émergent magazines, which will be included in the forthcoming Ken Hollings Reader from Strange Attractor Press. I also included drafts from my autobiography, a long-term writing project that is already producing some surprising and exciting material.

 

I am of course very grateful to Johny Brown for creating such a fabulous show around my reading of ‘Trash: An Autobiography’ parts one through three, and also most beholden to  Strange Attractor Press for publishing the Trash Project and to Noon and émergent for featuring my work. 

 

Anyone who attended my recent ‘Trash Trilogy’ lecture at the BFI will know what to expect from this show, and I hope you will enjoy it. Bad Movies on Bad Punk is a reality!

 

 

Bad Movies on 'Bad Punk' On for Friday 10 July

 

STOP PRESS: UPDATE – this is to confirm that my appearance on ‘Bad Punk’ with Johny Brown and the Band of Holy Joy on Resonance 104.4FM is now happening on Friday 10 July. The show starts at 22.00 BST and can be followed online via the Resonance website – please see my previous post for 22 June for details.

 

At a glance:

Ken Hollings ‘Trash: An Autobiography’

‘Bad Punk’ with Johny Brown and The Band of Holy Joy

22.00 – 23.30 

Friday 10 July

Resonance 104.4 FM

 

Pictured above: Tandra Quinn as Tarantella stealing the show in Mesa of Lost Women 

Bad Movies on ‘Bad Punk’: Ken Hollings on Resonance 104.4 FM with Johny Brown

 

I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining the fabulous Johny Brown and members of The Band of Holy Joy live on Friday 26 June for another episode of ‘Bad Punk’, a show Johny has been hosting for almost twenty-five years.

 

Last time I appeared on ‘Bad Punk’, it was with Howlround for a ninety-minute show devoted to our work together as The Howling, first broadcast in April 2025. For more details of that event, please click here.

 

This time around, it will just be me with a microphone and a script, plus Johny and The Band of Holy Joy dismantling the airspace around me in real time. 

 

I will be presenting ‘Trash: A Personal Education’, comprising extracts from the three volumes that make up my Trash Project, cut together with some new thoughts and autobiographical musings on the theme of bad movies and why they remain so fabulous. 

 

Trash has been an abiding passion of mine for some time now, and ‘Trash: A Personal Education’ will also contain snippets from essays I have written in the past for Noon and Emergent and are to be included in The Ken Hollings Reader, due out next year from Strange Attractor Press. Look out for more details on this in the coming weeks.

 

In the meantime, be prepared for 90 minutes of hypnogogic beauty and uneasy easy listening on Resonance 104.4, starting at 22.00, Friday 26 June. For that day’s complete schedule on the Resonance website, please click here. 

 

At a glance:

Ken Hollings ‘Trash: An Autobiography’

‘Bad Punk’ with Johny Brown and The Band of Holy Joy

22.00 – 23.30 

Friday 26 June 

Resonance 104.4 FM

STOP PRESS: Due to unforeseen circumstances, this show has been postponed until July 10 - look out for more details in a future post.

Pictured above: Bad Movies and Bad People go together –  KH, Maria Montez in Cobra Woman, El Santo, the Mutant from Metaluna, I Was A Teenage Frankenstein, She Devils on Wheels, Bronx Warriors

 

 

Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise: Talking Trash at the BFI

 

As part of the BFI’s ‘Trash!’ season at the South Bank, I have been invited to give a lecture on my three-part Trash Project, published by Strange Attractor Press. Comprising three volumes, plus an additional Trash Concordance, this expansive and fragmented study contains personal reflections on Trash and Trash Culture developed over the years. Divided into Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, the Trash Project presents a complex but structured mosaic of perceptions on everything from alchemy, beauty and sovereignty to sexploitation, biker movies and underground cinema. It was always intended to be wide-ranging but never definitive.

 

Thanks to the BFI, I have been given the opportunity to look back on the whole thing for the first time since the Trilogy was completed. I will be reflecting in particular on the relationship between movies and Trash, starting with the ‘Purple Death’ episode of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe and then moving further into the deep spaces opened up by Jack Smith, Doris Wishman, Kenneth Anger and Mario Bava. I’m not saying that it won’t get messy, but it will be interesting – so do please join me.

 

The lecture will be taking place in the Reuben Library on the evening of Wednesday 29 April. You can find more details and book tickets by clicking here.

