Profs and Pints - Richmond

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Venturing into Eco-Horror,” an Earth Day exploration of a genre focused on humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world, with Joshua Barton, lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University and scholar of horror.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-eco-horror .]

What happens when nature stops being a passive backdrop to horror films and itself becomes the monster?

Join us as we explore eco-horror, a genre that channels environmental anxiety into green nightmares in the form of tales of toxic landscapes, invasive species, and planetary revenge.

The speaker, Profs and Pints fan favorite Joshua Barton, will look at how fears related to ecological collapse, climate change, and human hubris have shaped modern storytelling.

He’ll trace the roots of eco-horror in earlier works where nature rebels against human exploitation, including Steve Sekely’s The Day of the Triffids and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. From there, he’ll move into contemporary examples that reflect modern environmental anxieties, like Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Barry Levinson’s The Bay, and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening.

We’ll also examine literary eco-horror that blends ecological thought with cosmic dread, including The Ruins by Scott Smith and The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey.

Across these texts and films, we’ll aim to answer a central question: Why does environmental catastrophe so often take the form of horror? By analyzing cultural context and ecological themes, we’ll see how eco-horror dramatizes the consequences of environmental neglect and forces audiences to confront uncomfortable possibilities about the future of our planet.

Part cultural critique, part genre exploration, this lecture invites audiences to reconsider the boundary between the natural world and the monstrous.

Ultimately, we’ll see that the true horror lies not in nature itself, but in humanity’s impact on it. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Photo by Jb Lardizabal / Creative Commons.

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Nightmares and Creativity,” on the relationship between frightening dreams and real creative achievements, with Bernard Welt, emeritus professor of arts and humanities at George Washington University, former member of the board of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and contributing editor of DreamTime.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-nightmares-creativity .]

Nightmares are associated with creativity—but how, exactly? Why do so many famous accounts of genius in the arts and sciences originate with a frightening dream?

Explore such questions with the help of Bernard Welt, who has taught courses on recalling dreams and dream journaling and written extensively on the relationship between dreaming and the arts.

Using excerpts from texts, illustrations of artworks, and clips from classic films derived from nightmares, Professor Welt will look at the relationship between bad dreams and celebrated innovations and creative accomplishments.

You’ll learn why psychologists consider the nightmare to be a key to understanding the creative power of the unconscious mind. We’ll consider sleep scientists’ definitions of the nightmare, asking why it still remains controversial, and explore contemporary theories about the relationship between nightmares and creativity from psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypal theory, evolutionary psychology, and other sources.

Though dreams have special authority in many cultures, in the western world it’s only among the nineteenth-century Romantics that we began to see personal accounts of creativity inspired by dreams—curiously, preponderantly bad ones. We’ll look at how Frankenstein arose from Mary Shelley’s famous dream of a scientist confronted by his own fearful creation, and how art’s Surrealist movement taught us to value our nightmares.

You’ll learn how dreams of all kinds can result in sudden inspiration because they relax inhibitions, transcend habitual trains of thought, and permit ideas that would be rejected by the thought processes of waking life. You’ll even come to see why we may welcome our nightmares as opportunities to expand our vision and our understanding. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: From Francisco Goya’s 1799 etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (public domain).