Bernice M. Murphy
Bernice M. Murphy is Lecturer in Popular Literature in the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. She has published extensively on topics related to horror fiction and film, and is an expert on Shirley Jackson who edited the first ever essay collection on her work, Shirley Jackson: A Literary Legacy (2005). Her other books include The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2009), The Rural Gothic: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (Palgrave, 2013), The Highway Horror Film (Palgrave Pivot, 2014) and (edited with Elizabeth McCarthy) Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic (McFarland, 2017). Her current book project is a monograph entitled California Gothic.
Bruna Foletto Lucas
Bruna Foletto Lucas is currently in her third year as a PhD student at Kingston University London, researching the role of women in horror films, both in front of and behind the camera (“Woman and Horror: Reframing the Debate”). She’s presented papers in key horror international conferences and has taught a guest MA lecture at Kingston University London as well as created and delivered a course based on her own research for The Brilliant Club. Bruna is currently a member of Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History, created by Alison Peirse, where she is researching the works of the Brazilian filmmaker Juliana Rojas. Her writing outside of academia can be found on The London Horror Society and the UK Film Review.
C. Courtney Joyner
C. Courtney Joyner is a novelist, journalist and screenwriter whose first major output was a string of more than 25 movie screenplays beginning with The Offspring (AKA From a Whisper to a Scream) starring Vincent Price, and Prison, directed by Renny Harlin, and continuing in the ’90s with Class of 1999, the CBS telefilm Distant Cousins, and Full Moon features like Dr. Mordrid, Trancers III, and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Lurking Fear, the latter two of which he also directed.
A film historian, Joyner’s articles and criticisms have appeared in more than twenty different publications, ranging from The Hollywood Reporter, Famous Monsters of Filmland to True West, where he served as Film and TV editor for three years. His critically acclaimed film book, The Westerners has been followed by contributions to biographies of John Wayne and Lon Chaney, and histories of horror and western movies. His two latest filmbooks, Unsung Heroes and Warner Brothers Fantastic will be published in 2020. In the world of fiction, Joyner is an award-winning author of short stories and novelist, many of them Westerns, having created the Shotgun mass market paperback series for Pinnacle Books. He is also the author of the sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Nemo Rising (2018), which has recently been adapted as a boardgame. Website: ccjoyner.com
Caelum Vatnsdal
From his cradle days in the great northern city of Winnipeg, Caelum Vatnsdal has lived and breathed the cinematic arts, with an especial love for the horror genre. Since then he has made short films, feature films, documentaries, music videos and more, and has worked also as a writer, producer, camera assistant, set decorator, special effects artist and actor. Vatnsdal began his professional life working on the films of Guy Maddin, starting with the colour feature Careful, on which he toiled in the art department, the camera department, and as an actor. (He continued acting for Maddin through to the director’s famous production The Heart of the World in 2000.) In 1994 he directed his first feature film, Black as Hell, Strong as Death, Sweet as Love, and through the 2000s, Vatnsdal busied himself making mostly documentary productions, including a large-scale documentary on Bigfoot for the Canadian Television Network. He has written three books on film – a monograph on the works of Guy Maddin in 2000, a history of Canadian horror films, titled They Came From Within, in 2004 and a biography of the actor Dick Miller called You Don’t Know Me, But You Love Me in 2018. He lives in Winnipeg with his wife and son.
Candis Steenbergen
Candis cut her horror teeth at an early age, sneaking scary books off her dad’s bookshelf and reading by flashlight late into the night. She graduated to slasher films, B-movies and creature-features shortly thereafter. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia in 2009, and has been a lecturer at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Women’s Studies since 2002, teaching classes on feminism and popular culture, girls and girlhoods, deviant bodies, postfeminism and marxist analysis. She also teaches courses revolving around issues of representation, power and the media in the Humanities department at John Abbott College.
Carl Sederholm
Carl Sederholm is Associate Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. His publications include, “What Screams Are Made of: Representing Cosmic Fear in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Pickman’s Model'” (2006), and the books, POE, “THE HOUSE OF USHER” AND THE AMERICAN GOTHIC (2009) and ADAPTING POE (both with Dennis Perry).
Carolyn Mauricette
Carolyn Mauricette is a Toronto-based Rotten Tomatoes approved critic, film writer and programmer/development coordinator for the Blood in the Snow Film Festival. You can find her writing on her website View From the Dark and Hollywood Suite. She has written reviews and articles for the online and print editions of Rue Morgue Magazine, Grim Magazine and contributed to The Encyclopedia of Japanese Horror Films and The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Films. Carolyn has produced talks on Afrofuturism for The Black Museum, lectures for the Fantasia Film Festival in 2020 and 2021, and is an industry commentator in the 2020 documentary “Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business” directed by Justin McConnell. You can also hear her on Reely Melanated, a film podcast focusing on Black creators, with her co-host Ashlee Blackwell.
Catherine Lester
Dr Catherine Lester is a lecturer in film and television at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of the book Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (2021) and editor of the forthcoming essay collection Watership Down: Perspectives on and Beyond Animated Violence (2023), both published by Bloomsbury. She has also published shorter pieces on the intersections of children’s culture and the horror genre in the books Discussing Disney (2019), Global TV Horror (2021) and the Fantasy/Animation Research Network http://fantasy-animation.org. When she isn’t writing or teaching she can usually be found relaxing with her partner, cat and two rabbits, whose lives aren’t nearly as dramatic as those of the rabbits in Watership Down.
Cerise Howard
Cerise Howard is a New Zealand-born co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque who co-founded the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia and was its Artistic Director from 2013-2018. A regular commentator on intersections of film, gender, sexuality and other matters, her recent writing on film can be found in Senses of Cinema, on the byNWR website, in the 2017 KVIFF Festival Daily, in a new monograph on Peter Strickland and in a forthcoming one on Bride of Frankenstein. She is a Studio Leader at RMIT University, specializing in incubating film festivals and contesting the canon. Away from film she plays bass for Queen Kong and The HOMOsapiens, a Melbourne-based punk, performance art, queer rock band.
Charlie Ellbé
Charlie is a recent graduate from the M. A. Film Studies program at Concordia University. She is now Coordinator of the Moving Image at the Concordia Visual Media Resources. In the summer of 2010, Charlie received a travel fund to go to the USC and Margaret Herrick Library archives to research her Master’s thesis. With access to original documentation from the Hollywood studios and personal writings from art directors of the classical studio era, Charlie was able to complete her thesis on art direction in Universal Studios’ horror films of the 1930s with original research. Last summer, she served on the jury of the Montreal Underground Film Festival. She is currently co-editing an anthology of essays on 1940s horror films with Kristopher Woofter and Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare.