Time-Slips 26 November 2024 In the early years of the 20th century, two ladies visited the gardens of Versailles. Whilst there, they apparently slipped back in time to the late 18th century. They published a book describing their experience, which in later years was debunked as misperception and hallucination. Case closed. Or is it? There are a plethora of similar contemporary reports of apparent slips through time, from brief glimpses to full interactive experiences. Most reports describe features from the past, but a few describe possible slips forward in time. Dr Ann Winspe r has been researching people apparently travelling through time for the last 20 years. She describes some of these fascinating cases and looks at possible explanations, as well as how not all can be explained through misperception and psychology. Venue: The Bell 50 Middlesex Street E1 7EX (Tubes: Liverpool Street, Aldgate, Aldgate East) Date: 26 November 2024 Doors: 7.30pm Start: 8pm Tickets: £5/£3 ht
Moral panic, myth, and the macabre: Video nasties in the 1980s and beyond. Thursday 21 November 2024 6.30 pm doors. 7 pm start. £10 / £7 Concessions Advance Booking Conway Hall , 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL Tube: Holborn London Fortean Email List When the widespread introduction of the VHS cassette changed the face of home entertainment in the early 1980s, it wasn’t long before video rental store shelves were filled with lurid tapes promising orgies of sex, violence, and terror. In this talk, authors David Kerekes and Jennifer Wallis explore how the panic over ‘video nasties’ developed: prompting raids and arrests, implicating films in real-life murder cases, and targeting film dealers, distributors, and viewers. They will ask how far policies and campaigns directed at video nasties — not forgetting the marketing of these films — created a mystique and mythology of their own, as fans sought out every tape on the famed video nasty ‘list’ produced by the Director of Public P