We’re smack dab in the heart of spooky season, that time of year when we turn our attention to all things dark and scary. For some faculty members and graduate students in the College of Letters & Science, that time is all year long. They’re studying, teaching and writing about subjects like horror and the supernatural and engaging in some seriously spooky scholarship. Join us for a horror-ific tour of some of the highlights.
Scream Queen
For years, UW students had been clamoring for a course on horror movies. This summer, Sarah Mae Fleming (MS’23) finally gave them one.
Fleming, a PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts, might have been the perfect choice to teach it. During her time at UW, she’d already done research projects on horror classics such as Rosemary’s Baby and Carrie, and she is a lifelong horror-flick aficionado, from the days when her dad showed her Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds at, as she puts it, “way too young an age.”
She configured the four-week online class as an overview of horror from the 1960s to today. Each week had a theme — industry themes like meta horror (Scream) and the elevated horror works of A24 Films (Midsommar) and global horror including the original The Ring, The Host and Suspiria.
“One thing I realized when I was teaching the class, which isn’t something I was thinking about before, is that horror is quite cyclical,” says Fleming. “The films that stretch from 1968 to 1980 are all about horror stemming from the family. And then when we look to what a lot of people term post-horror, the A24 stuff like Hereditary and Midsommar, it’s also about horror stemming from the family.”
Fleming agonized over her choices — classics like Psycho and Halloween didn’t make the cut, while more modern identity-based films such as the all-female The Descent and Jordan Peele’s Us did. But what really surprised her was how her students were into the horror flicks that came out before they were born, movies like The Exorcist and The Shining.
“They were all commenting, ‘My parents said, The Exorcist was the scariest movie they had ever seen in their lives,’” says Fleming, whose teaching specialty is sound design in films. “They were very excited for it.”
Fleming’s class was ranked one of the top 10 most popular of the UW’s summer offerings, which is likely encouragement for her to teach it again in the future. After all, if the Scream franchise can get seven entries, why not at least that many for a horror-movie class? She says she’d probably change the film lineup a little just to mix things up — Rosemary’s Baby remains a lock, but next time, the found-footage classic The Blair Witch Project would probably make the cut.
“I love teaching genres, and horror in particular,” Fleming says. “I’ve turned a lot of people onto horror that were horror skeptics in my life, so I’m considering that an accomplishment.”
Witches, Ghouls & Ghosts!
In the early 1900s, a Black British artist named Pamela Colman Smith created the unsettling imagery that adorns the 78 cards in the Rider–Waite Tarot deck — the one most popularly used by Tarot readers. More than 125 years later, Smith’s haunting visions helped inspire Tania Kolarik, a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History, to teach a class this fall on the supernatural in art named, “Witches, Ghosts & Ghouls!”
Kolarik, who specializes in medieval art, was also interested in spiritualism — which plays a surprisingly large part in Wisconsin’s lore. And once an essay on Smith and her Tarot work got her started digging, she found a lot of bodies, er, examples of spooky themes in art history. So far, her 66 students — not 666, but close — have been riveted by the class material. (It probably helps that Kolarik begins each class with a Halloween-themed Spotify playlist.)
Many of her students have never taken an art history class before. When she polled them, she found that many were also interested in the artistic origins of modern Halloween and horror concepts — for instance, where does the idea of a witch with a pointy hat and broomstick originate? Spoiler alert: The answer is a French manuscript illumination from 1440.
The course spans from ancient Assyria to modern times, but Kolarik is using topics to organize the historical tour — hence the witches, ghouls and ghosts.
For the ghosts, Kolarik drew on one of the earliest known depictions of a ghost — a Babylonian stone tablet that features a line drawing of a female figure pulling a male figure by a rope around his wrists.
“The speculation is that the female figure is a family member who’s haunting a family,” explains Kolarik, who uses both historical context and an era’s religious atmosphere to paint a fuller picture for her students. “And often ghosts in that context are coming up in the sense that maybe you have a dead relative who’s not happy with the way they’re being treated.”
On the back of the tablet, there’s a cuneiform script of the magic spell to use to rid yourself of a ghost.