 

I will also be signing copies of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise in the BFI bookshop before the talk and would be delighted to say hello to anyone who drops by. 

 

Here are the basics:

Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise

Ken Hollings’ Guide to the Trash Underworld

Wednesday 29 April 2026 at 20:00

In the Reuben Library

The BFI South Bank

 

Ken Hollings Shares Bill with Newly Restored Print of ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ at the BFI

 

I feel particularly honoured to have been asked to provide an introduction to a special screening of Edward D Wood Jr’s cinematic masterpiece Plan 9 from Outer Space at the British Film Institute on the evening of Tuesday 7 April. As part of their ‘Trash! The Wildest Films You’ve Ever Seen’ Southbank season, the BFI will be showing a newly restored 35mm print of this fabulous movie, so we can all bathe in its pristine glory.  

 

Anyone who knows me also knows that I bow to nobody in my love for Plan 9, which I revere with an intensity that would shame the fires of Hell itself. I first saw it at the old Scala cinema in Kings Cross around 1982 – I came to laugh but stayed to worship. One of the people who came along with me spat out their ice cream at the sight of it. Since then, I have made numerous references to it in many of my books and essays and have rewatched the movie on countless occasions. Time spent with Plan 9, I have found, is never time wasted. When recovering from cancer surgery a few years back, I would listen to the Plan 9 OST, including all of its inspired dialogue and Trevor Duncan’s tense library music score, on my i-Pod. It got me through more than one lonely, fearful night.

 

I’m not going to praise Plan 9’s many virtues here – I’ll merely draw your attention to its astonishing cast, from Bela Lugosi and Vampira to ‘Swedish Angel’ Tor Johnson and the Amazing Criswell. After that, you’re on your own. If you know, you know. If you don’t, Google it.

 

On the evening of 7 April, I will be giving a special reading to introduce Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s going to be an unforgettable night and is not to be missed. You can find more details about the screening and where to book tickets by clicking here.

 

Here are the basics:

Plan 9 from Outer Space

Tuesday 7 April, starting at 18.10 

In NFT1 at the BFI Southbank

 

STOP PRESS: I will also be giving a lecture at the end of the BFI’s ‘Trash!’ season in the Reuben Library on 29 April. Look out for details. I’ll be posting them on here.

 

Pictured above: Vampira, Vampira and Tor Johnson, Plan 9 title, Vampira

 

 

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!

Got My Name In The Paper: Ken Hollings Reads at Helen of Troy

 

Issue Two of the ambitious newspaper project Agapius hit the street on Tuesday 16 December with a new text by me on its front inside page. It was great to have the opportunity work with such a large format, and ‘Permanent Threat’ is the result. Its theme of constant societal collapse and menace has been carefully balanced by the editors with Jeremy Deller’s more reassuring ‘Community Centre’ text on the back inside page. In between, Agapius offers a wide range of subjects, styles and techniques. From Satanism in Bolivia to a Queer History of Diamonds, everything in this newspaper is a reflective surface.

 

The paper launched in grand style at Helen of Troy, a louche little hangout on Hanway Street in the West End of London. This marvellous dive’s interior lighting concept favoured deep shades of red, thus making it almost impossible for any text to read indoors. Charlie Hills, who coedits Agapius with Kay Basil Fletcher, had asked me to read ‘Permanent Threat’ at the paper’s launch, but I wasn’t sure how that would be possible under the circumstances – besides, everybody was having far too good a time to stop what they were doing and listen to me. Charlie, however, had the inspired idea of inviting me to read my text to the sizeable crowd smoking and vaping on the pavement outside Helen of Troy. Hanway Street feels more like a back alley in old Paris than something that leads off Oxford Street – even this close to Xmas – so I decided to do just that.

 

Long story short: doing the reading outdoors turned it into a small piece of theatre that ended up involving pedestrians and bystanders in the action. At one point a taxi dropping off a passenger had to inch its way past me, but I didn’t stop reading – no, not even for a second.

 

You can find more details about Agapius issues One and Two by clicking here. Support independent publishing wherever and whenever you can.

 

Pictured above: Ken Hollings reads ‘Permanent Threat’ to those attending the launch of Agapius Issue Two at Helen of Troy, Hanway Street, 16 December 2025 – photographs by @lahollings – also pictured above: Agapius Issue Two, a detail of ‘Permanent Threat’, plus the Agapius promotional badge.