Dr. Lindsay Hallam is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of East London. She is the author of Screening the Marquis de Sade: Pleasure, Pain and the Transgressive Body in Film (2012), Devil’s Advocates – Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (2018) and is currently researching a monograph on revenge in Australian horror cinema.

Richard J. Hand is Professor of Media Practice and Director of Drama at the University of East Anglia (UK). He is the author of numerous studies of popular horror culture including two books on horror radio drama and is the co-author (with Michael Wilson) of three books on Grand-Guignol horror theatre. He has written and directed numerous radio and stage plays, including commissioned works for the Science Fiction Theatre Festival; the Frankenstein Bicentenary in Edinburgh; Abertoir Horror Festival; and (with Geraint D’Arcy) a recreation of the Victorian stage illusion ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ in the original venue in London where the illusion was first presented in 1862. For several years, he produced the annual public Halloween performance for Cardiff city council in Wales. He is artistic advisor for Molotov Theatre Group and his media appearances include Heston Blumenthal’s Great British Food and the special edition DVD of Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. Richard is the lead scriptwriter for the US-based National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air, a podcast drama series which has won several awards including, most recently, two Gold Awards at the 2021 Hear Now Festival. In 2020, the entire repertoire of the series was acquired by the Library of Congress for preservation in recognition of ‘its cultural and historical importance’.

JIM HARPER is a writer and film critic specializing in cult cinema from around the globe. He is the author of Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies (Headpress, 2004) and Flowers from Hell: The Modern Japanese Horror Film (Noir, 2008). His work has appeared in many publications and websites, including Midnight Eye, MYM, Electric Sheep, Necronomicon, V-Cinema, Deranged, Alternative and Scream, and he has contributed to Intellect’s ground-breaking Directory of World Cinema series, writing for the Spanish and Japanese volumes. Currently Harper is working on a revised and updated edition of Flowers from Hell, and preparing the first English-language book about the German Edgar Wallace films of the 1960s.

Justin Harries is the co-creator and curator of Filmbar70, a London based film-club that specialises in screening anomalies drawn from the last gasp of European genre cinema, and has contributed visual and written essays to a number of DVD releases – especially those that lean toward the more glamourous side of the giallo genre. He also makes up approximately 50% of ‘The Carpenters’ (a John Carpenter tribute band) and is a member of ‘The Begotten’, a collective providing improvised sonics to E. Elias Merhige’s avant-splatter flick.

Andi Harriman is a writer and DJ living in New York City with an emphasis on all things dark and Eighties-centric. She is the author of the book Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace: The Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s and her writing has appeared in Red Bull Music Academy, Dazed, Noisey, Bandcamp Daily, Electronic Beats and LA Weekly, to name a few, while acting as contributing editor to Post-Punk.com. Harriman was published in Leipzig in Schwarz: 25 Jahre Wave-Gotik-Treffen and wrote the foreword for the book Gothic Romandie 1985-1995: La Décennie Noire. She lectures regularly about the goth subculture and has appeared at Morbid Anatomy Museum, New York University and Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig, Germany. Her endeavors have been featured in Time Out New York, the Village Voice, Refinery 29, and Red Bull Music Academy Radio. Additionally, she runs the dark electronic party and label Synthicide.

Edwin Harris is a PhD candidate in Horticulture with a concentration in Entomology at Oregon State University (OSU). His dissertation research focuses on sensory systems and communication in stink bugs. Combining his interests in the world of insects and the world of the macabre, he published an article titled “Are Entomologists Mad Scientists (According to Horror Movies)?” in the Winter 2025 issue of The American Entomologist, which provided a basis for this lecture. Edwin promotes public engagement with entomology through research extension work and development of informal educational events as a member and former officer of the Bug Club at OSU.

Dr Nedim Hassan is a Senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool John Moores University’s School of Humanities and Social Science. He is the author of Metal on Merseyside: Music Scenes, Community and Locality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), which is the first book-length study of the Liverpool city region’s hard rock and metal scenes. In addition to his ongoing ethnographic and historical research into metal music scenes in Merseyside, Nedim has also published work that examines the representation of metal music culture on film, with a particular emphasis on heavy metal horror films of the 1980s. Since January 2025 Nedim has been the Chief Editor for Metal Music Studies journal, which is published by Intellect. Metal Music Studies is the main intellectual hub for the International Society for Metal Music Studies (ISMMS).

Sophie Haywood is a WRoCAH Funded PhD student at the University of Sheffield working on eighteenth century Gothic women's writing. She is co-organiser of the Sheffield Gothic Reading Group, and edited a special edition on Transgression for the journal Oxford Research in English. Alongside her thesis she enjoys working on women in horror, and has presented her work at Fear 2000 for the past few years. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary symposium for WRoCAH students that considers embodied spaces across genres and mediums.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas is an Australian film critic, author, academic and festival programmer who has written eight books on cult, horror and exploitation cinema with a particular focus on gender politics. Her books include Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011), 1000 Women in Horror, 1895-2018 (BearManor, 2020), the Bram Stoker Award nominated Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019), and monographs on Dario Argento’s Suspiria for Auteur’s Devil’s Advocates series, Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 for Columbia University Press, and Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher, published by Arrow Books. Alexandra has co-edited books on Elaine May, Peter Strickland, Alice in Wonderland in film, and Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. She holds a PhD in Screen Studies and is an Adjunct Professor at Deakin University and a Research Fellow at RMIT University, as well as a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. Alexandra is also a proud member of the advisory board for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies.

