About this website
TheDarkMirror.net is the official Internet presence of The Dark Mirror, the horror film festival created by horror writer Matt Cardin and held in Waco, Texas on the campus of McLennan Community College.
The 2011 festival will be held in MCC’s indoor Lecture Hall on Friday, October 28 and Saturday, October 29. The theme for 2011 is “Horror and the Soul,” which means we’ll have a mixture of film screenings and lectures that deal with the intermingled subjects of horror, religion, psychology, and society, with a distinct dash of apocalypticism thrown in for good measure. Click around this site to find information about the films, the venue, and more.
About the blog
We update our BLOG regularly during the month of October with articles about horror films and their relationship to society, religion, philosophy, psychology, academia and more. We also post info about the upcoming film festival, including scheduling news, notes about the speakers and lectures that will accompany the screenings, and more. Check back regularly!
About The Dark Mirror film series
The point of both the film series and this website is to underscore the fact that horror movies really do reflect societal fears and psychological truths. A major part of the college experience, and also the experience of maturing as a human being in general, is waking up to the fact that everything is deeper, more meaningful, and more open to profound thought and reflection than you’ve previously recognized. This includes art, including films, including, most definitely, horror films.
About horror films and religion
The theme of this year’s Dark Mirror festival is Horror and the Soul. As you may have noticed, in 2011 America is living through a very strange time. Apocalyptic fears of both the religious and practical/secular kind are running rampant, and have been doing so for the past decade. The Fall 2011 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, the “magazine of history and ideas” created and edited by political journalist and former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, is devoted to this very subject. In “Kingdom Come,” the issue’s opening editorial essay, Lapham observes our reigning mood of doom:
Although I’ve yet to see sandwich-board men on the steps of the nation’s capitol declaring that the end of the world is nigh, I expect that it won’t be long before the Department of Homeland Security advises the country’s Chinese restaurants to embed the alert in the fortune cookies. President Obama appears before the congregations of the Democratic faithful as a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, cherishing the wounds of the American body politic as if they were the stigmata of the murdered Christ. The daily newscasts update the approaches of weird storms, bring reports of missing forests and lost polar bears, number the dead and dying in Africa and the Middle East, gauge the level of America’s fast-disappearing wealth. Hollywood stages nostalgic remakes of the Book of Revelation; video games mount the battle of Armageddon on the bosom of the iPad. Nor does any week pass by without a word of warning from the oracles at the Council on Foreign Relations, Fox News, and the New York Times. Their peerings into the abyss of what to the Washington politicians are known as “the out years” never fail to discover a soon forthcoming catastrophe (default on the national debt, double-dip recession, global warming, nuclear proliferation, war in Iran) deserving the close attention of their fellow travelers aboard the bus to Kingdom Come.
If he’s correct that we’re obsessed with notions of “the end,” the natural question to ask is: What’s up with this? Why are we so fascinated by the idea of apocalypse and all that goes with it? More to the point of our main focus here, how do horror films reflect this enduring theme, which is fundamentally bound up with something like the religious impulse, and which manifests not only as the fearful craving to see the word Doom writ large in our collective near future but as a fear for the very safety or our selves or souls in a world gone mad?
That’s what we’ll be talking about in the lectures and discussions that will accompany this year’s Dark Mirror Screenings, and it’s what you’ll be asked to notice in the films themselves. Obviously, this is a subject that’s fit for entire books and college courses, since it combines film studies with sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, religious studies, and more. We cannot and will not cover it comprehensively in the short lectures and discussions that will accompany the film showings, and in the posts at the Dark Mirror blog. But we can certainly broach the subjects, and hope that people will catch the flavor of it and want to find out more on their own
About your hosts
The Dark Mirror is the brainchild of horror writer and MCC Writing Center instructor MATT CARDIN, with intensive planning help from film scholar JAMES KENDRICK of Baylor University. You can contact them through their respective Websites (linked on their names above) or through the contact page that’s available here.
Matt Cardin and Jim Kendrick
