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.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

This study day will examine the question of the association of women with magic and witchcraft.

Although born in Ireland, Bram Stoker came to London to work with the great Actor Manager Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre and spent the rest of his life here. While working at the Lyceum he published his most famous and enduring novel “Dracula” in 1897. This virtual tour takes us to the London locations of that novel so we cover a wide range of ground from Hendon to Hampstead and Piccadilly to Pimlico tracing the footsteps of the fictional vampire and his creator. Learn about the places Stoker visited, the people he knew, the library where he researched and the history of the book on stage and screen.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) is acknowledged as one of the all-time greats of cinema, expressing as one critic describes it, the ‘poetry of fear’ and as one of the first feature length vampire films it’s influence, and legacy has been widely felt. Chris McKay’s Renfield (2023), comes just over one hundred years after Nosferatu and marks one of the most recent instalments in a genre that continues to renew itself for each generation of film viewers. Exploring a range of key vampire films from across this century of cinema, this course will explore why the vampire film remains such a popular sub-genre of the horror film and it will consider why it continues to exercise such power over its spectators.

An introduction to the art and architecture of medieval Europe. Study the art of the era and the architecture of the prominent Gothic cathedrals and medieval buildings of the continent and England.

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.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Write to unsettle, in this six-week trip through the techniques of horror fiction, learning from classic horror authors and contemporary masters of the genre.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Explore the horror film, past and present, through a range of key films, concepts and critical accounts of the genre. We will consider its history and development, and the ways in which different production contexts, for example, American, European and East Asian horror cinemas, have given rise to significant variation within the genre, with each producing films with distinctive styles, themes.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

The figure of Satan/devil has pervaded many centuries of the cultural imagination of the Western world. The course will examine the literary and iconographic sources for this enduring phenomena and will ask why ideas about the devil have continued to both frighten and fascinate and why its long-lasting association with sexuality and deceit continues to make it an attractive theme in contemporary culture.

From Wicca to the Satanic Panic, and from The Wizard of Oz to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this course looks at why the modern world now has so many competing ideas about what witchcraft is.

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.