Halloween Courses

Once upon a time there was a City Lit workshop all about writing fairytales. The quest: to inspire writers to pen stories of love, fear, forests, revenge, dragons, witches, kings, queens, frogs and magic.

Night of the Demon (1957), The Wicker Man (1973) and Frightmare (1974) form part of a less familiar, though equally striking, horror tradition than that of Hammer, and often in very different terms. Explore chillers from the 1930s and 40s, the proliferation of horror in 1950s, 60s and 70s along with more recent examples, while assessing a range of critical accounts of British horror beyond Hammer.

Want to write a murder mystery that will knock readers dead? On this course you'll learn how to plot a murder most horrid and develop your writing to create maximum suspense.

Explore a selection of European films that draw on cinematic traditions of fantasy, horror and surrealism, but which have also acquired significant critical reputations, with their striking visual styles, dreamlike narratives and dark themes lending them an enduring place in both film and popular culture in general. Strange tales and dark dreams to fascinate, horrify and astound you.

Surprisingly, not every film that features the occult is a horror film. Certainly, many of them are; we will consider classics such as Haxan from 1922, Rosemary’s Baby, The Craft, Angel Heart, The Witch and Hereditary. Other films, such as Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising and A Dark Song, attempt to treat the occult seriously as secret or hidden knowledge. We'll examine the cultural backdrop of occult films and questions of representation, gender relations, and spirituality.