In the year 1994, two reigning horror-movie directors each released a film: John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. A preliminary comparison between these two films reveals… well, let’s be honest: if Daniel Cockburn had never made a preliminary comparison between these two films, he’d probably be a lot happier right now. But here we are.

This autobiographical lecture performance tells the tale of a child who “discovered he could turn any film into a horror film simply by watching it” and asks what happens when such a child grows up and turns his superpowers on the real world. Along the way, we will encounter: a film-projection mishap, French filmmaking dogma, the Y2K crisis, a correspondence with a famous American filmmaker, and some seriously detailed grammatical analysis of classic power-ballad lyrics.