1 00:00:04,250 --> 00:00:08,360 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Well, I've been there for this ten minutes. It's up to the scaler. 2 00:00:08,750 --> 00:00:14,750 The Queen's College, Oxford, which in is right here in Oxford, completed. 3 00:00:14,750 --> 00:00:26,240 Mosquito passionate Pulseless modern British pension is forthcoming per hour of the order of the Golden Dawn will be published early next year. 4 00:00:28,370 --> 00:00:35,989 Thanks very much. Um, I apologise it, um, at first because that, um, it's quite a tonal shift. 5 00:00:35,990 --> 00:00:40,390 The title league between and Oxford fantasy and CSS Louis. 6 00:00:40,430 --> 00:00:46,489 Uh, and weird fiction. Um, uh, I've been trying to think of some correspondences between the two, 7 00:00:46,490 --> 00:00:51,139 and I think this is origin on with, um, here's a weird, weird fiction author. 8 00:00:51,140 --> 00:00:57,320 Um, uh, date similar to CSS Louis and Louis. 9 00:00:57,350 --> 00:01:01,730 Louis definitely read backwards. Um, I think as a, as a, as a teenager. 10 00:01:02,150 --> 00:01:11,030 Um, and there's also, uh, an apocryphal story that Tolkien got the phrase cracks of doom from one of, um, backwards towns. 11 00:01:11,030 --> 00:01:15,140 So there is a link, I promise. Um, right. 12 00:01:15,440 --> 00:01:22,340 Uh, so weird fiction with tales, uh, the weird new weird, however you've heard it described. 13 00:01:23,030 --> 00:01:32,999 Described. Um. With um as an adjective, uh, to, to to talk about the kind of horror and supernatural fiction, 14 00:01:33,000 --> 00:01:37,800 um, that people like Edgar Allan Poe were writing in the early 19th century. 15 00:01:39,370 --> 00:01:49,210 Uh, is obviously not a modern term. Um. Uh, authors like, uh, Sheridan, Lieutenant Bram Stoker, Walter Scott, they were described as weird by critics. 16 00:01:49,570 --> 00:01:53,020 Well into the 1890s. Um. 17 00:01:54,610 --> 00:02:00,460 It wasn't until the American poet magazine Weird Tales, uh, started to be published in the 1920s. 18 00:02:01,000 --> 00:02:05,050 Um, that weird fiction began to take on a life of its own. 19 00:02:06,460 --> 00:02:13,330 Um, as part of the genres that we think of, uh, these days as horror, science fiction and fantasy. 20 00:02:14,170 --> 00:02:18,280 Uh, writers became proud to label themselves as weird fiction writers, 21 00:02:18,280 --> 00:02:25,480 and they delighted in corresponding, corresponding between each other as, uh, connoisseurs of the wind. 22 00:02:27,100 --> 00:02:30,309 Um, but it's a slippery term. 23 00:02:30,310 --> 00:02:35,470 Weird. Uh, particularly applied to literature and film. 24 00:02:35,510 --> 00:02:40,570 Uh, and it needs a definition. Some critics, some call that a subgenre, others a mode. 25 00:02:41,200 --> 00:02:48,189 But how does it differ from or rather, how does it infect or alter the kind of traditional speculative literature that 26 00:02:48,190 --> 00:02:52,000 people think of when they imagine fantasy literature or horror literature? 27 00:02:53,540 --> 00:03:01,219 Um. So the American New England writer H.P. Lovecraft had a lot to say about the weird time 28 00:03:01,220 --> 00:03:05,840 he spent quite a lot of time trying to define and exactly what he thought it was. 29 00:03:06,500 --> 00:03:10,340 Um, whether you like his writing or not. 30 00:03:10,880 --> 00:03:15,110 Uh, we have to reject his racism and his, um, prejudice and politics. 31 00:03:15,590 --> 00:03:21,620 Uh, but any discussion of the way it has to take into account, um, his his early definitions. 32 00:03:23,240 --> 00:03:27,470 Um, he had this to say in, uh, his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, 33 00:03:28,130 --> 00:03:35,240 the tree where its tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones or sheeted form, clanking chains, according to room. 34 00:03:36,950 --> 00:03:44,090 Um, a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer unknown forces must be present, 35 00:03:44,870 --> 00:03:53,090 and there must be a hint expressed with a seriousness and contentiousness becoming at subject of that most terrible conception of the human brain, 36 00:03:53,420 --> 00:03:58,070 a malign and particular suspension of defeat of those fixed laws of nature, 37 00:03:58,370 --> 00:04:03,890 which are our own safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the demons of unplanned space. 