Phil Baker is a writer of criticism and non-fiction, and his books include The Devil is a Gentleman: the life and times of Dennis Wheatley (Dedalus, 2009), William S. Burroughs (Reaktion Books, 2010), and a groundbreaking study of the obscure cult artist Austin Osman Spare (Strange Attractor, 2011/2023), of which Alan Moore has said ‘Phil Baker has established himself as among the very best contemporary biographers… What Baker has accomplished here is little short of marvellous.’

Thea/Rae Bamber is a PhD student at Roehampton University, currently working on their PhD thesis on the representation of goth and goth subcultures in contemporary horror. Their main research interests include reinterpreting the horror genre through the means of Gothic romanticism, the use of homoerotic imagery in slasher and splatter horror cinema, and the ways in which marginalised audiences interact with horror fandom. Outside of academia, they self-publish their work through the means of online video essays which they produce independently, as a means of making their level of academia accessible and entertaining, and they are fully aware of how shameless this promotion is.

Peter Bebergal writes widely on the speculative and slightly fringe. His essays and reviews have appeared in NewYorker.com, The Times Literary Supplement, Boing Boing, The Believer, and The Quietus. He is the author of Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural; Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll; Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, and The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God (with Scott Korb). Bebergal studied religion and culture at Harvard Divinity School. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Howard S. Berger is a screenwriter, editor, director,documentarian, historian and educator on all things cinema. He’s half creator (alongside Kevin Marr) of the “Destructible Man” blog – where individual films with dummy-deaths undergo close examination and deconstruction. Howard has also contributed to dozens of audio commentaries for Kino Lorber, Image, Synapse, Arrow and 101 Films as well as many interviews and articles to such magazines as Fangoria and European Trash Cinema. He was co-director of the cult feature, ORIGINAL SINS and the documentary A LIFE IN THE DEATH OF JOE MEEK. DESTRUCTIBLE MAN is currently being prepared as a feature documentary and video essay series.

David Bering-Porter is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York City. David has lectured, taught, and published on zombie movies and other forms of Black horror at the intersections of film, digital media, and technology. His current book project is a study of Undead Labor and the ways that race, labor, and value come together in the mediated body of the zombie as well as other examples of biological excess and his academic writing has appeared in journals such as Culture Machine, Critical Inquiry, Flow, MIRAJ, Post 45, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Kelly Boner (born Kelly Schmader) is a visual and performance artist residing in Chicago, IL. She received her BA in studio art from Oberlin College in 2009, and her Master of Arts Management in 2019. She designed and taught the pilot semesters of "Creative Communities: The Art of Drag" at Columbia College Chicago, a course that explores the nature of drag as both a community artform and form of artistic gender expression, with a focus on media literacy as it pertains to digital drag and video performance. Her academic and artistic relationship with the telephone as a source of horror is reflected in a postcard she submitted to the website PostSecret when she was 16 that simply stated "I'm afraid to answer the telephone."

Amy Bride is a lecturer in American Studies at University of Manchester. Her first book, Financial Gothic: Monsterized Capitalism in American Gothic Fiction (University of Wales Press, 2023) examines the intersection of race and finance in American Gothic monster fiction and film across the Long Twentieth Century, and she has also published on financialization within the slave trade, the monster octopus in Jordan Peele’s Nope, and the work of Bret Easton Ellis as Late-Capitalist Hyper-Gothic. Amy’s teaching specializes in Gothic American literature and culture from 1799 to 2011, and her other research interests include technogothic, body horror, the history of the slave trade, and cinema of the 1980s-90s.

