Dr. Phil Smith (Crab Man, Mytho) is a writer and researcher, specialising in creating performances related to walking, mythogeographies and counter-tourism. As a member of site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites, he is presently working on their new publication: ‘The Architect-Walker’. He is the company dramaturg of TNT Theatre (Munich), most recently co-adapting Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’. His story ‘The Inner Ring Road Cycle’ appears in CFZ’s collection of Fortean horror ‘Tales of the Damned’. Phil is an Associate Professor (Reader) at Plymouth University. His publications include ‘A Footbook of Zombie Walking’ and ‘Walking’s New Movement’ (2015), ‘On Walking’ and ‘Enchanted Things’ (2014), ‘Counter-Tourism: The Handbook’ (2012) and ‘Mythogeography’ (2010).
'The Hollow Hill is Everywhere' (Phil Smith)
In this talk I will be addressing a particular thematic finding from a series of journeys, almost all on foot, that I have been taking around the towns and cities of South Devon (UK) and across the land between. During these walks I have been using techniques of limited paranoia and hyper-sensitised state, walking in relation to a particular fiction invented for this project, and using various existing literary and cinematic sources – including William Beckford’s ‘Vathek’, Dennis Wheatley’s ‘The Haunting of Toby Jugg’, and the 2013 found-footage horror ‘The Borderlands’ – as levers in the landscape.
While this project, the culmination of twenty years wandering, exploring and performing in the area, has generated multiple findings, in this talk I will particularly focus on how a series of material and imaginary meshworks and narratives, often entangled, have been revealed in the process. These meshworks, like the hollow ways that reach deep into the fabric of the cities, transgress the city/countryside boundary. They challenge assumptions about the city as a concentration, of centres as the defining points of communities, burrow and crawl under walls and boundaries with multiple myths of caves and tunnels, and excavate patterns of dispersal and relaxed spacing that underlie more recent social architecture.
In a search for traces of H.P. Lovecraft’s Devonian ancestors, a watery Dumnonian landscape emerges that leads me to a martyr’s well in a city centre vegan café. Memories of Michael Jackson’s healing mission to Exeter City’s football ground evoke iconographies of flow in High Street ornaments and on re-emerging roods screens. In seeking access to ‘The Old Grotto’ at Torbryan rationalist nineteenth century palaeontology and fairy cities become tangled. A stone circle in an urban playpark is spirited away.
Drawing on ambulatory explorations, on gothic texts from the prophesies of Exeter servant Joanna Southcott to the ‘Atomic Consciousness’ of Whimple’s ‘James Bathurst’, giving close attention to textures and materials (to the geological serpent coiled beneath), and given the emergence of the journey’s own narratives, I will propose a more loosely lived and more distantly connected model of urban landscape.
Dr Sorcha Ní Fhlainn is Lecturer in Film Studies and American Literature and a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author/editor of numerous publications, including The Worlds of Back to the Future: Critical Essays on the Films (McFarland), and articles with Adaptation (Oxford University Press) and Horror Studies (Intellect). She is Reviews Editor for Gothic Studies, the journal of the International Gothic Association. Forthcoming books include Clive Barker: Dark Imaginer (Manchester University Press, 2017) and Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2018).
'In the "Palace of Delights"... "where the monsters live": Clive Barker’s Gothic Cities' (Sorcha Ní Fhlainn)
Since the 1980s, in his fiction, film and art, Clive Barker has frequently used the city as a site in which supernatural, or strange, disruptions manifest in the everyday world. From his celebrated debut in Books of Blood (1984-85) to his later fiction, films, and adapted works, Barker has explored, and made strange, the city as a landscape – an environment which seamlessly houses visceral horrors, fantastical creatures, and dark fantasies. These Barkerian horrors include urban legend killers (‘The Forbidden’), violent crime and supernatural authorities (‘The Midnight Meat Train’), ghostly Hollywood stars (Coldheart Canyon (2002)) imprisoned by temporal and spatial secrets, and dislocated and fragmented geographies which conceal portals to Hell (The Scarlet Gospels (2015)), and the secret city of Midian (Cabal (1988)/Nightbreed (1990)), where the monsters live. In this paper, I wish to explore Barker’s works in fiction and film adaptation which feature supernatural disruptions within city spaces, with special emphasis on the short story and film adaptation of The Midnight Meat Train, his roman-à-clef gothic novel Coldheart Canyon, The Damnation Game (1985), and The Scarlet Gospels. Each text transforms the metropolis into an uncanny gothic space, an intersection between the living and the dead, the normal and spectacular, and, on occasion, provides refuge for the different and the damned. For Barker, to understand the city, we must experience its shadow self and dark histories.