Grady Hendrix has written about the confederate flag for Playboy magazine, terrible movie novelizations for Film Comment, and Jean-Claude Van Damme for Slate. He’s covered machine gun collector conventions, written award shows for Chinese television, and answered the phone for a parapsychological research organization. His novel, Horrorstör, about a haunted IKEA, has been translated into 14 languages and is currently being developed into a television series. His latest novel is My Best Friend’s Exorcism, now out in paperback, and he’s the screenwriter for Mohawk, a War of 1812 horror movie that recently premiered at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival. His next book is Paperbacks from Hell, a non-fiction history of horror paperbacks in the Seventies and Eighties, out on September 19.

Karen Herland fell in with a bad crowd with a taste for horror at a young age. Currently, her research focuses on the social and cultural construction and marginalization of bodies considered threatening or challenging to traditional norms. She is a Co-Director of Montreal’s Monstrum Society and sits on the Monstrum Journal’s editorial board. She has taught at the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies since 2012. Amongst her recent publications are “ ‘Always Hearing Voices, Never Hearing Mine’: Sound and Fury in The Snake Pit” in Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema (2014) and "Horror and the Last Frontier: Monstrous Borders and Bodies” in Firefly and Westworld." Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition: The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond.(2019), A lecturer in popular/visual culture and sexuality studies at Concordia University, she has been involved in teaching their interdisciplinary course on HIV/AIDS for more than a decade and has served as the Director of the university’s HIV/AIDS Community Lecture Series.

Sean Hogan is a writer and filmmaker. His directorial credits include Lie Still and The Devil's Business; he also produced the feature documentary Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD and has worked on the screenplays for a number of other films, most notably The Borderlands. In collaboration with Kim Newman, he was responsible for devising two multi-author anthology plays, The Hallowe'en Sessions and The Ghost Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, both of which he directed. Most recently, he wrote a metafictional book on the cult 70's horror film Death Line, and wrote and directed a short film homage to the BBC Christmas Ghost Story tradition entitled We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea.

Ken Hollings is a writer, lecturer and performer. His work has appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, and he has written and presented critically acclaimed features for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and Resonance 104.4 FM. He teaches regularly at the Royal College of Art and Central St Martins. Ken’s books include Destroy All Monsters, Welcome to Mars, The Bright Labyrinth, The Space Oracle and his three-volume ‘Trash Project’: Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. His next book is The Ken Hollings Reader: Digitally Restored and Remastered, coming from Strange Attractor Press in autumn 2026.

A film curator, historian and critic, Los Angeles author Heidi Honeycutt co-founded the Etheria film Festival and has written for a number of books, magazines and websites, from Filmmaker, Moviemaker and Indiewire to Bloody Disgusting, Rue Morgue and Famous Monsters of Filmland. Currently, you can see her commentaries on Joe Dante's TRAILERS FROM HELL and hear her discuss horror movies on Shudder/AMC+ docuseries such as Eli Roth's History of Horror, The 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of All Time, and Horror's Greatest.

A widely known voice of esoteric ideas, Mitch Horowitz is a writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library, lecturer-in-residence at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles, and the PEN Award-winning author of books including Occult America and The Miracle Club. He has written on alternative spirituality for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Politico, and other national media. The Washington Post says Mitch “treats esoteric ideas and movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness that is too often lost in today’s raised-voice discussions.” Mitch’s work has been censored in China, in school districts, and at New Age centers.

Gillian Wallace Horvat is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, writer and film programmer. Her first short film, GUNPLAY, was a 2007 Wasserman Semi-Finalist and the only film to ever receive a disclaimer for graphic content at Tisch's First Run Film Festival. KISS KISS FINGERBANG, starring Anton Yelchin, Kate Lyn Sheil and Buck Henry was awarded the Jury Prize in its short category at the 2015 South by Southwest Film Festival, premiering online as a Vimeo Staff Pick. Miriam Bale wrote in Indiewire that Gillian was one of “the most exciting American indie filmmakers I can think of.” Her films have screened in festivals around the world including SXSW, Fantasia, Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, Beyond Fest, Maryland Film Festival, Yale University, and many others. Gillian also produced A FULLER LIFE, a documentary on the life and films of director Samuel Fuller that premiered at the 2013 Venice Film Festival. For the past five years she has been producing documentary shorts for Arrow Films, Kino Lorber and Olive Films, working on projects ranging from an AMERICAN NINJA box set to Orson Welles' MACBETH. She is also a guest columnist for Filmmaker magazine and her writing has appeared in Sight & Sound.

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.

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.