Promotional still of Bela Lugosi as Dracula in the movie Dracula (1931), one of the movies from the event.
From 6 p.m. on Nov. 14 to 6 a.m. the next day, UW’s horror club, Waterboo, hosted Delirium, a 12-hour movie marathon of classic Hollywood horror movies, the club’s longest event to date.
The movie marathon featured nine films from Universal Monsters, a series from the 1930’s focusing on well-known creatures and cryptids. The lineup included films on Dracula, Frankenstein and the Invisible Man, as well as sequels and spinoffs. The marathon ended with the 1959 adaptation of The Mummy, a predecessor to the 1999 adaptation many know today as a cult classic.
According to Madeline Peace-Smith, fourth year legal studies student and secretary of Waterboo, Universal Monsters “is sort of the first movie franchise… From the 30’s to the 50’s, Universal Pictures was adapting a bunch of classic monster stories.” The films originally were planned as standalone entries in the series, Peace-Smith says, “but [the movies] would cross over with each other and had sequels. So in many ways it was the first sort of cinematic universe… even if they weren’t initially intended to exist together.”
Fourth year arts student Azie Hare, the club’s social media manager and movie archiver, noted that the event is the first of its kind for Waterboo since they rebooted two years ago after it went inactive. “Our former oldest movie was from 1942, but with Delirium, we are beating that record six times in one night,” Hare stated in an interview with Imprint.
Delirium is a successor to the Late Night Theatre event series, says Hare, where the club would screen a horror movie online at 2 a.m. every few days across several weeks during the summer. Usually, for club movie nights, the film screened is selected through a Discord community poll from a shortlist of approved movies. But for Late Night Theatre, Hare chose movies from the 50’s and 60’s that would be least likely to be voted on in community polls.
“I wanted to give [them] a chance,” they emphasized. “Because in my opinion — and the main reason I started the club — is that every single horror movie, no matter what, has some kind of artistic or creative value.”
That feeling is shared among club execs, general members and event attendees. Fourth year computer science student Deyi Zhang came to Delirium because he was interested in both horror and classic films.
“It’s a subject that scares me a little — as it should,” he said about the horror genre. Zhang stated that while other film genres have a standard narrative structure and patterns that are predictable, horror aims for subverting those expectations to scare or provoke the viewer. “I think that’s pretty exciting, as well as the fact that it elicits interesting emotions.”
For Peace-Smith, that emotional experience is character-building (pun intended). “I got into horror because it was a way to push myself, but also a space to experience fear in the comfort of my own home and control it.” A major factor that also drew her to horror was how works in the genre often feature women in prominent roles, or revolve around struggles women and other marginalized groups face in society. “There’s a history of women and racialized people working within the horror genre because it is kind of the outsider genre, so you get a lot of films and stories that are coming from a perspective you wouldn’t otherwise get… horror can address these issues in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way,” she remarked.
Regarding Delirium, Peace-Smith stated that the focus on the Universal Monsters series came from wanting to do a franchise movie marathon, and the films seemed like a perfect fit. “It’s always interesting as a genre fan to watch the first movies from that genre,” she said. “Because you can kind of see where these ideas came from, what has stuck, what hasn’t, and where these tropes originated.” One example is Dracula’s iconic accent, which originated from Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of the vampire in the 1931 film shown at Delirium. The popular image of Frankenstein’s monster — flat head shape, with screws at the neck and stitches on his face — was also popularized from the character’s portrayal in the 1931 film Frankenstein.
Creatures of other worlds, like Frankenstein’s creation, are what drew first-year biology student and club explorer, Theo Corbin Genest, to Waterboo. Genest originally disliked horror, but warmed up to it through the link between the genre and his interests. “I used to read a lot of books about cryptids, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster… I just started consuming more horror media that I found interesting.” As explorer, Genest hosts ghost tours and outdoor expeditions, like a recent trip to the Waterloo County Gaol (pronounced “jail”) uncovering local ghost stories and history. “I’m not too [into] the depth of believing in ghosts, but I like the stories about [them],” he said at the event. “If I can join a club where there are other people who like doing the things that I do, it’s perfect.”
While Delirium and most other club events to date have revolved around the horror genre, Waterboo doesn’t shy away from adjacent topics. “Officially, we consider ourselves a horror and everything-alt club,” Hare says, adding that the club can “do anything that is macabre, strange or unusual.” Hare hopes to expand Waterboo’s coverage of those topics in upcoming events and club activities. Waterboo has five movie nights and three game nights scheduled for the next term, along with the launch of a term-long short film project.
Above all, Waterboo aims to be a space where fans and potential fans of all things haunted can find community. “We watch a lot of movies that I would not choose to watch on my own, and they’re a lot more fun with other people,” stated Fletcher Grant, club treasurer and third-year science student. Just as with Delirium, all of Waterboo’s movie nights are casual, with refreshments and talking allowed during screenings. Hare emphasized that, as a rule, the club “invites and allows as much socialization as possible. It’s the most important thing to us.”
Genest encourages those curious about Waterboo to drop in on one of their events: “It’s not as scary as you might think, and it’s a really great community.” And for those who want to dip their toes into horror but don’t know where to start, he suggests looking for where personal interests intersect with horror: “It’s about finding your niche, and then you can explore further into that… [then] you can appreciate the horror genre as a whole.”
More information about the club and their events can be found on their Instagram, @waterboo_uw.
