Blood Ties: The Family in Cult and Horror Cinema
Online conference: 22-24 October 2024
In-person symposium (Birmingham, UK): 25 October 2024
Blood Ties Screening Season: 21 -27 October 2024
In-person symposium (Birmingham, UK): 25 October 2024
Blood Ties Screening Season: 21 -27 October 2024
Scheduled Special Guests and Online Events
Gremlins at 40: Joe Dante in Conversation
Joe Dante, director of Gremlins, celebrates the film’s fortieth anniversary with delegate Q&A.
Gremlins at 40: Joe Dante in Conversation
Joe Dante, director of Gremlins, celebrates the film’s fortieth anniversary with delegate Q&A.
Image courtesy of Joe Dante
Blood Ties Over Time: Cast and Crew Reflect on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Allen Danziger (“Jerry”), William Vail (“Kirk”), Daniel Pearl (Cinematographer) and Ted Nicolaou (Sound Department) celebrate fifty years of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with an exclusive streamed roundtable discussion.
Allen Danziger (“Jerry”), William Vail (“Kirk”), Daniel Pearl (Cinematographer) and Ted Nicolaou (Sound Department) celebrate fifty years of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with an exclusive streamed roundtable discussion.
Image courtesy of Ash Loydon
Keynote Address: Professor Tony Williams
Tony Williams, Professor of Film Studies at Southern Illinois University, provides this year’s keynote address.
Tony Williams, Professor of Film Studies at Southern Illinois University, provides this year’s keynote address.
…a shy but solicitous motel manager tends to his reclusive mother… a family of Texan cannibals entertains a reluctant guest for dinner… a respectable husband and father turns vigilante after a devastating home invasion… a loyal daughter visits her disturbed mother at her isolated farmhouse, bringing ‘food parcels’… a horribly scarred concert organist takes revenge on those he holds responsible for the death of his wife… a loving father brings home an unusual pet as a Christmas gift for his son…
For more than half a century, the family, in all its forms, has been at the dark heart of cult and horror cinema, and the 2024 edition of Cine-Excess invites contributors to a family celebration like no other!
Gremlins celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year, a genre-defining film that pioneered contemporary notions of family friendly horror, and director Joe Dante joins this year’s Cine-Excess to commemorate the film’s anniversary in an exclusive Q&A with conference delegates.
While Gremlins provides a universal glimpse into the cultural hopes and fears of Reagan’s America that continues to resonate with audiences today, another more controversial film also celebrates a landmark anniversary this year; a film that takes us from the white picket fences of suburbia to the unrelenting isolation of the rural South.
Fifty years on, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s visceral capacity to shock is undiminished. An immersive work of art that so perfectly encapsulates the cultural nihilism of the time, cast and crew join this year’s Cine-Excess in an exclusive roundtable discussion, reflecting upon the truly transgressive nature of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on its fiftieth anniversary. Scheduled guests include Allen Danziger (“Jerry”), William Vail (“Kirk”), Daniel Pearl (Cinematographer) and Ted Nicolaou (Sound Department), and all of whom will be the recipients of a Lifetime Achievement award on behalf of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s wider cast and crew.
Of course, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains a touchstone for discussion of American cinema of the period, a definitive marker of post-classical cinema and one famously championed by film critic Robin Wood, whose seminal essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” is 45 years old this year. We are delighted and honoured to welcome one of Wood’s esteemed contemporaries, Professor Tony Williams, author of Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996; University Press of Mississippi, 2014), as our keynote speaker. For his Cine-Excess 2024 keynote address, Professor Williams will be considering the significance of familial representation within a wide range of horror films including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Aside from the groundbreaking entries of Gremlins and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in this year’s call for papers, Cine-Excess 2024 also casts a critical eye over more recent international examples which demonstrate subversive and socially incisive considerations of familial representation.
Proposals are welcomed for both individual papers or pre-constituted panels that consider case studies within a range of differing contexts that relate to this year’s theme, including:
Cine-Excess 2024 invites proposals either online for the online conference or the in-person symposium, and participants should indicate their preference when submitting their proposal. The online conference is expected to run for a minimum of two days whereas the in-person symposium will be limited to a one-day event in Birmingham, UK.
For the in person event, we welcome proposals from the above listed conference strands, but would be interested in submissions which deal with the family in horror and exploitation films of the 1970s and 1980s as well as entries reinterpreting the family in work of scholars such as Robin Wood, Tony Williams, Vivian Sobchack, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed.
Since 2007 Cine-Excess has developed and nurtured a reputation as an inclusive and safe space in which to present new work around global cult film cultures. We welcome submissions from emerging and established scholars, activists, filmmakers and community groups.
Please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio by Monday 12th August 2024 to:
John Atkinson
Editorial Lead of Cine-Excess
john.atkinson@cine-excess.co.uk
Daniel Sheppard
Associate Director of Cine-Excess
daniel.sheppard@bcu.ac.uk
Professor Xavier Mendik
Director of Cine-Excess
xavier.mendik@cine-excess.co.uk
A final listing of accepted presentations will be released on Monday 19th August 2024.
We will subsequently invite a limited number of participants to rework their papers for inclusion in the seventh edition of the Cine-Excess journal, for publication in Spring 2025.
Gremlins celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year, a genre-defining film that pioneered contemporary notions of family friendly horror, and director Joe Dante joins this year’s Cine-Excess to commemorate the film’s anniversary in an exclusive Q&A with conference delegates.
While Gremlins provides a universal glimpse into the cultural hopes and fears of Reagan’s America that continues to resonate with audiences today, another more controversial film also celebrates a landmark anniversary this year; a film that takes us from the white picket fences of suburbia to the unrelenting isolation of the rural South.
Fifty years on, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s visceral capacity to shock is undiminished. An immersive work of art that so perfectly encapsulates the cultural nihilism of the time, cast and crew join this year’s Cine-Excess in an exclusive roundtable discussion, reflecting upon the truly transgressive nature of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre on its fiftieth anniversary. Scheduled guests include Allen Danziger (“Jerry”), William Vail (“Kirk”), Daniel Pearl (Cinematographer) and Ted Nicolaou (Sound Department), and all of whom will be the recipients of a Lifetime Achievement award on behalf of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s wider cast and crew.
Of course, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains a touchstone for discussion of American cinema of the period, a definitive marker of post-classical cinema and one famously championed by film critic Robin Wood, whose seminal essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” is 45 years old this year. We are delighted and honoured to welcome one of Wood’s esteemed contemporaries, Professor Tony Williams, author of Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996; University Press of Mississippi, 2014), as our keynote speaker. For his Cine-Excess 2024 keynote address, Professor Williams will be considering the significance of familial representation within a wide range of horror films including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Aside from the groundbreaking entries of Gremlins and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in this year’s call for papers, Cine-Excess 2024 also casts a critical eye over more recent international examples which demonstrate subversive and socially incisive considerations of familial representation.
Proposals are welcomed for both individual papers or pre-constituted panels that consider case studies within a range of differing contexts that relate to this year’s theme, including:
- “Don’t Feed Them After Midnight”: Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of Gremlins
- Family Friendly? Case-Studies of Joe Dante as Cult Auteur
- “The Saw is Family”: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its Legacy
- Forty Years a Flame: A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Franchise that Freddy Built
- Frightmares: Deviant Families, Pagan Clans in British Horror Cinema
- Blood Relatives: (In-)Famous Family Collaborations On-Screen and Behind the Lens
- “We’re the Perfect Family Now”: Familial Plasticity in Seed of Chucky and the Child’s Play Franchise
- “Viewer Beware, You’re in for a Scare”: Family Friendly Horror and Children’s Cult Media
- Surgical Siblings: (Re)Animating the Perverse Cinema of Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon
- Cult on Cults: Charles Manson, “The Family” and Subcultural Representations
- Mothers and Daughters, Fathers and Sons: Gender in the Family
- (De-)Constructing Family Values: Cult Film, Cultural Crisis and the Symbolic Function of the Family
- Feral Packs, Wayward Clans and Transgressive Bonds: International Renditions of the Disruptive Family
- Family and the Female Gaze: Women’s Filmmaking and (Post-)Feminist Politics
- “Based on True Facts”: Cult Representations of Real-Life Family Trauma
- Queering the Family Structure: LGBTQ+ Subjectivity, Acceptance and Belonging
- Archaic Legacies: Ageing and Generational Trauma in the Family
- What Lies Beneath: Whiteness, the Family and Global Images of Racial Difference
- Trauma and Resistance Under the Colonial Gaze: Family, Kinship and Community
- Keeping It in the Family: Case Studies in Kinship and Working Family Relations in Cult Production and Distribution Outlets
Cine-Excess 2024 invites proposals either online for the online conference or the in-person symposium, and participants should indicate their preference when submitting their proposal. The online conference is expected to run for a minimum of two days whereas the in-person symposium will be limited to a one-day event in Birmingham, UK.
For the in person event, we welcome proposals from the above listed conference strands, but would be interested in submissions which deal with the family in horror and exploitation films of the 1970s and 1980s as well as entries reinterpreting the family in work of scholars such as Robin Wood, Tony Williams, Vivian Sobchack, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed.
Since 2007 Cine-Excess has developed and nurtured a reputation as an inclusive and safe space in which to present new work around global cult film cultures. We welcome submissions from emerging and established scholars, activists, filmmakers and community groups.
Please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio by Monday 12th August 2024 to:
John Atkinson
Editorial Lead of Cine-Excess
john.atkinson@cine-excess.co.uk
Daniel Sheppard
Associate Director of Cine-Excess
daniel.sheppard@bcu.ac.uk
Professor Xavier Mendik
Director of Cine-Excess
xavier.mendik@cine-excess.co.uk
A final listing of accepted presentations will be released on Monday 19th August 2024.
We will subsequently invite a limited number of participants to rework their papers for inclusion in the seventh edition of the Cine-Excess journal, for publication in Spring 2025.
Supported by:
