Sonia Lupher has been a member of the Horror Studies Working Group since the very beginning and is intimidatingly adept at programming amazing events. Her work focuses particularly on women in horror and as a result her impressive list of contacts and interests allow her to access compelling, edgy, and extremely talented horror filmmakers and artists. Most recently, Sonia hosted an event with director Lesley Manning discussing the impact of her film Ghostwatch (1992). See my own interview with Sonia about the Horror Studies Working Group and her work. Like any good horror interview we span such topics as cookbooks and cannibal horror to teaching Psycho and Funny Games. “I wouldn’t say the Working Group has changed my interests in any way as much as it’s given me a chance to cultivate them and do that in more or different ways…. I feel like what I'm doing is more official with the Working Group, less… maverick I guess.”
Sonia Lupher is a Visiting Lecturer in Film and Media Studies and English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she completed her PhD in 2020. Her scholarship has appeared in Jump Cut and Studies in the Fantastic. Sonia is the founder and editor of Cut-Throat Women: A Database of Women Who Make Horror in 2018, a digital humanities database of women filmmakers who make horror films. The site includes many tools to help inform and promote research including essays about female horror filmmakers, interviews, resources, and director profiles including thousands of filmmakers. Nathan Koob: To start us off I realized I have the perfect introduction to a Horror Studies Newsletter Interview feature. If you’re at all into cooking… SL: Yes, absolutely. NK: I wanted to share this with you. My sister got me this because I’m a fan of the series: [shows Janice Poon’s Feeding Hannibal cookbook] 1 Sonia Lupher: Oh my god! Wow, I don’t know… NK: It’s by Janice Poon the chef who did all the on-screen cooking for the series Hannibal and despite the gimmick it’s seriously the best cookbook I’ve ever owned. There are some recipes that seem very strange that I haven’t tried with like… SL: Kidney, heart, liver… NK: Right, exactly, but most of the recipes are not. It’s either totally just legit fancy gourmet stuff, or it’s food that can be made to look like other things that are creepy. SL: [writes down book info] Interesting. You have to show this to the group the next time we meet! I should definitely get that. I’ve never even heard of that—that’s intense! NK: It is, and I thought it would segue nicely into asking what kind of horror do you tend to gravitate toward? SL: That’s a good question. I was going to say not ghosts, but lately I’ve been on a ghost kick so I guess I kind of go in cycles. I guess probably the easiest way to say it is what I don’t like. Ones I don’t like as much are actually cannibal horror because they just kind of gross me out. [Interviewer now rethinks his choice to show off a Hannibal cookbook at the start of the interview]. NK: Do you know what it is about those films? SL: I think it’s because they always use chicken in those movies, and I love chicken [laughs]. It’s very clearly chicken, and it just makes me kind of taste the chicken differently. There’s a visceral reaction to cannibal horror that I’m not a huge fan of which of course is different from zombie horror. NK: I think we all have a slightly different experience with the HSWG and I wanted to get your sense of that history, and of course most specifically where it all started for you. SL: Oh, yes, I kind of fell into it at the very beginning. Let’s see, it would have been Fall 2017 or Spring 2018 I think. Basically, it was when we were first starting to thinking about the 50th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead. I think that’s right. Adam Lowenstein asked me and another then grad student Ben Ogrodnik, to go to lunch with him at Ali Baba’s. And there he was kind of telling us a little bit about his thoughts about putting together a Horror Studies Museum, or Center of some kind and building on the momentum of what was going on with the growing interest in Romero at that time. He told us that the library might be getting the Romero archival collection, though that was hush-hush at that time, and he was talking to Suz Romero. I’m not quite sure at what stage all these things were at then, but I think they were talked about at that meeting. NK: And I assume the whole thing with the Romero material and the HSWG was an easy sell for you? SL: It was, yeah. At the time I was a grad student and also President of the Film Studies Graduate Student Organization and that meant I was going to be in charge of the Graduate Student Conference the following semester. So, I had decided the theme was going to be something surrounding the Living Dead and the Undead which turned into a conference called: No More Room in Hell: A Half-Century of Undead Media. That way we could talk about dead media and other things. It was really fun to organize and for that conference, which was Fall 2018 just before Romero Lives, we had two days of student papers. Sarah Juliet Lauro came to give the keynote address from the University of Tampa. She wrote a book called The Transatlantic Zombie so she’s, you know, heavy into the zombie theory. I had a guest filmmaker who was Monica Estrella Negra and she brought her films to screen and we did a short block of zombie films from the last 20 years or so. That was a really fun event and let Adam Lowenstein know that I was capable of pulling off a major event like that. So Adam brought me in officially at that point to help out with the Romero Lives stuff. NK: That’s great, and what specifically was your involvement in Romero Lives? SL: I remember going to a lot of meetings. I remember going to one or two in August and September 2018. I missed a lot of the early meetings, but there were a few later ones I was involved in. Therefore, I wasn’t super involved in the planning, that was mostly Adam Hart: he put a lot of it together. There was a reunion of Romero actors, people who had been involved with his films, and people who worked with him on the stage. That was really fun, and that was all Adam Hart. 2 So while I wasn’t super involved in that planning I was on the sidelines watching and supporting at that point. NK: That’s great! That’s really interesting. And have you seen the group change over the years since? SL: Well we’ve taken more people on, as you know [The interviewer is one of the more recent additions to the Group], and extended it to members of the larger community. The George A. Romero Foundation, which was established around that time, has taken on a more central role. The Group was always connected to GARF, but now it’s like a different kind of growth from the same entity. NK: Your own works seems to intersect a lot with the interests of the Working Group. Has that relationship changed at all over the years or offered different opportunities? SL: I think it just changes everything period because instead of all of us focused on one thing we have different people working on different projects aligned with their own interests. That’s something I’ve really enjoyed. I wouldn’t say the Working Group has changed my interests in any way as much as it’s given me a chance to cultivate them and do that in more or different ways. I think it’s helped me a lot. Before when I was putting together events, it was kind of like I had to do everything from start to finish myself. And even though I still do a lot of that, I don't have to look for funding as much anymore; that's been a big helpful change. NK: Yeah, for sure. SL: I have more opportunities to put together events and there’s a ready-made community for them which is nice. So, yeah, it’s definitely changed. I feel like what I'm doing is a little bit more official because another thing that I did that 2018/2019 school year was invite a filmmaker Aislinn Clarke. She is a Northern Irish director of a found footage horror film called The Devil's Doorway, and she was the first woman to direct a feature length horror film in Northern Ireland. She made it on 16 millimeter; it's a really cool film. But anyway, I invited her to Pitt in the Spring of 2019 and she was coming from Belfast so I cobbled together the funding from like 12 different sources or something. It was a $2,800 budget-- pretty big for a University event. Now I feel like I am still taking advantage of those funding sources where I need them, but I feel like what I'm doing is more official with the Working Group, less… maverick I guess. NK: {laughs} Yes, I remember you working some with Jeff Whitehead on the Gigi Saul Guerrero event for some help with contacts or marketing. SL: Yeah, right. NK: Does the programming help your work, or how does it fit into what you do as a scholar? SL: Women in horror film production is my area of interest and I am able to bring people to campus virtually whose films I'd like to write about, or whose films I have written about in some cases. The advantage of working with women in horror film production of the 20th century, or 21st century is that they're all still alive and most of them are just starting out so they're more available. NK: I would imagine given that we’re all doing virtual stuff right now it might give you even more access in terms of access and potential for your own interviews or just to have the contacts. SL: Yeah, it does. I mean before I was conducting a lot of interviews at films festivals. NK: That’s great, can you talk more about that? SL: So this was for my dissertation I would just go to a woman's horror film festival and interview as many people as I could, while I was there. And then, you know, whoever I couldn't get ahold of or who wasn't available then I would have a phone interview later which wasn't very convenient but it worked, and I think now will be a lot easier using zoom, but I haven't done that yet. NK: I love the events that have been happening this year and since you’re so central in programming so many of them I was wondering if you have any fun or interesting stories around programming. SL: My favorite event ever was the Aislinn one. That was just a great time. You know, she was here on her birthday, and it was just a really fun, meaningful event. I remember trying to convince Adam Lowenstein to bring Aislinn in. I was helping him out with another event, The Blackness and the Powers of Horror Event, and we were working with the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics to put that together in February 2018, which was a really fun event too. But as we were putting that together I was telling him, “You should really bring Aislinn Clarke out here. She’s so cool, she’s really smart, and her film is great.” And he was like, “Yeah, yeah, cool, cool.” And then I decided I was passionate about it and that I was just going to do it. So I asked for money and started organizing. I even got some students involved. Then I told Adam about it and he was excited so I invited him to lunch with her. She began talking about growing up in Ireland during The Troubles and being right on the border of all that violence and Adam began talking about trauma in Israel and among Israeli students. They really hit it off. Afterwards he turned to me and said, “I just want to make a tiny version of her and put her in my pocket and just take her out whenever I have to talk to the Dean about why horror is important.” NK: [laughs] That’s great. It sounds like the first event where you’re taking initiative to do something you want and that you think will be rewarding and making it all happen. That’s an amazing experience. SL: Yeah, and she also ran a screenwriting workshop for undergrads which was really cool too. I was just really proud of how that whole thing went down. NK: That’s amazing! Do you have any dream events you’d like to do now? SL: I think it would be really cool to have a film festival here at Pitt. I’d like it to be a student run kind of thing, giving them experience organizing and vetting films, that I can be in charge of. I would love to do something like that. NK: That sounds awesome! How much is horror a part of your teaching? Do you include horror texts in courses that aren’t traditionally horror-defined? SL: I usually teach horror when I teach a genre unit in Introduction to Film. Typically, though, I don’t like to overload my syllabus with horror, unless it’s a horror class. I’ve never actually taught a horror class before. I’ve taught a couple of Seminar in Composition Film classes that have had a core theme like monsters or something, but I’ve kept it kind of open so it’s not always scary monsters necessarily. But I’ve found that a lot of students really like horror and are really into it. Though then there are some students that just don’t like it at all, and I don’t want to alienate those students. Typically I have at least two horror films on my syllabus. NK: I’ve run into this too at other schools when I was teaching where I’d put something on the syllabus not really thinking of it as too intense and then a couple of students let me know that they’re having trouble with it. So it can be hard to know where to set the line since there are people who just react very strongly to horror. Do you have any horror films you like to show that tend to work well for all audiences? SL: Yeah, I think most of the things I show are pretty tame like Psycho. Older stuff, typically, is definitely going to be fine. But you never know how they’re going to react—something unusual will always happen. I’ve shown Funny Games four times, have you seen that? NK: The Haneke (1997)? SL: Yeah, the original. So it’s not necessarily a horror film but everything in it is difficult. I’ve shown that in Seminar in Composition Film and it went really well because they all hated it so much that they have a lot to say about it… NK: And then they inevitably write really well about it… SL: Yeah, for sure. But this semester it didn’t really go over all that well. I’m not sure why, but this semester I didn’t find that the students were as responsive to getting into what the film is trying to do. NK: Could that in part be due to the remote nature of everything this year, and not having as much of a connection to the group discussion? SL: Maybe, it could be, I don’t remember how it went the last time I taught it in person which would have been about 2 years ago. Let’s see, I’ve also taught Invasion of the Body Snatchers… I think the most intense thing I’ve taught in terms of horror was Oldboy. NK: Oh yeah. SL: My students were okay with it, but I had a lot of people who really liked Tarantino and I think they could see a lot of the influence on Tarantino's films in there or vice versa. Nk: Definitely, that makes a lot of sense. Well I don’t want to keep you any longer as I know we’re all very busy right now but thank you so much for agreeing to do this! SL: Of course, my pleasure! 1 Poon, Janice. Feeding Hannibal: A Connoisseur’s Cookbook. Titan Books, 2016. 2 Adam Lowenstein facilitated the appointment of Adam Hart through the Department of English and the Dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences to a two-year position as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Film/Media Studies this appointment was made in conjunction with Lowenstein’s Senior Faculty Fellowship from the Humanities Center. Hart worked closely with Lowenstein on the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 horror studies programming, including the first two versions of Romero Lives. When his Visiting Assistant Professor contract expired, Hart was then hired as a Visiting Researcher by the University Library Systems for 2020-2021. Comments are closed.
|
|