Dean Hurley
Dean Hurley is an American sound designer, re-recording mixer and composer. Hurley exclusively operated director David Lynch’s Asymmetrical Studio from 2005 – 2018, where he collaborated extensively on the sound and music for an array of Lynch’s film projects, commercial work and albums. In 2017, Hurley served as supervising sound editor and music supervisor for Lynch’s third season of the ground-breaking television series Twin Peaks (Showtime), contributing original ambient compositions later released under the Anthology Resource series moniker.
Dennis Paoli
Dennis Paoli has written for film, TV, the stage, and the internet. His feature films include Bodysnatchers (with Stuart Gordon, for Warner Brothers), adaptations of H. P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator (with Stuart Gordon and William Norris), From Beyond (for Empire), and Dagon (for Filmax).
For the stage, he wrote the one-man show Nevermore: An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe, which has been performed internationally; co-wrote the script for Re-Animator: The Musical, for which he won several LA theater awards; and co-wrote with the Organic Theater Company, the baseball comedy Bleacher Bums, which ran Off-Broadway, through three revivals in Chicago, and over seven years in Los Angeles. The television version for PBS won an Emmy, and the film version (which he co-wrote with Mitch Paradise) aired on Showtime. The HBO film The Dentist (with Stuart Gordon) and his work for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series—adaptations with Stuart Gordon of H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreams in the Witch House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat—brought the horror genre to cable television. His adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Hound was streamed on Halloween 2015 by the genre website Tales from Beyond the Pale (talesfrombeyondthepale.com).
Dennis is also an academic, a teacher and administrator at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He has taught Gothic and Irish literature and 20th century drama. He has written criticism and articles for the New York Times, the Village Voice, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, and various volumes, periodicals, and online blogs.
The most important work he does is as Donor-Advisor of The Heidi Paoli Fund, a philanthropic organization that supports cancer patients and their caregivers.
Derek Johnston
Derek Johnston is Lecturer in Broadcast Literacy at Queen’s University, Belfast, and is the author of Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). His research focuses on British broadcasting history and on the history of genres such as science fiction and horror, particularly where the two combine.
Dianca London Potts
Dianca London Potts earned her MFA in fiction from The New School. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a VONA Voices alumna, and the online editor of Well-Read Black Girl. Her words have been featured in Lenny Letter, The Village Voice, Vice, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Planning for the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from 37 Ink. She currently works and resides in Brooklyn. You can follow her musings on Twitter via @diancalondon.
Don Coscarelli
DON COSCARELLI became the youngest filmmaker ever to have a feature film distributed by a studio when Universal bought his first film at age 19. The independent, award-winning filmmaker is best known for Phantasm which spawned a rabid cult of fans worldwide. His other indie genre hits include The Beastmaster and Bubba Ho-tep. On TV he directed Showtime’s Masters of Horror premiere episode. His film John Dies at the End was a Sundance selection. In 2004, he was inducted into Fangoria’s Hall of Fame.
Donato Totaro
Donato Totaro received his PhD in Film & Television from the University of Warwick (UK) and has been a Film Studies lecturer at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) since 1990. Totaro has been the editor of the online film journal Offscreen since its inception in 1997 and member of AQCC “Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma” since 2004. Totaro has published extensively on horror cinema, including articles/essays in Cult TV (2010), 100 European Horror Films (2007), The Cinema of Japan and Korea (2004), Fear Without Frontiers (2003), Eaten Alive!: Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies, and magazines The Dark Side and Fangoria.
Douglas Buck
Douglas Buck grew up on Long Island. Under the personal influence of Abel Ferrara and Zoe Lund, he left his first career as an engineer to become a filmmaker. He is best known for his confrontational work on the darkness lurking in the heart of the suburban nuclear family unit, as seen in his anthology film FAMILY PORTRAITS: A TRILOGY OF AMERICA, and his contribution to the Severin anthology THE THEATRE BIZARRE. Buck also edited the latter film, in addition to the Jack Ketchum adaptation OFFSPRING, David Gregory’s mindbending documentary LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY’S ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, and Gregory’s upcoming Bruceploitation documentary. His film criticism column “Buck a Review” is hosted at the long-running online journal Offscreen.
Douglas E. Winter
Douglas E. Winter is an award-winning author, editor, horror historian and the biographer of both Clive Barker and Stephen King. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and has a parallel career as a lawyer specializing in aerospace, aviation and entertainment law.
Dr. Diane A. Rodgers
Dr Diane A. Rodgers is Senior Lecturer in Media, Arts and Communications and a founder member of the Centre for Contemporary Legend Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Interested in all things wyrd, cult and horror-related, Diane is working on a monograph about 1970s British folk-horror and hauntology based on her PhD. When she’s not making punk rock noise with her band The Sleazoids, Diane has published articles in Folklore, book chapters in recent collections on folk horror from Routledge and Manchester University Press, and is co-editor of The Legacy of The X-Files, forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
Dru Jeffries
Dru Jeffries has a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University, with a MA in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. His work on the intersections between comics and cinema can be read in QUARTERLY REVIEW OF FILM AND VIDEO 31.1, CINEACTION 77, as well as his dissertation (2014).