A Short History of Corridor Dread

Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck)

PMStudio Meeting Room,

Watershed, 1 Canon’s Rd, Bristol BS1 5TX

PLEASE NOTE THE CHANGE OF VENUE!

Wednesday 3 April 15.00-17.00

Why are we frightened of corridors? Why has the corridor shot become one of the defining tropes of modern horror? Can we think about a specific sensibility of corridor dread, one that evokes interminable hotel corridors, the labyrinths of bureaucracy or the mazes of institutional neurosis?

This talk will explore the history of the modern corridor in architecture and film, and try to answer these urgent questions.

Roger Luckhurst is the author of Corridors: Passages of Modernity(2019). His previous books include BFI classics on The Shining (2017) and Alien(2014), as well as Zombies: A Cultural History(2015), The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy(2012), The Trauma Question(2008), Science Fiction: A Cultural History(2005), The Invention of Telepathy(2002) and ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of JG Ballard(1997).