Cinema Studies with Mister Kennedy: Thirty-One Nights of Horror (2025)
Cinema is Everywhere. Cinema Studies members will engage with the moving image in all of its forms, on all its platforms, across the world; paying attention to the margins as well as the mainstream. Offering an opportunity to constantly experimenting with exciting new forms of research and scholarship, from the angles of critics, curators, and creators.
Through the study of film, as an art, my focus will be concentrated around the relationships amongst film style, narrative form, and the material practices that shape the medium. The study of film as mass culture explores how film reflects societal values and processes of social change.
This October Series, Cinema Studies with Mister Kennedy will present the Thirty-One Nights of Horror series, accompanied by a trailer release. This initiative serves as both a soft launch and a statement of my teaching philosophy, outlining key areas of pedagogical focus. Over the course of one month, I will provide an introduction to the study of cinema through a curated exploration of the horror genre.
The series is designed as a model for a Special Topics in Film course, a variable-topic undergraduate offering that examines specific areas of cinema history, theory, and style.
While this course emphasizes applications relevant to enriching animation story artists approach to thinking like the camera, its interdisciplinary framework makes it accessible and valuable to students across multiple fields of study. Given its changing thematic focus each term, the course may be repeated for academic credit.
The Thirty-One Nights of Horror series highlights a selection of landmark films—gritty, visceral, and stylistically innovative—that have reshaped the genre across decades. Screenings will be accompanied by contextual resources, including streaming information for student accessibility. The lecture series is free of charge, though access will be password-protected; interested participants are invited to contact me directly to receive credentials.
Posts will be posted every Wednesday and Friday at 7PM (PST) on our site.
October kicks off with a 31 Nights of Horror Series that collects some of the grimiest, goriest, and most inventive nightmares from throughout the decades that revolutionized the genre. Today I will be posting a few films to get everyone comfortable with finding the movie and viewing content.
This series is meant to focus on some of the most inventive films from throughout the decades that revolutionized the genre. I will also have enrichment elements lectures, books, essays, and articles that link more to an academic/critique focus based on talks and studies with my professors at California Institute of the Arts and the California College of the Arts Oakland Campus.
suggesteD READER:
These books are essential reading for anyone participating in the course. The singular aim of selecting these scholarly texts is to stimulate and engage the community in the fast-changing, complex, and increasingly interdisciplinary nature of cinema studies, and to catalyze future intellectual, academic, and professional-driven research agendas. It is believed that the integration of cinema studies with other disciplines will undoubtedly contribute to the development of the cinema field both in practice and in theory while enriching the past. Enjoy!
