W. Scott Poole
W. Scott Poole is a full Professor of History at the College of Charleston. He is the author of a number of books, most recently Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror (2018). He is also the author of a Bram Stoker-nominated biography of Lovecraft (2016) and Monsters in America, winner of the Pop Culture Association’s Best Book award in 2011 and appearing in a revised edition in 2018. He has written numerous essays and book chapters dealing with the history of horror. He has a lifelong crush on the late Elsa Lanchester.
Photo by Leslie McKellar.
Wendy C. Nielsen
Wendy C. Nielsen (www.wendynielsen.com) is Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University in New
Jersey, where she teaches European Romanticism, Science Fiction, Enlightenment literature, and other courses about comparative literature. She is interested in solving why certain popular figures recur in British, German, and French literature, as seen in her book Women Warriors in Romantic Drama (University of Delaware Press, 2012) and the forthcoming monograph, Motherless Creations: Fictions of Artificial Life, 1650-1890 (Routledge, 2022). She regularly publishes scholarly essays in academic journals on world literature, Romantic-era automata, theater, the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Olympe de Gouges, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Corday, and Boadicea.
Wickham Clayton
Wickham Clayton is an author, movie critic, filmmaker and lecturer. Born in the US, he has been living and working in the UK for over 15 years. Establishing himself as an expert in Slasher films – Friday the 13th particularly – as well as the Twilight franchise and religion and film. He is fascinated by film form and genre, as well as the industrial and cultural structures that inform film style, and particularly the outlying films of the mainstream. Wickham is author of the forthcoming BFI Film Classics book on The Wicker Man (2024) and See!Hear!Cut!Kill!: Experiencing Friday the 13th (2020), editor of The Bible Onscreen in the New Millennium: New Heart and New Spirit (2020) and Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film (2015) and wrote, directed and produced the award-winning short film A Possible History of Ghosts (2020).
William Burns
William Burns is a Professor of English at Suffolk County Community College. On the day he was born, crucial scenes for both THE EXORCIST and THE WICKER MAN were being filmed, forever marking him as a member of the Haunted Generation. The strange, the eerie, the unsettling, and the obscure have bedevilled him ever since. In search of lost futures, he has stumbled upon forgotten ghosts and shadowy remembrances. His newest book Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia (published by Headpress Books) is the culmination of the journey started in his previous book The Thrill of Repulsion: Excursions into Horror Culture.
William Fowler
William Fowler is a writer, film historian and musician. He is Curator of Artists’ Moving Image, BFI National Archive and the co-founder and co-programmer of The Flipside at BFI Southbank. His seasons and restoration projects at the BFI have included GAZWRX: the films of Jeff Keen, Queer Pagan Punk: Derek Jarman and This Is Now: Film and Video After Punk, the latter of which is currently touring internationally through LUX. He has written for The Guardian, Sight and Sound and Frieze and appeared on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, and also contributed chapters to Inside Out: Le Cinéma de Stephen Dwoskin and The Edge is Where the Centre: David Rudkin and Penda’s Fen (which he co-edited). He programmes the monthly BFI strand Essential Experiments and has since 2013 been the co-programmer of Experimenta in the London Film Festival. He regularly gives talks and presents films.
Xavier Aldana Reyes
Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. His books include Gothic Cinema (2020), Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror Film and Affect (2016) and the edited collection Horror: A Literary History (2016). He is the chief editor of the book series Horror Studies, published by the University of Wales Press, and has edited weird and Gothic fiction anthologies for the British Library.