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.
From Greed (1924) to post-apocalyptic cinema, the desert has served as one of horror’s most unforgiving landscapes. This lecture, presented by Ken Hollings for Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, traces how the American desert became a site of monsters, mutations, and moral collapse, shaped by atomic testing, exploitation cinema, and low-budget genre filmmaking.
Join us for an evening of readings and talks to celebrate the launch of Sightlines, a new series of books by Mack looking at architecture from distinct points of view, each taking the perspective of a particular entity, history, discipline, or form of writing.
This lecture, presented by Nedim Hassan for Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies examines how metal fans and musicians were cast as “folk devils” within the 1980s culture wars, and how a cycle of horror films—including Trick or Treat and Black Roses—absorbed and refracted these anxieties.
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.
Amurmur is a platform celebrating memory, enshrinement and archives. For our first event, through readings and budding projects, a selection of artists share their impassioned ways of engaging with the past. Followed by a screening of a film by Ines Barquet and Ximena Prieto, based on an idea by Alexia Marmara.
Presented by Mikatonic, this talk explores how cinematic representations of the asylum and its patients have reflected real-life developments in psychiatry, including the demolition of Victorian institutions and moves toward community-based care in the late 20th century. We will also see how film itself played a role in these developments, with documentary exposés of asylum life like Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies (1967) revealing the real-life horrors of the institution.
Tales of Ordinary Men and Women who Gave up their Lives for Other Londoners
Brontë Schiltz joins the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies to explore how the Televisual Gothic has imagined television as both a site of horror and a means of resistance—revealing the medium’s power to distort reality, exploit its subjects, and reinforce class hierarchies, but also to challenge and subvert them.
A seasonal evening of flickering visual fireworks, barely-remembered formats and sonic seances featuring glimmers of the ghostly televisual past, psychogeographical spoken word and moving pictures.
Antony Clayton joins the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies to explore a century of horror cinema rooted in the underworlds of fact and folklore, where everyday transit systems become uncanny landscapes of dread. We will trace how myth and rumour entwine with the anxieties of the modern city, shaping films that turn tunnels into sites of fear, claustrophobia, and monstrous intrusion.
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
London’s parks are not just spaces of leisure or greenery. They are ancient stage-sets for myths, politics, hauntings, and folk histories.
The Horse Hospital joins forces with Justice Is Not Seasonal, a collective of migrant workers victims of exploitation in the UK seeking justice. We will gather for an evening of talks, video screenings, traditional Bolivian dances, food and music.
Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love at 40: A Birthday Celebration Listening Party and in conversation with the author and musician Leah Kardos. Plus a display of Kate Bush-inspired paintings by Ukrainian artist Daria Hlazatova
Genesis P-Orridge lived their art to the extreme. A pioneering musician, avant-garde artist, spiritual explorer and gender revolutionary, Genesis has been featured in films and videos, but never the full story… never this intimate... until now.
A gala evening of film, music, special guests and discount copies of the sensational new book - BOOM! The Exploding Cinema and the New London Underground Cinema Scene.
Take a deep dive into forgotten Thames history as we explore the lost routes and the monumental hidden engineering where water meets land.
VSSL Studio present the London premiere of Keioui Keijaun Thomas’ film and multimedia performance, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise.
Beaulieu is an exhibition by Hannah Baum, open 12-5pm. From 6pm there will be a panel discussion.
Genesis P-Orridge lived their art to the extreme. A pioneering musician, avant-garde artist, spiritual explorer and gender revolutionary, Genesis has been featured in films and videos, but never the full story… never this intimate... until now. With a panel discussion featuring Chadd Curry aka Dahc Dermur VIII.
A fundraiser for Leo’s top surgery. With performances from Frances Glass and Gerst, films by Fatemeh Sarebannejad and (Yue)Fei Li, and readings by Maria Dragoi, Ed Burrell, and Lily Petch.
London’s parks are not just spaces of leisure or greenery. They are ancient stage-sets for myths, politics, hauntings, and folk histories.
An evening of music, performance, and spoken word from Jesse Darling VS Gentle Stranger, AMRA (Imran Perretta & Paul Purgas), Fondant, and Semionightmarekatz.
Two of London’s most passionate historians uncover lost chapters and characters from the city’s story: Salon for the City welcomes Vic Keegan and Matt Brown
A poetry reading with Verity Spott, Anthony Capildeo, and Kimberly Campanello, examining the intersection between lyric and community formation.
FIELDNOTES Live is a new programme bringing together artists and writers working across sonic and textual terrains. With performances from Titus Barker, Knee Gnaw, Yan Wai Yin and Rouzbeh Shadpey.
The Spectacle of Murder in Contemporary Crime Media, presented by Dr Stella Marie Gaynor
