Prague Valentine’s Day for the Black-Hearted

If you haven’t checked out this sky-lit gallery and performance space, now is the time. Trafo has organized a number of interesting exhibits and events this month, including a mini-festival for lovers of vintage horror films that opens today.

Lovecraft, and horror films and books in general, were banned from Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s as too bourgeois-decadent for communist ideologues.

The exhibit is “the first attempt at mapping this topic in our country,” according to curator Otto M. Urban, who says there is a growing interest in Lovecraft’s work in the spheres of Czech film and literature.

Featured Trafo artists including Josef Bolf, Jakub Gajdošík, Stanislav Karoli, Eva Macekova, Martin Mulač, Martin Salajka, Richard Stipl, Marek Škubal, Frantisek Storm, and Jan Vytiska, bring Lovecraft’s dark vision to life via paintings, drawing, sculptures, and installations. 

Urban promises an “Atmospheric depiction of anxiety through pop wildness up to nerve-racking cruelty,” adding that “hardly any topic resonates so strongly with our present, which is also full of fear and anxiety.”

The exhibit runs through March 5.

The festival will focus on the most influential and best horror films in history, by screening three selected titles each evening across a period of three days.

Admission is free.