38 00:04:05,180 --> 00:04:12,830 So you can kind of see where it has been associated a bit more with the horror genre than any other, um, speculative gentlemen. 39 00:04:14,270 --> 00:04:18,590 Um, but what exactly is he saying here? Um, we just go back. 40 00:04:19,010 --> 00:04:23,360 Something more than the secret murder. Bloody bones or sheeted form. 41 00:04:24,530 --> 00:04:33,110 Uh, Lovecraft is writing in the 1920s, and here he's looking back at the kind of romantic Victorian, uh, tradition of the Gothic. 42 00:04:33,740 --> 00:04:37,820 Um, and where a lot of these things were kind of commonplace. 43 00:04:38,510 --> 00:04:46,310 Uh, and while he admired writers like, um, Radcliffe or, uh, Mary Shelley, people that were using these, these tropes early on. 44 00:04:46,850 --> 00:04:53,540 Um, he, he kind of rejects them as something that is, uh, part of the literary great greats. 45 00:04:54,020 --> 00:04:58,130 Um, but this is where it gets a bit more interesting. 46 00:04:58,160 --> 00:05:03,440 Um, an unexplainable dread of outer unknown forces must be present. 47 00:05:05,040 --> 00:05:14,580 So if Olaf the Weird is cosmic in scope, um, out of forces by what she means outside of our normal understanding of time and space. 48 00:05:15,120 --> 00:05:20,160 Lovecraft was an atheist. He rejected the idea of the spirit completely. 49 00:05:20,520 --> 00:05:30,870 Um, he was a materialist. He was very interested from an early age at, um, in, uh, astrology, astronomy, uh, looking at the universe. 50 00:05:30,900 --> 00:05:37,350 He was very aware of how big the universe was and how small um, humankind was in comparison to it. 51 00:05:37,950 --> 00:05:48,020 Um, and it was this kind of sense of, um. Uh, kind of our inability to perceive that universe and our insignificance. 52 00:05:48,500 --> 00:05:52,580 Um, that was the true kind of terror at the core of the weird tale for Lovecraft. 53 00:05:53,270 --> 00:05:58,610 Um, uh, there is something that is out there that science has not yet discovered. 54 00:05:59,420 --> 00:06:06,320 It enters our world, however fleetingly and so indescribable and incomprehensible that many Lovecraft protagonists go mad. 55 00:06:08,380 --> 00:06:12,870 Um. No. 56 00:06:12,870 --> 00:06:16,440 Not yet. Um, atmosphere. 57 00:06:16,620 --> 00:06:23,260 Um, which kind of links with what, uh, Simon was saying about, uh, CF Louis and the fans? 58 00:06:23,400 --> 00:06:32,010 It's our atmosphere is also very key word to describe the with um plots is secondary to then to the sensation of emotion which the way it evokes. 59 00:06:32,700 --> 00:06:39,629 Um so Lovecraft goes on, the one test of the really weird is simply this whether or not there be excited in the reader, 60 00:06:39,630 --> 00:06:44,070 a profound sense of dread and of contact with unknown speakers and powers, 61 00:06:44,340 --> 00:06:48,510 a subtle attitude of awkward listening as if to the beating a black queen for the 62 00:06:48,510 --> 00:06:53,100 scratching of outside shapes and entity on the known universe is utmost for him. 63 00:06:54,780 --> 00:07:01,440 Terrifying. Um, there are, of course, other weird writers other than H.P. Lovecraft writing at this time. 64 00:07:01,860 --> 00:07:10,829 Uh, one writer in particular, the Welsh writer Arthur Machen, um, had a completely different, um, approach to the weird. 65 00:07:10,830 --> 00:07:14,680 And he didn't conceive of it in, in terms of the way. 66 00:07:14,680 --> 00:07:19,350 And he I don't think he ever used that word, really, and that he, he was more spiritual. 67 00:07:19,710 --> 00:07:27,120 He was more of a mystic. He believed that, uh, the material world, um, beyond that lay a kind of spiritual truth. 68 00:07:27,600 --> 00:07:35,729 And that through the way the experience, he could kind of uncover it, um, and have a kind of transformed transformational experience. 