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!

Purgatory, Beauty & Trash at the BFI

 

On Monday 31 October I will be giving a lecture in the BFI Reuben Library to introduce my latest book – Purgatory: Towards the Decay of Meaning.

 

Published by Strange Attractor Press, Purgatory is the latest addition to the three-part Trash Project in which I take a personal look at Trash and Trash Aesthetics. From Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Tony Hancock’s The Rebel and from the decadent artworks of the late nineteenth century to the early years of cinema, this sequel to Inferno examines the complex relationship between ‘beauty’ and ‘trash’.  

 

I will be looking at how a renewed interest in alchemy and a stern cult of beauty met in Paris in the late nineteenth century and how together they reflected a hierarchy of values that would shape the social unrest of the late 1960s. Consequently, in the wake of May 68, I trace the emergence of a uniquely European form of Trash cinema devoted exclusively to beauty, sex and despair.

 

The talk will begin on Monday 31 October at 18.30 and will last around 90 minutes, so you will have plenty of time to go home afterwards, change into your Halloween costume and scare your neighbours. 

 

The BFI is located on the South Bank within spitting distance of Waterloo Bridge and National Theatre – but I wouldn’t recommend that as means of finding the place. The Reuben Library can be found in the same part of the building as the box office and NFT3.

 

Tickets for the event are £6.50, and they’re selling fast, so be sure to book in advance.

 

Details can be found here.

 

Pictured above: Cover art for Purgatory by Tihana Sare – Tony Hancock Irene Handl and George Sanders register their unalloyed delight at the prospect of being featured in Volume II of The Trash Project

 

The Cosmos Remains A Work In Progress

I have a lot of new work coming out in print at the moment – and, as is typical, it is all coming out at once. First up is Space for Visual Research 2: Workshop Manual and Compendium, which contains an essay I wrote over the summer at the request of Anna Sinofzik, one of the volume’s editors and a former student of mine. The work contained in this fascinating collection represents an extracurricular graphic design laboratory at the Bauhaus University Weimar, and I am particularly proud to have been invited to contribute – it feels to me as if a tradition is being carried through from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. My best wishes go out to all who are involved in this enterprise.  

My essay is called ‘The Cosmos is a Work in Progress: Astronomy as Communication Design – A Guide to What You Are Missing’ and is based on a lecture I gave at the Royal College of Art earlier in the year – details on that particular talk can be found here .

For more information on the publication, which is available from Spector Books of Leipzig, please click here or here.

There are two more new essays of mine that have just gone into print, and I will get to them in successive posts. Each deserves to have its own entry as each is very different. Bear with me while the blog adjusts itself.

The Cosmos Is A Work in Progress

On Tuesday January 17 I will be giving a public lecture at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington The talk, called ‘The Cosmos Is A Work in Progress: Astronomy as Data Design’, is presented as part of the School of Visual Communications Work in Progress show.

Here is a an extract from the blurb:

The history of astronomy offers a platform from which we can explore ideas and theories surrounding experimental communication and information design. To examine how the cosmos can fit into that our narrow frame of references is to confront complex issues of representation, illustration, visual complexity and media archaeology. What are we actually seeing when we look at space? Ken Hollings offers a guide to what you've been missing.

So get ready for optical canons, Mayan suicide gods and Saturn devouring his children. The talk is scheduled to start at 4.30. This is a free event, but you will need a ticket to attend. You can order those by clicking here.

For more information on the students’ WIP show, check their Facebook page here.

Pictured above: rarely seen moments in our universe.

The Bright Labyrinth at the ICA

On Saturday June 6 between 2 and 6 pm I will be taking part in a panel with Mark Fisher, Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck University of London and Mary Margaret Rinebold. The session is dedicated to ‘Changing Prospects’, dealing with change and our collective sense of futurity; and I will be presenting some extracts from The Bright Labyrinth and publicly reaffirming my desire to be reincarnated as Astro-Boy one day – although there are some who fear that this may have already happened.

 The event is part of the ambitious fig-2 year-long cycle of exhibitions and installations. This panel is one of a series instigated by the artist Marjolijn Dijkman. To give you more information on this exciting project I am reproducing the programme notes for this event below:

A three century old ritual is reimagined by artist Marjolijn Dijkman in the form of a week long presentation of ideas and discussions called ‘LUNÄ Talks: Uncertainty Scenarios’. The LUNÄ Talks take place around a table, a reproduction of the original table which accommodated The Lunar Society of Birmingham, where pioneers of the Industrial Revolution debated Philosophy, Arts, Sciences and Commerce, every month on the night before full moon. Three centuries later, this table, becomes a platform to develop and expand the knowledge production of our times. The programme includes conversations about the notion of Time, recent developments in Neuroscience and explorations in Big Data, amongst others. The programme of invited speakers posits seeds of thought planted to flourish in a close future.

Saturday’s session will concentrate on the notion of change in relation to the locus of collective imagination of the future. We will explore different approaches, which are utilised to motivate and trigger seismic shifts relating to the world around us.

LUNÄ is based on the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which was formed from a group of amateur experimenters, tradesmen and artisans who met and made friends in the Midlands in the 1760s. The original Lunar men gathered together for lively dinner conversations, the journey back from their Birmingham meeting place lit by the full moon. Members included the flamboyant entrepreneur Matthew Boulton, the brilliantly perceptive engineer James Watt whose inventions harnessed the power of steam, the radical polymath Joseph Priestley who, among his wide-ranging achievements discovered oxygen, and the innovative potter and social reformer Josiah Wedgwood. Their debates brought together philosophy, arts, science and commerce, and as well as debating and discovering, the ‘Lunarticks’ also built canals and factories, launched balloons, named plants, gases and minerals, managed world-class businesses — and changed the face of England.

June 6
2 – 6 pm
fig-2
The Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall
London SW1Y 5AH
For tickets and more information, click here.

Pictured above: the LUNÄ Table by Marjolijn Dijkman

Ludwig II: Dandyism, Decadence and Decay

On the evening of Monday April 20 at London’s Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History, I will be giving a talk on one of my favourite subjects: the life, architecture and aesthetics of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He is one of the key figures in my next book on Trash and Trash Aesthetics and a constant source of fascination.

Ludwig II ascended to the Bavarian throne in 1864 at the age of eighteen. His first act as king was to invite his hero Richard Wagner to Munich. Those who understood or appreciated his deep passion for beauty and sensation would not have been surprised. Builder of extravagant palaces, shunning the day in favour of the night, lover of poetry, theatre and opera, Ludwig’s life was the embodiment of the ‘fairy tale as aristocratic dream’ – to quote his cousin Crown Prince Rudolf of Austrian. Ludwig was also quick to embrace modern technology – including electricity, engines, glazed spans and cement – in the realization of his fantasies, even though his dream of a flying throne, submarines and a death ray were never to become a reality in his own life.

 An inspiration to Verlaine, Huysmans and Crowley, his tragic death, denounced as a madman and stripped of his crown, remains a key myth for the 21st Century.

April 20th 6:30 - 8:00 pm
The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Natural History
11 Mare Street
London E8 4RP
02079983617
info@thelasttuesdaysociety.org

Tickets are £10 - £5 concessions

To book and learn more about this event, please click here.

See Also

Ludwig, Elvis, Michael at the Venice Biennale

Ludwig II’s Venus Grotto

Pictures from Nyphenburg and Herrenchiemsee by KH and the Daily Planet's roving shutterbug Kitty Keen