DOORS: 7.PM
Salon for the City is London's longest running cultural event. Every month we take a look at the City through a different lens with two amazing speakers in the historic location of London's only surviving 18th century Horse Hospital.
His House (2020) is a ghost story about displacement, precarity, and the inescapable afterlives of empire. This lecture situates the film within a global “horror cinema of precarity” that uses the genre to address marginalised experiences. Drawing on postcolonial Gothic and hauntological theory, it explores how Britain’s imperial and capitalist legacies haunt the film atmospherically rather than corporeally.
Often dismissed as gratuitous or artistically empty, gore remains one of horror cinema’s most contested pleasures. This lecture reframes gore as an aesthetic practice rooted in tactility, craft, and collaboration. Tracing the devaluation of gore films and their fandoms, it situates graphic violence within broader artistic traditions and examines practical effects as a form of resistance to digital smoothness.
Mark Pilkington, author of the UFO meta-conspiracy classic Mirage Men, presents a curated selection of his favourite filmic artefacts from the flying saucer era and beyond. Against the backdrop of the longest sustained wave of UFO coverage in the United States since the 1940s—culminating in a series of inconclusive congressional hearings—this lecture examines how moving images shape belief, doubt, and wonder.
