John Skipp
John Skipp is a Saturn Award-winning filmmaker (TALES OF HALLOWEEN), Stoker Award-winning anthologist (DEMONS, MONDO ZOMBIE), and New York Times bestselling author (THE LIGHT AT THE END, THE SCREAM) whose books have sold millions of copies in a dozen languages worldwide. His first anthology, BOOK OF THE DEAD, laid the foundation in 1989 for modern zombie literature. He’s also editor-in-chief of Fungasm Press, championing genre-melting authors like Laura Lee Bahr, Autumn Christian, Danger Slater, Cody Goodfellow, and Devora Gray From splatterpunk founding father to bizarro elder statesman, Skipp has influenced a generation of horror and counterculture artists around the world. His latest book is THE ART OF HORRIBLE PEOPLE.
Johnny Walker
Johnny Walker is Associate Professor of Media and Film, and a founding member of the Horror Studies Research Group, at Northumbria University, UK. He has published widely on the social and industrial contexts of horror media including, most recently, essays on ‘Activist Horror Film’, shot-on-video horror, the horror films of Roberta Findlay, and the fiction of Shaun Hutson. He is editor of the second edition of Peter Hutchings’ Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (Manchester University Press, 2021) and author of both Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-92 (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). From 2021-23 he was the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Fellowship, ‘Raising Hell: British Horror Film of the 1980s and 1990s’.
Jolene Marie Richardson
Jolene Marie Richardson is a New York-based costume designer, fashion historian, and writer. Her designs can be found in various film, stage, and television productions including The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs. She lecturers at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, NY, and her research is published on her blog Hanging By A Thread, and in the pages of Fangoria.
Jon Dieringer
Jon Dieringer is a writer, film programmer, and media art conservator. He’s the founder of Screen Slate, a resource for listings and commentary of repertory, microcinema, and gallery screenings and exhibitions in New York City. At media arts nonprofit Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Dieringer oversees the preservation video art and experimental films. And as a programmer, he has worked most prolifically at daily Brooklyn microcinema Spectacle and additionally curated programs and series at 92YTribeca, Anthology Film Archives, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, The Lightbox Film Center, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Many of these artist-focused series have focused on correspondences between archives and obsolete or overlooked media, including horror-themed series “Industrial Terror” and “The Medium is the Massacre.” He’s also one of the regular rotating hosts of Alamo Brooklyn’s Terror Tuesday/Weird Wednesday screenings.
Jon Towlson
Jon Towlson is a film critic and the author of THE TURN TO GRUESOMENESS IN AMERICAN HORROR FILMS, 1931-1936 (McFarland, 2016), CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (CONSTELLATIONS) (Auteur/Columbia University Press, 2016) and SUBVERSIVE HORROR CINEMA: COUNTERCULTURAL MESSAGES OF FILMS FROM FRANKENSTEIN TO THE PRESENT (McFarland, 2014). He is a regular contributor to Starburst Magazine, and has also written for the BFI, Paracinema, Exquisite Terror, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Shadowland Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal, Offscreen and Digital Film-Maker Magazine. Jon contributed to the recent edited collection LOST SOULS OF HORROR AND THE GOTHIC (eds. Bernice M. Murphy & Elizabeth McCarthy, McFarland, 2016). He is currently writing a monograph on the film CANDYMAN for Auteur/Columbia University Press. www.subversive-horror-films.com. @systemshocks
Jonathan Rigby
JONATHAN RIGBY is an English actor and film historian, author of the books English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema (2000), Christopher Lee: The Authorised Screen History (2001), American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema (2007) and Studies in Terror: Landmarks of Horror Cinema (2011). He was also series consultant on the BBC documentaries A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss (2010) and its sequel Horror Europa (2012).
Josh Saco
Josh Saco is one of the UK’s leading independent film curators and runs Cigarette Burns Cinema. Catering to fans of leftfield, classic horror and exploitation cinema, he celebrates the celluloid, screening primarily from rare 16mm and 35mm prints at prestigious venues including the Barbican, Prince Charles and Regent Street Cinema and various festivals.
Saco offers a unique and informed perspective on everything from beloved genre oddities to the complexities of film, digital and modern cinema.
Julia Round
Julia Round is an award-winning writer and scholar whose research examines the intersections of Gothic, comics and children’s literature. Her books include Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics (2019, winner of the Broken Frontier Award for Best Book on Comics), Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (2014), and the co-edited collection Real Lives Celebrity Stories (2014). She is a Principal Lecturer at Bournemouth University, UK, co-editor of Studies in Comics journal (Intellect) and the book series Encapsulations (University of Nebraska Press), and co-organiser of the annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference (IGNCC). She shares her work at www.juliaround.com.
Justin Harries
Justin Harries is the co-creator and curator of Filmbar70, a London based film-club that specialises in screening anomalies drawn from the last gasp of European genre cinema, and has contributed visual and written essays to a number of DVD releases – especially those that lean toward the more glamourous side of the giallo genre. He also makes up approximately 50% of ‘The Carpenters’ (a John Carpenter tribute band) and is a member of ‘The Begotten’, a collective providing improvised sonics to E. Elias Merhige’s avant-splatter flick.
Justin LaLiberty
Justin LaLiberty holds degrees in Critical Film Studies and Film Preservation and Archiving and has spent more than half of his life working in either theatrical exhibition or home video in the roles of projectionist, film programmer and archivist. He currently works as the Director of Operations for OCN Distribution, sister company of Vinegar Syndrome, and spends most of his free time logging films on Letterboxd and taking photos of his cat.