Held live on Saturday, 19 February, 2022, this inaugural HORROR REVERIE symposium on Nosferatu features three panels on topics including filming locations, actor histories, re-scoring and restoration, queer readings, and more. Panelists include filmmakers, musicians, silent film historians, and horror film scholars.

Access the symposium online:
​A recording and transcript of the symposium, with a critical framing text by Nosferatu scholar Cristina Masaccesi (Devil's Advocates: Nosferatu, 2015, Auteur Press), is available in the June 2022 issue of the online, open-access journal, Monstrum. 
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Co-sponsored by the Collective for Research on Epistemologies of Embodied Risk (CORÉRISC), the Montréal Monstrum Society and Monstrum, Oklahoma Baptist University, the University of East Anglia, and the Moving Image Research Lab, with support from the Fonds de recherche du Quebec, société et culture.​
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Picture
The very first newspaper advertisement for NOSFERATU, heralding its opening in Rotterdam on 17 February 1922.
PROVISIONAL PROGRAM
Saturday, 19 February, 1pm-4pm EST

1:00 – 1:10 — Introductory remarks

1:10 – 1:55 — Panel 1: The Legacy of Nosferatu
Chair: Gary D. Rhodes
Speakers: E. Elias Merhige, Stephen Bissette, Argyle Goolsby

2:00 – 2:45 — Panel 2: Historical and Other Contexts
Chair: Erica Tortolani
Speakers: Steve Choe, Lokke Heiss, Murray Leeder, Milly Williamson

3:00 – 3:45 — Panel 3: Style, Theme, Politics,  Aesthetics
Chair: Robert Singer
Speakers: John Edgar Browning, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

3:45 – 4:00: Closing Remarks
RELATED NEWS
  • Read the 17 February, 2022, op-ed article, "Nosferatu at 100" by Gary D. Rhodes in The Los Angeles Review of Books here. 
  • Check out here the sample pages of the Grimoire that artist Leigh J. Mccloskey created for scenes that did not make it to the final cut of E. Elias Merhige's film Shadow of the Vampire.
  • Find Argyle Goolsby's score for Nosferatu here. ​
  • Horror Reverie 1, an online symposium celebrating 100 years of Nosferatu will be published with video recordings, a live transcript, and critical framing text in Monstrum 5.1, June 2022. 
SPEAKERS
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E. Elias Merhige is the director of Begotten, Shadow of the Vampire (screened at the 53rd Cannes Directors’ Fortnight program and nominated for an Academy Award), Suspect Zero, and Polia & Blastema. 

Stephen R. Bissette, a pioneer graduate of the Joe Kubert School, was an instructor at the Center for Cartoon Studies from 2005-2020. He is renowned for his work on Swamp Thing, Taboo (launching From Hell and Lost Girls), '1963,' S.R. Bissette’s Tyrant®, co-creating John Constantine, and creating the world's second '24-Hour Comic' (invented by Scott McCloud for Bissette). Comics creator (Spongebob Comics, Paleo, Awesome ‘Possum), illustrator (Vermont Monster Guide), author (Teen Angels & New Mutants, short fiction in Hellboy: Odd Jobs, The New Dead, Mister October, co-writer of Comic Book Rebels, Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman, The Monster Book: Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Bissette’s latest includes Cryptid Cinema™, the ‘Midnight Movie Monograph’ David Cronenberg’s The Brood, sketchbooks Thoughtful Creatures and Brooding Creatures, and co-authoring Studio of Screams.

John Edgar Browning is a recognized authority on the horror genre, vampires, and Monster Theory. He has contracted or published in the field some 20 academic and popular trade books and over 90 articles, chapters, and reviews.

Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016), ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2021), and is a co-editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019).

Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, PhD, teaches courses in genre cinema, grotesque traditions, and monster ethics in the Humanities department at John Abbott College in Montréal, Québec, Canada. He also coordinates the Montreal Monstrum Society Courses and Lecture series. His forthcoming book is Grand-Guignol Cinema and the Horror Genre: Sinister Tableaux of Dread, Corporeality and the Senses (Anthem, 2022).

Argyle Goolsby is the co-founder of horrorpunk pioneers Blitzkid for whom he's served as bassist and singer for 25 years.  When not touring the deepest, darkest recesses of the globe, he serves on the board of the Witch's Dungeon Classic Movie Museum in Bristol, CT, is the US label rep for the German record label Fiend Force Records, and is a resident tattoo artist at Black Hydra Tattoo in Fitchburg, MA.
Goolsby has also written a score for Nosferatu​ from a first-generation 16mm print of the film, all available here. 

Lokke Heiss has a medical degree and an MFA in film studies from USC. While in film school, Dr. Heiss was asked by film historian David Shepard to help restore Nosferatu and to provide a commentary track for the film. As part of Heiss's research for this project, he travelled to Germany and Slovakia to find the original locations for the production, providing perhaps the first NosferaTOUR available for fans. Heiss has continued his research for the last 30 years, including two trips to Romania to find the origin of the word, "Nosferatu." Dr. Heiss writes about film on his website http://lokkeheiss.com.
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Murray Leeder is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of English, Film, Theatre and Media at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and American studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. She is a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and author of Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2019), which was awarded the Lord Ruthven Prize by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts in 2020. She has published widely on socio-cultural history, subjectivity and postmodernism in Film Studies, American studies, Horror studies, and Popular Culture. ​

Milly Williamson is Senior Lecturer of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London, and author of The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy (Columbia UP, 2005).
CHAIRS  AND ORGANIZERS

Mark Jancovich is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, and the author of many books and articles on horror and the moving image.

Gary D. Rhodes is a Professor of Media Production at the Oklahoma Baptist University and the author of The Birth of the American Horror Film (Edinburgh UP, 2018) and many other books on horror and early cinema.

Robert Singer is a Professor of Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and series co-editor (with Gary D. Rhodes) of ReFocus for Edinburgh UP.

Erica Tortolani recently completed a Ph.D. in Communication with a concentration in Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  Together with Martin F. Norden, she has published the edited volume ReFocus: The Films of Paul Leni (Edinburgh University Press), which debuted in March 2021. 

Kristopher Woofter, PhD, is Editor-in-Chief of Monstrum and editor of the recent books Shirley Jackson: A Companion (Peter Lang, 2021) and American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, co-edited with Will Dodson (U. of Texas Press, 2021). He teaches courses on horror and the Weird traditions in literature and the moving image at Dawson College in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Visit his research hub, The Hauntologist.
SPONSORS