Step into the hazy, destabilising world of Shoegaze Horror—a strain of cinema that trades story for sensation, jump scares for silence, and clarity for lingering dread. Presented by Andrew Pope
Doors: 7pm [event starts promptly at 7.15pm, please do not be late]
Tickets £12 Standard, £9 concessions
Borrowing its name from the 1990s music genre of distortion and emotional opacity, Shoegaze Horror occupies the edge of coherence. It unsettles not through gore but through repetition, oblique imagery, liminal spaces, and a slow emotional drift into alienation. Over ninety minutes, this lecture will map its emergence and cinematic language, tracing a form that turns absence, distortion, and melancholy into tools of fear.
At the centre are three defining works. Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) leads us into retro-futuristic unease, where sensory overload and ambient sound blur time and space. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) carries the genre into the internet age, exposing digital alienation, fractured identity, and disembodied transformation. Skinamarink (2022) distills the terror of childhood into pure abstraction, transforming the home into a haunted void of stasis and uncertainty.
From these films, and from a wider lineage reaching back to Maya Deren, Jean Rollin, David Lynch, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the lecture will chart the five qualities that define Shoegaze Horror: ambiguity, stillness, repetition, liminality, and auditory dread. It will also ask what this turn toward dreamlike horror reveals about our cultural moment—how it reflects post-crisis drift, pandemic-induced dissociation, and the unease of living in suspended time.
What does it mean when horror abandons resolution for atmosphere, when fear becomes a slow dissolve? Shoegaze Horror lingers like a half-remembered dream, a cinema of haunted echoes and spectral futures.