WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 11 – MACELI’S 1031 New Hampshire
Doors open at 7. Presentations start at 8.
The cost is one US dollar bill or coin.
The Grave Topics:
“Giallo Horror: Unmasking the Masked Killer” by Sarah Thomas and Kelly Nightengale.
From the yellow pages of pulp crime novels emerged GIALLO, the Italian horror film genre of the 1960s-1980s. Characterized by virtuosic camera work, stylized violence, and lurid color, Giallo left a bloody fingerprint on the horror genre that is still seen today!
“Oak Hill Cemetery: A History and its Symbolism,” by Lori Strecker.
An introduction about the rural cemetery movement and what characteristics make Lawrence’s Oak Hill primarily a rural cemetery. Digging deeper, we’ll next look at gravestone symbolism with several of examples from Oak Hill. Finally, time allowing, a brief exploration how later portions of it evolved into a lawn cemetery in the 1940s and what makes that different than the rural cemetery.
“Gifford Pinchot’s Ghost Wife,” by Rachel McCarthy James.
Gifford Pinchot worked with Teddy Roosevelt to protect the land we know as our national parks. But while he was one of the most prominent Republicans in the Roosevelt administration, his status as a handsome bachelor was a curiosity to the DC political scene.
The reason: his secret heteromortal marriage to Laura Houghteling, who died of tuberculosis in 1904. Though he would eventually marry an alive woman, he felt Laura as a spiritual and metaphysical presence, his source of support for nearly two decades. This is a deeply romantic story about nature, death, and love.
ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:
A passionate horror devotee, Sarah Thomas studied film and anthropology at the University of Kansas. She watched Mario Bava’s horror classic, Black Sunday, as a little girl, which sparked a lifetime appreciation of Italian horror.
Kelly Nightengale’s longtime admiration of giallo movies influenced her co-production, lighting, and set design of a feature length giallo-inspired horror melodrama called “It Starts With Murder,” and other dark experimental projects.
As founding members of the Black Light Jello Ectoplasm Film Society (aka Blood Church), Kelly and Sarah have collaborated on several short films which screened in the 2015 Illuminati Cult Dress Film Festival.
Cemeteries reveal much about the culture and history of a community and are a must-see whenever vacationing or visiting a new area; at least, this is what Lori Strecker tells her family whenever she schlepps them yet again on another cemetery field trip. Lori is happy to have a coven of fellow nerds who she hopes will come to love and appreciate Oak Hill cemetery as much as she does.
Rachel McCarthy James has written for Broadly, Bitch Magazine, LitHub, The New Inquiry, and Robot Butt. Her first book, titled The Man from the Train, co-authored with her father Bill James, has just been published and solves the mystery of the serial killer behind the Villisca axe murders of 1912.