Artistic representation of ghosts in the European Middle Ages is often what you’d expect (figures composed of phantom white lines) and what you may not (normal looking people portrayed as almost zombie-like skeletons). In Song Dynasty China (c. 960-1279), they’re painted as dead figures on the back of a silk scroll, so they look more faded and dimmer, as though passing to a higher realm of existence.
“Not all of this fits neatly into your box of what you think a ghost is, and you could probably look at some of these works and say, ‘Oh, that’s a zombie,’ based on modern pop culture references,” says Kolarik. “The students recognize that it doesn’t quite match with what they thought it was going to be like.”
Kolarik plans to take her students on a tour of Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison, using Civil War-era tombstones and monuments as examples of the ways people used art to commemorate the dead. She’s also asked them to compose their own mini supernatural art exhibition, complete with labels and essays explaining their spooky selections.
Kolarik knew the class was going to be a hit when, days before it launched, a bat flew at her head in the stairwell in Science Hall.
“In the Chinese and East Asian context, it’s considered an auspicious good luck symbol to encounter a bat,” she notes. “That’s how I’m choosing to look at it.”
Piles of Bodies, Rivers of Gore
Students who’ve taken William Brockliss’ annual course on ancient Greek and Roman monsters are keenly aware of his passion for some of the more horrific elements of familiar myths: a bloody and beheaded Medusa, or Atreus serving the bodies of his nephews to their father in a stew — you know, that kind of thing. What they might not know is that he’s recently shifted his eye for the gory and terrifying to the battlefields that provide the setting for some of the ancient traditions’ most famous epic poems.
Brockliss — the Bradshaw Knight Professor of the Environmental Humanities, director of the Center for Culture History and Environment, and Professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies — is soon to publish his latest book, Horror in Ancient Epic. In it he examines Greek and Roman epic poets’ fascination with, among other things, the carnage of the battlefield.
“When most of us think horror, the first thing we think of isn’t necessarily piles of dead warriors and decapitated limbs and that kind of thing on the battlefield,” says Brockliss. “And yet, it’s definitely horror.”
Plenty of studies on the epic tradition have focused on the prowess of legendary heroes such as Achilles and Hector. Brockliss wanted to examine something else.
“People ignore the fact that the majority of the real estate of epic poems such as The Iliad is taken up with descriptions of really horrible things happening to human bodies,” Brockliss points out, noting examples like the disembowelment of many a minor character or the way in which Achilles drags Hector’s dead body around the walls of Troy.
Some have argued that the poets had no choice but to describe what happened on the battlefield — that’s what war is like, right? Brockliss takes the opposite view: Some poets chose to focus on courage or cowardice in battle, but Homer chose to focus on something else.
“In the Homeric poems, there is this emphasis on bodies being carved up, and that’s an emphasis that’s then developed, and made gorier in the later tradition, where the poets pile up more and more instances of pretty horrible ways for people to die.”
Brockliss also found himself drawn to the haunted aspects of the epic poems — such as the prophet Theoclymenus in Odysseus' halls, who describes images of wolves dripping in blood and the ghosts of the suitors (who at this point are still alive) stalking the courtyard. The Latin poet Statius includes an image of Oedipus emerging from the lower levels of his palace, existing in a sort of living death, the eyes he gouged out as at the end of Sophocles play somehow still bleeding.
“On the basis of these sort of passages, people have suggested that we should see the epic poet as more like a necromancer who reawakens the dead in all of their goriness, particularly the dead from the battlefield, and confronts us with them, invading our present in a way that defies temporal logic.”
Phantasmagoric
Once upon a time — way back in the late 1700s — people would gather in dark, foreboding rooms, sometimes to hold seances and attempt to commune with spirits, and sometimes to watch magic lanterns project slides of spooky and disturbing images onto screens, walls and even curtains of smoke.
The latter practice came to be known as phantasmagoria. And Amanda Shubert is completely fascinated by it.
Shubert, a teaching faculty member in the Department of English, has made phantasmagoria a centerpiece of her research. While she’s busily teaching about Gothic novels like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, she’s also closing in on the publication of a book about phantasmagoria, Seeing Things: Virtual Aesthetics and Victorian Culture.
