Chris Alexander
Chris Alexander has spent his life eating, sleeping and breathing movies, breaking only to obsess over music. He is the editor-in-chief of FANGORIA magazine, has released several collections of his own music, has written a book about movies he loves, and his first feature film – which he wrote, directed, co-shot, edited, composed the music, handled FX and even catered – BLOOD FOR IRINA will be released via Autonomy Pictures later this year. Visit Chris at www.chris-alexander.ca.
Chris Whittaker
Chris Whittaker is a physics teacher and Coordinator of the Science Program at Dawson College. He has a Masters Degree in Engineering Physics from Queen’s University where he specialized in aeronautics and nuclear engineering. At Dawson, he created a course for non-science students that explores a variety of topics in physics through movies and TV shows. Before his teaching career, Chris also completed a Masters Degree in Social Work and worked for several years in emergency mental health, with at-risk-youth and as an intake worker at a CLSC. Along the way he also managed to do two radio documentaries for the CBC Radio One program Ideas, including one on how size matters in engineering, biology and the movies.
Claire Donner
Claire Donner is the New York City branch Director of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. Despite her background in Art History, she has a special focus on the role of faith, superstition, and manufactured authenticity as a merchandising tool in horror media. Her favorite debate subjects include the so-called Amityville Horror, the Doris Bither case, and the life and theology of Anton LaVey. She enjoys pseudo-snuff films like Faces of Death, the symbiosis of gore and pornography, and cannibalism.
Clare Smith
Dr Clare Smith is the Historic Collection Curator for the Metropolitan Police Museum. Previously Clare was the Collection Manager for the art collection at National Museum Wales.
Clare has an MA Honours degree in History of Art, a MA in Mythology and Society and wrote her PhD on the Depiction of Jack the Ripper in Film and Culture.
Publications include Top Hat, Gladstone Bag and Fog: The Whitechapel Murders on Film. The chapter ‘Is Hannibal in Love with Me? Gender Changes in the Television series Hannibal; the chapter Jason ‘Statham in Spy; Subverting genre and gender’
Research interests include gender and crime, Nineteenth century art and literature, detective fiction and the depiction of the Whitechapel murders in film and television.
Cory Legassic
Cory Legassic is a faculty member of the Humanities and Sociology Departments at Dawson College, Montréal, Québec, where he teaches courses on Social Movements, Social Justice Education, Anti-Racism, Media and Feminist Masculinities. His article “Reasonable Accommodation as a Settling Concept” was published in The Canadian Women’s Studies Journal in their special issue on Women and Canadian Multiculturalism (2010). An article on horror icon Rondo Hatton and the politics of disfigurement in forties horror is forthcoming.
Craig Ian Mann
Craig Ian Mann is a film scholar, writer and researcher with a particular interest in the cultural politics of popular genres. He is the author of Phases of the Moon: A Cultural History of the Werewolf Film (2020) and
is currently writing his second monograph, Bleeding Us Dry: Independent American Horror and Anti-Capitalism. He is a lecturer in film and media studies at Sheffield Hallam University, organiser of the annual Fear 2000 conference series on contemporary horror media and co-editor of the 21st Century Horror book series at Edinburgh University Press.
D. W. Pasulka
Dr. D. W. Pasulka is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work spans Catholic history to modern day reports of UAPs and UFOs. Her recent book, American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, and Technology (Oxford, 2019) has been featured in Vice, Vox, Fox News, Tank, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Publisher’s Weekly, and Kirkus Reviews. She has presented her research at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, universities, and has been an invited speaker internationally and at various museums and public radio stations. She is also the author of Heaven Can Wait (Oxford University Press 2014); two co-authored books about religion and technology; and numerous academic essays. In cooperation with the Vatican, she is the lead of the translation project of the canonization records of the saint, Joseph of Copertino. Her latest book, Encounters, will be released in Fall 2023 with St. Martin’s Essentials. Additionally, Dr. Pasulka consults about religion and history for movies and television, including THE CONJURING (2013).
Daniel Bird
Daniel Bird is a writer, filmmaker, and one of the world’s leading scholars on Eastern European cult cinema. He has curated numerous retrospectives, overseen film restorations, participated in DVD commentaries and is best known as the biographer of both Walerian Borowczyk and Andrzej Żuławski. Daniel Bird first interviewed Zulawski for Eyeball magazine with Stephen Thrower back in 1997. He organised ‘A Weekend with Andrzej Zulawski’, the first Anglo-phone overview of Zulawski’s films, at the Cine Lumiere in 1998. The following year he visited the set of Zulawski’s La fidelite in Paris and worked with with Anchor Bay Entertainment to release Possession on DVD in the U.S., for which he also moderated a commentary track with the director. Over the years he continued to work with Zulawski, liaising with festivals, distributors and producers on retrospectives, DVD releases and film projects. Last year he made the English subtitles for Zulawski’s Cosmos and produced a restoration of On the Silver Globe.
Daniel Sheppard
Daniel Sheppard is a PhD Candidate and Visiting Lecturer in Film Studies at Birmingham City University, UK. His thesis is called “Gays, Women, and Chainsaws: Queer Approaches to Characterisation and Identification in Contemporary Slasher Film and Television, 1996-2019,” and is fully funded by the AHRC Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.
David Austin
David Austin is the author of FEAR OF A BLACK NATION: RACE, SEX, AND SECURITY IN SIXTIES MONTREAL (2013), winner of the 2014 Casa de las Americas Prize. He has also produced radio documentaries for CBC’s IDEAS on the life and work of C.L.R. James (THE BLACK JACOBIN, 2004) and Frantz Fanon (THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, 2006) and he currently teaches in the Department of Humanities, Philosophy and Religion at John Abbott College.