Press Release
PØST is please to host a Reading and Signing by Dr. Laurence Rickels of his new book The Psycho Records on Wednesday, February 15 at 7 pm.
Dr. Rickels will be in the area lecturing on vampires, zombies, and Nazis at UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, and Otis College of Art and Design.
PØST is located in the Bendix Building at 1206 Maple Avenue #515, Los Angeles, CA 90015
For further information please contact HK Zamani at new@postlosangeles.org
www.postlosangeles.org
www.post-la.com
https://www.facebook.com/NotPOST
THE PSYCHO RECORDS
LAURENCE RICKELS
The Psycho Records follows the influence of the primal shower scene within subsequent slasher and splatter films. American soldiers returning from World War II were called “psychos” if they exhibited mental illness. Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock turned the term into a catch-all phrase for a range of psychotic and psychopathic symptoms or dispositions. They transferred a war disorder to the American heartland. Drawing on his experience with German film, Hitchcock packed inside his shower stall the essence of schauer, the German cognate meaning “horror.” Later serial horror film production has post-traumatically flashed back to Hitchcock’s shower scene. In the end, though, this book argues the effect is therapeutically finite. This extensive case study summons the genealogical readings of philosopher and psychoanalyst Laurence Rickels. The book opens not with another reading of Hitchcock’s 1960 film but with an evaluation of various updates to vampirism over the years. It concludes with a close look at the rise of demonic and infernal tendencies in horror movies since the 1990s and the problem of the psycho as our most uncanny double in close quarters.
Laurence A. Rickels is professor in art and theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe. He is the author of Aberrations of Mourning (1988), The Case of California (2001), Nazi Psychoanalysis (2002), The Vampire Lectures (1999), The Devil Notebooks (2008), Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (2008), I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (2010), and Germany: A Science Fiction (2015).
–WALLFLOWER PRESS–
DISTRIBUTED BY COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
216 pages
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Film Studies PRESS RELEASE
A Wallflower Press Book: Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press
61 West 62nd Street, New York, NY 10023 Phone 212.459.0600 Fax 212.459.3677 www.cup.columbia.edu
For more information please contact: Erin A. Larson
(212)-459-0600 x7135
eal2178@columbia.edu
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