69 00:07:35,730 --> 00:07:38,730 And it could be horrifying, but it could also be very joyful. 70 00:07:39,360 --> 00:07:43,350 Um, so got two very different, um, conceptions there. 71 00:07:44,370 --> 00:07:48,750 Um, transgression also seems to be a key element to any form of the weird. 72 00:07:49,290 --> 00:07:53,150 Uh, the idea of a boundary being crossed. Uh, the science. 73 00:07:53,470 --> 00:07:59,090 Science fiction writer, the China bureau. Uh, he's, uh, 21st century writer. 74 00:07:59,090 --> 00:08:03,520 He talks about the weird, um, of the Lovecraft periods in revolutionary times. 75 00:08:03,940 --> 00:08:10,690 Uh, he he says traditional monsters were now profoundly inadequate, suddenly nostalgic in the epoch of modern war. 76 00:08:11,110 --> 00:08:16,780 I was at this crisis of traditional fantastic, the burgeoning sense that there is no stable status quo. 77 00:08:17,050 --> 00:08:27,550 It's a horror underlying the every day. And, uh, more, more, more recent attempts to define the wave, uh, focuses on its ontological implications, 78 00:08:27,550 --> 00:08:31,990 particularly as a way to disrupt systems around us that we take for granted. 79 00:08:32,410 --> 00:08:37,710 So the ways in this, in this, um, conception is uncanny. 80 00:08:37,720 --> 00:08:41,980 It's Freud's on him. Like it's eerie. Um, but it's deeper than that. 81 00:08:41,980 --> 00:08:45,820 It's more powerful. Something that challenges the very structures of reality. 82 00:08:46,540 --> 00:08:53,800 Um. So there are three I've identified. 83 00:08:54,160 --> 00:08:59,170 I've identified three main stages of the weird in in literature. 84 00:09:00,010 --> 00:09:05,110 Um, there are people who like to split it into two, the early period and the late variants. 85 00:09:05,500 --> 00:09:15,520 But, um, I think there are there are grounds to, to argue that there are three very distinct periods that each develop, um, what the way it becomes. 86 00:09:16,550 --> 00:09:29,800 Um. So the, the, the very early stage is the kind of late 19th century, um, we've got writers like Algernon Blackwood's on the left. 87 00:09:29,830 --> 00:09:35,080 Uh, um, he started off as quite a conventional ghost story writer. 88 00:09:36,010 --> 00:09:41,320 That he, he became very intensely interested in things like theosophy and the occult and spiritualism. 89 00:09:42,040 --> 00:09:46,989 Uh, and this, uh, began to, in fact or influence what he later wrote. 90 00:09:46,990 --> 00:09:50,290 His tales got longer, focussed a lot more on atmosphere. 91 00:09:50,800 --> 00:09:57,310 Um, uh, Lovecraft's favourite weird tale was called The Willow, inspired by Blackwood's, uh, 92 00:09:57,310 --> 00:10:07,600 and this was this, um, enormous, uh, tale, a very brooding, um, story about, um, some, uh, two men. 93 00:10:07,600 --> 00:10:11,020 You go, uh, canoeing down the Danube in Europe. 94 00:10:11,500 --> 00:10:19,299 Um, uh, and during the night, the willows on the banks, they start to whisper and, um, and move eerily. 95 00:10:19,300 --> 00:10:26,950 And there's a kind of hint that they're opening another dimension. Um, and then and then you have Arthur Machen that I've already mentioned. 96 00:10:27,460 --> 00:10:33,340 Uh, he started writing in the 1890s, uh, with novels like The Great God Poem and The Three Imposters. 97 00:10:33,340 --> 00:10:41,110 And then his writing got a bit more spiritual. Um, he started focusing on Celtic Christianity and the Holy Grail and that kind of thing. 98 00:10:41,710 --> 00:10:46,480 Um, C.S. Lewis owned a copy of, of his novel The Secret Glory. 99 00:10:46,480 --> 00:10:50,140 So that kid has a kind of another correspondence that going on. 100 00:10:50,860 --> 00:10:58,570 Um, and then to the right that you've got Emma Jones, which might be the most recognisable name, um, uh, in this trio. 101 00:10:58,600 --> 00:11:07,090 Uh, and again, ghost stories, um, he was kind of thought to have perfected the ghost story in the early 20th century. 