{"id":7390,"date":"2009-04-23T23:29:23","date_gmt":"2009-04-24T05:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dreamdawn.com\/sh\/post_view.php?index=7390"},"modified":"2009-04-23T23:29:23","modified_gmt":"2009-04-24T05:29:23","slug":"thinking-after-dark-day-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/horror.dreamdawn.com\/?p=7390","title":{"rendered":"Thinking After Dark: Day 1"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nMontreal is a beautiful city.<\/p><\/div>I have logged a lot of time in the air this month. I flew from Japan to the Bay Area in early April, then flew up to Oregon to see my family, and now I am sitting in a hotel room in Montreal. On Sunday I return to the Bay Area and on Tuesday I will get back in the plane and fly back to Japan. Hello frequent flyer miles!<\/p>\n

I am in Montreal, which is a fantastic (but very cold) city, for the first time in about eight years, to attend the Thinking After Dark conference<\/a>, which is all about horror video games. Today was the first day of the conference, which runs for three days. On Saturday I am giving a (very short) talk about using horror games to study Japanese culture, a topic that I think is a pretty predictable selection for me. The conference is located in a neat old building that was selected because “it looks like something out of Resident Evil.” I can tell that I am in the company of friends, though I have to admit that some of the lingo is so academic that I have trouble understanding it.<\/p>\n

Today’s talks were all interesting, and I took a ton of notes. In fact, I have so many notes that rather than trying to describe each individual talk, I am going to just record some of the key interesting points that I heard today. I’m going to break the notes up into separate posts because there’s just too much information. Also, even though there’s a lot of content here you should understand that I am applying a pretty strict filter; these talks have way more info in them than I can possible transcribe here.<\/p>\n

The first keynote, by Barry K. Grant of Brock University, was about horror cinema. Grant is the author of numerous books on cinema and had a whole lot to say about horror films. Some points:<\/p>\n