“As I was reading novels for my graduate school seminars, I was coming across imagery in these novels of spectrality, haunted mirrors and visual flows and things that were really interesting, like this archive of descriptions that seemed very cinematic,” says Shubert. “There was a visual culture reference that studying photography couldn’t explain.”
Shubert’s flashpoint was the Charles Dickens classic A Tale of Two Cities, and the scene in which Charles Darnay stands trial for treason. An overhead mirror projects light down on him, and Dickens describes it in a haunted and spooky way, as though it contained all the ghostly images of the people and prisoners who had stood in that spot before being condemned to death. “That was the beginning of my research on the phantasmagoria and the Gothic,” Shubert says.
With her book, she is searching for the through line that connects phantasmagoria to our sense of virtual reality today.
“We talk about the virtual today, and it’s not always clear what we mean,” Shubert explains. “It’s already a very slippery term, but I’m making the case that the 19th century, especially the second half of the 19th century, originated an idea of the virtual and aesthetics of the virtual that are based in an experience of seeing things that aren’t really there.”
To Shubert, phantasmagoria is the first sort of large-scale, virtual-like entertainment experience, where the audience feels the ghostly image is real, but they also know it’s not, so it’s fun rather than unsettling.
“If you really feel like that ghost is real, and you believe that that ghost is real, you're not having fun — you’re seeing a ghost,” says Shubert. “You’re probably terrified.”
The limitation of phantasmagoria was always the limitation of the painted slides used to project the images, but its purveyors often pushed the medium as far as it could go. Monsters and ghosts could appear to be approaching or retreating, hovering over the audience. Artistic virtuosos accomplished the task, and, eventually, in 1862, the British scientist John Henry Pepper wowed audiences by projecting off-stage spectral figures onto the stage to scare audiences using a technique that came to be known as Pepper’s Ghost. (If you’ve ever visited Disney’s Haunted Mansion in Florida, you’ve seen a modern version of Pepper’s Ghost in action.)
“The formats like phantasmagoria might die out, but the techniques are constantly being reconstituted and incorporated in new ways,” says Shubert. “The technology and the effects are still being used, just not in that Gothic framework.”
American Gothic
Shubert’s not the only instructor in the Department of English with an eye for the appeal of the Gothic. Graduate student Jordan Costanza conducts research and once taught a course about the Gothic novel. Like a lot of us, she’s drawn to the enduring hallmarks of the genre: the gloomy settings, the constant specter of death, the supernatural elements and spooky symbolism.
“To me, the Gothic represents a fascination with the dark, mysterious, melancholy, and often macabre aspects of humanity,” says Costanza, who seized on the topic after her undergraduate mentor steered her toward answering the question of why the disturbing and macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe are such a constant staple of elementary and middle school curriculums. ("A Cask of Amontillado," anyone?) “Even technically non-Gothic texts can be interpreted as Gothic works. For example, the Bible is teeming with Gothic elements, but people would not generally define it as a ‘Gothic text.’”
Costanza’s research focuses mostly on American Gothic — no, not the famous painting by Grant Wood — but the short stories of American writers like Poe and Joyce Carol Oates. Lately, she’s expanded her horizon to include English and Irish writers, as well.
“Gothic texts often draw on or are preoccupied with the past,” Constanza says. “And yet, despite this, they are remarkably useful in speaking to modern society. They can function as a lens through which to examine and confront societal fears and anxieties, power structures, identity and more.”
Unlike some of her students, Costanza’s not a fan of TV and film adaptations of the works she studies — she’s not planning to catch last year’s Netflix modern-Gothic adaptation of “The Fall of the House of Usher” anytime soon. She has been pleasantly surprised to see her charges pick up hidden threads in Gothic works such as Stephen King’s 1978 short story “Strawberry Spring,” a tale of a man who experiences uncomfortable memories about a serial killer.
“Seeing students identify metaphors, pick up clues, and recognize repeating aspects always takes me by surprise in the happiest way,” Costanza says.