Rebecca Bruce is a PhD student focusing on the unethical treatment and perception of mummies in nineteenth-century Britain. She focuses on the concept of ‘travel and the body,’ examining travel narratives, visual and material culture, mummy unwrappings, the display of human remains, and mummies in museums to develop a wider understanding of how the mummy was viewed during Victorian Britain. Bruce is the creator of Mummymania Mondays, a social media presence about mummies in history. She is also the creator and editor of The Anatomy Shelf, a free monthly newsletter focusing on the body in history literature and art. She is also the host of The Anatomy Shelf podcast (coming soon). In her spare time, she is also a gothic and horror writer and journalist working with publishers, authors and studios to promote their work (books and films). She has interviewed many horror icons such as Grady Hendrix, Ramsey Campbell, and Beverley Lee, and has forthcoming interviews with Sean Hogan, Tim Lebbon, and Stephen Volk. She has written popular articles including ‘Unfinished Business: Reading the Fragmented Ghost Stories of William Gay,’ Midwich Mayhem: How The Simpsons resurfaced a forgotten horror classic of the 1950s,’and has an article on mummy-brown paint in press for ArtUK.org. In May 2022, she curated an exhibition on Dracula, ‘a maritime history’ to mark the novel’s 125th anniversary. Additionally, she is the co-founder and co-chair of ISSE, The International Society for the Study of Egyptomania. In recent years, she has presented papers on mummies, gothic and horror studies, fiction, non-fiction, and the Victorians and mummymania.

Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé is a Lecturer in Digital Media Practice at the University of Southampton. She writes and speaks about contemporary adaptation, remix culture, and popular identity politics. She is the author of Gothic Remixed (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the editor of Embodying Contagion (UWP, 2021) and the Genealogy of the Posthuman (criticalposthumanism.net). Read more about her work at frankenfiction.com.

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.

Heather Buckley worked as a graphic designer and creative lead for thirteen years in the New York advertising world before transitioning to live her life-long dream of a career in the Film World. She has worked for years as a journalist for Dread Central, Diabolique, Fangoria and Vulture. She worked in the makeup department on Billy Pon’s CIRCUS OF THE DEAD, and then as Makeup FX Shop Supervisor on The Booth Brothers’ DEAD STILL (and, under prosthetics, played a featured ghoul—film soon to be released by Sony Pictures) and Ted Geoghegan’s WE ARE STILL HERE (MPI). She is currently a Blu-Ray Special Features Producer for Red Shirt Pictures, Severin Films, Kino Lorber and Liongate (Vestron) working on documentaries (over 100 and counting), which include THE THING, 8 MILLION WAYS TO DIE, BARTON FINK, THE LONG RIDERS, SAW 10th Anniversary reissue, and ARMY OF DARKNESS. She is also one of the Producers on Jen Wexler’s The Ranger for Glass Eye Pix and Hood River Entertainment a punk rock horror film coming to a pit near you.

Tony Burgess is a Canadian writer of numerous books, including Pontypool Changes Everything and Fiction for Lovers. His most recent `fiction,’ The 3rd Figure , appears in the anthology Acephale and Autobiography/ Philosophy in the 21st Century: Responses to the “Nietzsche Event. Founded in 1936 by Georges Bataille, this volume is the 85th anniversary of the influential journal.

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.

David Bushman has been a television curator at the Paley Center since 1992, excluding a two-year stint as program director at TV Land. He is the coauthor of Twin Peaks FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About a Place Both Wonderful and Strange (2016) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About Sunnydale’s Slayer of Vampires, Demons, and Other Forces of Darkness (2017). He is co-president/publisher of Fayetteville Mafia Press (http://www.fayettevillemafiapress.com) and has taught media and writing courses as multiple colleges in the New York metropolitan area. He is also a regular contributor to PaleyMatters (www.paleymatters.org).

Jörg Buttgereit is a German playwright, theatre director, and director of some of the most notorious and controversial films of all time. The so-called “trash poet” and “punk surrealist” behind the shockers NEKROMANTIK parts 1 and 2, DER TODESKING, and SCHRAMM has also brought his uncompromising vision to the stage, and helmed some fifteen radio plays for Westdeutscher Rundfunk. His superhero character Captain Berlin appears regularly in publications from Weissblech Comics.