Conjuring the Demons in English 1202

A class in horror fiction gives KPU students a chance to dance with the devil

Sometimes it feels like there are only so many ways to get students interested in literature. So Kwantlen Polytechnic University English professor John Rupert enlisted a little help from some friends down below.

Kwantlen’s English 1202 class is taught by a variety of different teachers, and each one has a different subject they prefer to focus on. Rupert teaches one such section of the course and his chosen focus is on literature and film designed to induce fear into the human mind.

“Horror and the Supernatural” is the title of the course section, and throughout the semester students will look at three different mediums to analyze horror.

“I have to train them to analyze literature,” says Rupert. “There’s a lot of coaching to be done.”

The first section of the course looks at poetry. By studying poems such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Haunted Chamber” or Clark Ashton Smith’s “Necromancy”, students learn how to analyze images.

“They’re looking at the figurative use of language,” says Rupert. “In ‘The Haunted Chamber’, the poet is using an image of ghosts . . . the ghosts serve as a metaphor to traumatic memory.”

The second section of the course looks at short stories. The students read pieces such as H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” with the intention of looking at characterizations and the setting.

“The theme, the topic, it’s not just horror,” says Rupert. “It’s kind of reducible to a formula: rational mind versus the supernatural. Often, it’s looking at the psychological degeneration of the protagonist as a result of that encounter with the supernatural.”

The last section of the course focuses on horror films. The two films students watch are The Shining and The Others.

After the section on short stories, right around Halloween, Rupert usually does something special for the class. He puts on a demonstration that many would consider appropriate for the season—a live demon conjuring.

This year’s demon conjuration will take place on Oct. 27, and Rupert says that some students are quite apprehensive about the demonstration. Fortunately for them, he assures people that never, any time he had done the demonstration, has anything out of the ordinary ever actually occurred.

Rupert has done an extensive amount of research on the subject, and says there is a plethora of things that need to be done for a conjuring to be successful. What Rupert demonstrates in class is simply the ritual at the end of the process which a conjuror would perform when everything else was prepared. And that preparation can take months.

The first two hours of the conjuration class is dedicated to teaching students what would be required to open the door for a demon to come through. There are many different skills a person would need to perform the ritual on their own.

“The first step is building your foundational knowledge,” says Rupert. “I go over all the disciplines they would have to know and the various practical skills they would need to develop, like sewing skills to make their own vestments, smithing skills to make the tools, and tanning skills because a lot of the talismans are on parchment. Then I get them to speculate how much time they think they would need before they have all of these skills. It runs into the decades. The point that I make with that is why the classical image of the wizard is always an old man. There’s a long apprenticeship before you become a master.”

Rupert admits that most of the class is a lecture, and that the demonstration at the end is not prepared enough to have any sort of success.

So, if there’s no chance of success, why does Rupert do it? What’s the point?

“I’ve got to say that part of what I do this for is to try and caution them not to just get a grimoire from Amazon.ca and try one of these things out,” he says. “It does take discipline and a long apprenticeship before you get to the point where you try this out with reasonable assurances that you’re going to survive it and meet with success.”

Whether or not any of the students in Rupert’s class will get the chance to trade their soul to Mephistopheles for a favourable grade come December, though, remains to be seen.