Sessions
Time: 5:00 PM
Location: The Gorsebrook Lounge923 Robie St, Halifax, NS B3H 1G3
This welcome event at the campus pub offers an accessible and community building introduction to the festival. Featuring @wednesdaywhizzquiz
Free for SMU students.
Time: 9:00 AM
Location: SMU9:00am-2:00pm
Come support local monstrous makers at SMU! The Bazaar will be located in the Anne J. & Albert T. Isaacs Learning Commons.
Vendors
Out of the Broom Closet
Hellifax Horror Festival
Dark Art Imagery by Ashley Drake
Witchy as Folk
Goblin’s Masquerade
Props Floral Design
Medusa Metric
Horrified Candles
SMU Alumni
Irving Entrepreneurship Centre
And more!
Time: 9:00 AM
Location: SMU9:00am-2:00pm
Day 1 Panel Topics:
1A - Monstrous Methodologies
1B - Love, Evil, and Monsters
2A - De/Colonizing Monstrosity
2B - Home and Monstrosity
3A - Abjection and the Femme Body
3B - Virtual Monsters and Monstrosity
Find full panel details and abstracts below..
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: Halifax Central Library5440 Spring Garden RoadHalifax, NS B3J 1E9
Where are the residential school diaries? Indigenous survivors do not have real-time records written by themselves or their ancestors about the experience. Rather, Indigenous residential school experiences come to us as memory or post-memory, meaning that a turn to other forms of representation is necessary, prolific, and powerful. Fictional representations, such as Rhymes for Young Ghouls, provides Indigenous survivors and their descendants a method of representing the unrepresentable. Jeff Barnaby was a Mi’kmaq intergenerational residential school survivor who created Rhymes for Young Ghouls, an Indigenous horror film about one Mi'kmaw girl's experience living beneath the colonial gaze and temporarily within the walls of the fictional St. D's residential school. The residential school system was predicated on colonial gazing that dehumanized, policed, and assimilated Indigenous bodies, but in Rhymes, monstrosity is wielded by the Indigenous characters as a tool of resistance; by embodying monstrosity willingly, the Indigenous characters both subvert and move through the colonial gaze, disrupting its various forms of surveillance.
Presenters/Speakers:Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Halifax Central Library5440 Spring Garden RoadHalifax, NS B3J 1E9
A public-facing, free screening of Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum and a panel
discussion moderated by Dr. Collier-Jarvis and led by Indigenous scholars and
activists.
This session is in partnership with Hellifax Horror Fest.
Presenters/Speakers:Time: 9:00 AM
Location: SMU9:00am-2:00pm
Come support local monstrous makers at SMU! The Bazaar will be located in the Anne J. & Albert T. Isaacs Learning Commons.
Vendors
Bad Manners Art
Witchy as Folk
Horrified Candles
Hellifax Horror Festival
Blackbird Studio
Goblin’s Masquerade
Lydia Leblanc
The Crystal Eye
SMU Alumni
Irving Entrepreneurship Centre
And more!
Time: 3:30 PM
Location: Halifax Central Library5440 Spring Garden RoadHalifax, NS B3J 1E9
Nia Da Costa’s Candyman (2021) exemplifies the ways in which Black filmmakers and artists can use the horror genre to explore important questions about global Blackness. What does it mean when trauma moves across Black lived experiences? What does it mean for film and art to address trauma—particularly the physical, emotional, and social trauma born out of racism’s pasts and present—across the temporal plane? How does horror contribute to cinematic and artistic aesthetics to foreground Black experiences and illustrate how Black creative agency helps recuperate traumatic-turned-revolutionary visual culture? Using Candyman (2021) and enriched by an interview with Trinidadian-born artist and Northwestern University professor, Sherwin Ovid, who created six paintings for Nia DaCosta’s film, this talk illustrates the vital role that visual culture, specifically art, plays in memorializing and (de)constructing Black traumas. His work on the film operates in conjunction with DaCosta’s iteration of the Candyman to illustrate the power of Black arts traditions in meditating on and preserving Black trauma born out of racism.
Presenters/Speakers:Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Halifax Central Library5440 Spring Garden RoadHalifax, NS B3J 1E9
Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of this 1975 classic with a queer shadow cast from the SMU Drama Society! Dr. Allyn Walker will introduce the film with a critical examination of the impact of the film, and after the screening the SMU Pride Society will moderate a Q&A.
Dr. Allyn Walker: Don't Dream It, Be It? Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Making of Monsters
While earlier generations of 2SLGBTQIA+ viewers found empowerment and representation in Frank-N-Furter's unapologetic monstrosity, embracing the film for its celebration of sexual and gender nonconformity, more recent queer and trans audiences often find Rocky Horror to be monstrous in and of itself. Modern critiques of the movie focus on its depiction of the trans main character as predatory and reductive. This divide reveals complex questions about representation, reclamation, and the double-edged nature of monstrous identity.
Presenters/Speakers:Time: 10:00 AM
Location: SMU10:00am-12:00pm
This breakfast gathering provides space for registrants to network, discuss pedagogy, share curriculum resources, and explore collaborative opportunities
Time: 12:00 PM
Location: SMU Art Gallery12:00pm-1:00pm
Two Pansies is a co-exhibition by artists Autumn Star and Shay Donovan at Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax. This collaborative project brings together sculpture, painting and video installation to create an immersive environment shaped by ecofeminist values and the transformative potential of play with interior spaces that hold memory and transformation. The gallery becomes an expanded organism that is inhabited, breathing, and blooming. At the heart of Two Pansies is a shared artistic inquiry into how queer bodies relate to space, nature, and one another. Two Pansies is a visual moment of radical imagination, where ecological care and kinship expand the boundaries of material practices and add colourful contributions to the visual art community in Nova Scotia.
Presenters/Speakers:Time: 2:00 PM
Location: Sammy Ho Discovery Zone, Sobey Hub 2112-4 p.m.
This workshop explores dark romance, a sub-genre of the romance genre that is increasing in popularity among young adult and adult readers. Because of its dark content and themes, including monstrosity, horror, dubious and non-consensual sex, dark romance is often branded as misogynistic. However, many argue that, like other subgenres of romance, including fantasy romance, it provides a safe and healthy space to explore and destigmatize sex and desire, encouraging and promoting healthy romantic and sexual relationships characterized by increased self-knowledge and informed agency. This workshop discusses the complex reception of dark romance among fans and scholars, with a particular focus on the evolving nature of content warnings, ultimately arguing that it provides a safe and healthy space to explore sex, desire, and agency.
Presenters/Speakers:Time: 7:00 PM
Location: SMU Theatre Auditorium7pm-10pm
A culminating community costume celebration, in the SMU Theatre Auditorium (designed to mirror the Prom in Carrie), featuring a performance from the SMU Drama Society, and more!
The Monster Ball with be hosted by DJ Anita LandBack. Anita LandBack (they/them) is a Two-Spirit Lnu (Mi’kmaw) drag artist, DJ, and nurse practitioner from Eskasoni First Nation, based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. Through performance and music, Anita blends Mi’kmaw culture, humor, and storytelling to create spaces where people feel seen, celebrated, and connected. Their work bridges art and healthcare, using both the stage and the clinic to spark conversations about identity, resilience, and visibility. Anita has been featured on CBC Gem’s “Canada’s a Drag” and presented at the 2024 JUNO Awards, where they helped introduce the reclaimed word Etuiwijijaqmijuinu’k (“living with two spirits”) to audiences across Canada and beyond.
Tickets available at the door.