Professor Yasser Aggour’s Art and Photography 541 class is the last regularly scheduled class to meet in Shaeffer Hall’s Shemin Auditorium on Monday’s this semester from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., but his class was not the final class to meet in the auditorium on Feb. 20.

Instead, Nick Kinling, a senior fine arts major, and Stuart Valberg, a senior film major, decided to finally unveil their course to the Syracuse University campus.

‘Welcome to FIL 360: History of Zombie Cinema,’ Kinling said, officially opening the class. ‘This is the only zero-credit course offered at SU.’

Valberg said he has not officially advertised the course and relied solely on word-of-mouth for the first class. A total of 13 people were in attendance on Monday night.

Because both Kinling and Valberg are seniors, they said they decided to begin their first class Monday night in order to conduct enough classes before the end of the semester.

Kinling said he also couldn’t stand waiting for approval from Crouse Hall.

‘They kept bullshitting me,’ Kinling said. ‘They should have just told us up front.’

Since the start of the semester, Kinling and Valberg have been trying to earn approval from administrators at Crouse Hall to conduct the course.

‘We never got their approval, so this course is subject to being canceled if they find out about this,’ Valberg said.

When they first approached administrators at Crouse Hall, Valberg said he and Kinling were told they were not permitted to conduct the course because they are undergraduate students, and they would need someone responsible to screen the material because of the problems with HillTV’s entertainment show ‘Over the Hill,’ which contained offensive material.

Valberg said he initially approached Ron Bonk, director of the B-Movie Film Festival held in Syracuse, to be an adviser to the course.

When Kinling and Valberg went back to Crouse Hall, they said they were told Bonk could not be an adviser to the course because the B-Movie Film Festival is not an official student organization.

‘I didn’t know it was going to be so difficult to put this course together,’ Kinling said.

Valberg said he next went to Thursday Screeners, a student organization on campus that screens independent films, but he said Thursday Screeners could not help Kinling and Valberg with their new course.

‘Thursday Screeners tried to help,’ Valberg said. ‘But since this class is informal, they said they can’t show anything they don’t have rights to.’

The rights to screen the film, ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ the movie watched Monday night, cost about $2,000, Valberg said.

Without the permission to conduct their class in Shemin Auditorium and without the rights to show their collection of zombie movies to an audience, Kinling and Valberg still decided to begin the course.

‘Hopefully people will be interested,’ Valberg said. ‘It’s supposed to be fun. We want people to come in, we’ll give 15 minutes of lecture, we’ll show a movie and then conduct a discussion.’

According to the syllabus, the course will track the history of zombie cinema from its cinematic debut in 1932 to the more recent ’28 Days Later’ and ‘Shaun of the Dead.’

‘The goal of this class is to successfully explain the allure of such catastrophic occurrences, placing the development of the zombie in its socio-historical context in an attempt to understand why, after all these years, we are still fascinated with the dead that walk,’ the syllabus stated.

In addition to film screenings, students in the class will also be responsible to obtain the course’s textbook, ‘Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema,’ and take a midterm and final exam.

Ryan Tebo, a graduate film student and the director of Thursday Screeners, said he is a ‘fan’ of Valberg’s and Kinling’s work and said he will be coming to future classes in the coming weeks.

‘We’re not doing this to break the rules,’ Valberg said. ‘Hopefully we won’t get in trouble.’

Published on February 20, 2006 at 12:00 pm