The Dark Desire is all about stories of impulse, longing, craving and lust, centred on a screening of Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 debut feature A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night – an Iranian vampire spaghetti western.
6:15pm: Roman Tucker I Live Theremin Performance in the Salon
Roman Tucker is a Melbourne musician from the bands Rocket Science – specialising in psychedelic punk rock infused with raw organ and theremin – Little Desert, and Person or Persons Unknown.
7:00pm: Experimental Art-Horror Shorts Program
Drew Pettifer, UNTITLED (GASP!) 2024
UNTITLED (GASP!) intersperses moments from cinematic history where male-identifying characters gasp in fear. The syncopated rhythm of these spliced moments collate micro-challenges to expectations of masculinity and allude to queer histories of the horror genre.
Isabel Peppard, Butterflies 2012
A young artist struggles to make a living selling her drawings at a train station. When a sinister businessman offers her a paying job the prospect seems inviting but the reality threatens to kill her imagination… Butterflies is a Gothic Fantasy stop-motion animation that speaks to the tension between art and capitalism and the struggle to preserve one’s creative soul.
David Lynch, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) 1966
Lynch’s first exploration into film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) was developed during his time at art school and presents a visceral and tongue-in-cheek metaphor about the process of expression and art marking.
David Lynch, The Alphabet 1968
The Alphabet is an experimental short film featuring a sick woman’s nightmare involving living representations of the alphabet. Combining animation and live-action the film presents an absurdist nightmare where learning and fear are intertwined.
Liang Luscombe and Cara Benedetto, Leave 2023
Leave uses puppetry to explore representations of Caucasian women and drunkenness in film and television. The stumbling woman, made famous in films and TV shows such as Fatal Attraction, Fleabag, Killing Eve, and Single Drunk Female, appears as a part-human-part-puppet character trying to piece together the night before. ‘Leave’ explores the erotics of the relationship between puppeteer and puppet, showing the way the puppeteer supports and manipulates the puppet to ask questions about agency and intoxication within the body horror genre.
8:00pm: Panel Discussion I Provoking the Dark Desire: Women in Horror
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (moderator) is an Australian film critic, author and academic who has written eight books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema with an emphasis on gender politics.
Isabel Peppard is a director, animator and visual artist. Her multi-award winning work has screened at top-tier festivals locally and internationally as well as at institutions such as GOMA(QLD), ACMI and The National Film and Sound Archive.
Liang Luscombe is an artist working across painting, sculpture, and moving image that engage in a process of generative questioning of how images and film affect audiences
Janice Loreck is a Lecturer in Screen and Cultural Studies at The University of Melbourne, and founding co-organiser of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival. Her books include Provocation in Women’s Filmmaking: Authorship and Art Cinema (2023) and Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema (2016)
8:50pm: Feature I A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night 2014 Ana Lily Amirpour
A tale of love, loneliness and family ties, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is set in the fictitious locale of Bad City. Dubbed the first Iranian Vampire Western, Amirpour’s take of the blood-sucking archetype is anything but prescriptive.
Language: Persian | 104mins | USA
Screams on Screen is co-programmed by Jessica Balanzategui (School of Media and Communication, SIGN network lead), Elyse Goldfinch, Jessica Clark (ACCA) and proudly presented by RMIT Culture and SIGN at RMIT in partnership with ACCA and supported by City of Melbourne Annual Arts Grants.
Screams on Screen ticket special – attend both evenings for $15 at checkout!
