HitchCon ‘26 Program

Online • October 3 & 4, 2026

SPECIAL FREE ONLINE SCREENING

Friday, October 2
4:00 PM PDT (Seattle)

Family Plot (1976)

Followed by our famed Icebox Conversation. Bring a sleeping bag!

Saturday, October 3

Saturday Morning – 8:00 AM PDT (Seattle)

Joel Gunz: Welcome and Introduction to Host

Caroline Young: The Other Vanishing Lady: Monograms and Magic in The Lady Vanishes

Stella Castelli: Clandestine Catalysts: Twin Peaks as a Tale Enabled by Absent Female Bodies

-BREAK-

JF Martel: A Dream of Dark and Troubling Things

-BREAK-

Kelly Bulkeley: The Gift of David Lynch’s Dream Logic

Roger Luckhurst: Hitchcock’s Homage: The Fake/Real (or Real/Fake) Psychic in Family Plot

-LUNCH BREAK-

Saturday Afternoon – 1:00 PM PDT (Seattle)

Joel Gunz: Introduction to the Host

Steven DeRosa: Scripting the Con: Hitchcock, Lehman, and the Final Wink of Family Plot

-BREAK-

Joel Gunz: Family Plot and the Magic of Pure Cinema

-BREAK-

Sidney Gottllieb and David Sterritt In Conversation: Family Plot

-DINNER BREAK-

Icebox Conversation

Sunday, October

Sunday Morning – 8:00 AM PDT (Seattle)

Joel Gunz: Welcome and Introduction to the Host

Katy Coakley: I Think You’ve Got The Wrong Guy! An Absurdist Approach to Mistaken Identities in North by Northwest and The Big Lebowski

Nick Haeffner: Lost in the Stars: An anti-auteurist approach to the work of David Lynch

-BREAK-

Rebecca McCallum: Strangely Familiar: Home Invasion in Shadow of a Doubt

Elizabeth (Beth) Bullock: “This Whole House is a Hotbed of Spies and Saboteurs”: Hitchcockian Farcical Espionage in McGoohan’s The Prisoner

-BREAK-

Victoria Nelson in Conversation with Joel Gunz: Pursuit, Paranoia and the Language of Birds

-LUNCH BREAK-

Sunday Afternoon – 12:30 PM PDT (Seattle)

Joel Gunz: Introduction to the Host

Oisin Queally: The Island That Likes to Be Visited: Hitchcock, Myth and the Phantom Place

-BREAK-

Mark W. Padilla: “Well, a Boy’s Best Friend is his Mother”: Musings on How Aeschylus and Eugene O’Neill Nurture the Tragic Expression of Psycho

Richard Gilmore: Hitchcock and the Myth of the Fall

-BREAK-

Colleen Glenn: La-La Lynch: Mulholland Drive and the Nightmare Factory

-BREAK-

Thomas Leitch: Haunted Hitchcock

Joel Gunz: Wrap Up