102 00:11:07,510 --> 00:11:12,790 Um, but his what makes these stories weird is a kind of, again, it's the transgression. 103 00:11:12,790 --> 00:11:21,009 It's the, um, it's the bringing out these, these old academics, um, or antiquarians digging, digging in, uh, 104 00:11:21,010 --> 00:11:26,860 digging in the ground and bringing out these secrets that shouldn't have, um, shouldn't have been uncovered. 105 00:11:26,860 --> 00:11:35,470 So bringing the past into the present, uh, and all the implications that follow, um, second era, the American pulp era. 106 00:11:35,500 --> 00:11:40,450 So this is when, uh, pulp magazines started to become very popular. 107 00:11:40,990 --> 00:11:53,170 Um, uh, very, very cheap magazines, um, sensational subject matter, um, often very hurriedly written and, you know, doing it for the money. 108 00:11:53,500 --> 00:11:57,340 Um, so a lot of it is quite. Bad. 109 00:11:57,590 --> 00:12:02,510 Unless he's very good. Um, I'd say the vast majority is quite bad, but. 110 00:12:02,510 --> 00:12:09,320 But there are like two. There are gems. Um. Uh, I'm getting a sign that says timeout. 111 00:12:09,530 --> 00:12:12,930 Have I reached my wish? Yes, yes. 112 00:12:12,980 --> 00:12:21,260 Okay. Um. I'll just. I'll just do the third, um, the third period, which is the new way. 113 00:12:21,650 --> 00:12:25,250 Um, and this is very kind of this is of behaviour. 114 00:12:25,280 --> 00:12:32,479 He's a British writer and John Harrison, British writer and, uh, Captain Kenyon, uh, who is, uh, an American writer. 115 00:12:32,480 --> 00:12:35,900 And they're very, um, they're almost like postmodern weird. 116 00:12:35,900 --> 00:12:40,760 But they take inspiration from a lot of different places. Uh, they write urban fantasy. 117 00:12:41,180 --> 00:12:47,860 Um, and there's a debate as to whether the wave has continued or whether it stopped in the early 2000. 118 00:12:48,280 --> 00:12:51,320 Uh, and I'm not sure. And we can talk about that in the questions, if you like. 119 00:12:51,890 --> 00:13:04,750 Uh, there we go. Uh, uh, could you speak a little bit of, uh, influences from different time? 120 00:13:05,280 --> 00:13:10,000 In that we have the opportunity to make a lot of movies that I think are important. 121 00:13:10,090 --> 00:13:13,460 Mhm. Uh, we become quite common, um, in marketing. 122 00:13:14,550 --> 00:13:18,810 Yeah. Do you mean, um, influences that the original authors? 123 00:13:19,320 --> 00:13:28,050 Um, I suppose each made, like, um. What? How were the ideas that fiction has influenced what we think of as horror today and across media? 124 00:13:28,790 --> 00:13:33,060 That's why the across media, we can now consider that in the world. 125 00:13:33,840 --> 00:13:39,270 Mhm. We can definitely think of weird cinema and that's, that's definitely a thing these days. 126 00:13:39,630 --> 00:13:47,940 Um, and it's um, think of directors like Yama del Toro, the Mexican director, his, his films, uh, Pan's Labyrinth. 127 00:13:48,570 --> 00:13:52,140 Uh, what we do in the shadows, something, uh, what we do in the dark. 128 00:13:52,530 --> 00:13:58,290 Um, he's very explicit in his influences. Um, some of those films even reference Arthur Machen by name. 129 00:13:58,740 --> 00:14:04,050 Um, or, uh, an author like William Hodgson, who's also writing from that time. 130 00:14:04,530 --> 00:14:09,120 Um, and those films are definitely in the ways, in a weird category, you know, Pan's Labyrinth. 131 00:14:09,510 --> 00:14:15,210 You've got a, um, a young girl going into these underground other worlds ruled over by a phone. 132 00:14:15,780 --> 00:14:18,090 Um, see what kind of possible influence in that. 133 00:14:18,210 --> 00:14:26,370 Um, uh, and then and then you have, um, I think the best instance of a weird film for me is Under the Skin by Jonathan Glazer. 134 00:14:26,940 --> 00:14:32,460 Uh, which is about an alien who comes to this world and takes the form of Scarlett Johansson, uh, on a motorbike. 135 00:14:32,790 --> 00:14:35,820 Um, and it's, uh. Yeah. Intensely weird. 136 00:14:38,960 --> 00:14:42,050 Well, we have to close the session now, but please join me in thanking.