Willow Catelyn Maclay is a queer historian, film essayist and co-author of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema. She has written for numerous outlets including The Village Voice, Film Comment, and Reverse Shot. Her favourite horror movies are Cat People (1942), Suspiria (1977) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

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.

Anna Marta Marini is a PhD candidate and research fellow at the Universidad de Alcalá. Her dissertation delves into the representations of border-crossing, Whiteness, and the Mexican “other side” in US cinema. Her research focuses on representations of the US-Mexico borderlands, and on Mexican American heritage(s) and Mexican politics—focusing on states of exception, otherness, identity re/construction, and narration through cinema, comics, and literature, esp. in the horror, noir, and weird western genres. She is the president of the PopMeC Association for US Popular Culture Studies and chief editor of the journal REDEN dedicated to US popular culture and new media. She has organized several international conferences, among which 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture (2021), Animals in the American Imagination (2022), Darkness in the American Imagination (2023), Frontiers and Wastelands: Redefining the Nation in US Popular Culture (2023). She is currently completing the monograph The US-Mexico Borderlands in Contemporary Horror: Crossing the Boundary (Edinburgh University Press, expected 2024).

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.

Payton McCarty-Simas is an author, programmer, and film critic. Their academic and critical writing has been featured in Little White Lies, Film Daze, The Brooklyn Rail, and Horror Studies among others, as well as spotlighted in The New York Times, CNN, and RogerEbert.com. She is also the author of two books of nonfiction and film criticism, One Step Short of Crazy: National Treasure and the Landscape of American Conspiracy Culture (2024) and That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film (2025). Payton holds a Masters in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University and is a member of the Online Association of Female Film Critics and GALECA.

Maitland McDonagh is the founder of 120 Days Books, a small press dedicated to republishing gay erotic pulp novels of the 1970s, a film critic with a predilection for horror and the author of books that including Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: the Dark Dreams of Dario Argento and The 50 Most Erotic Films of All Time.

Jimmy McDonough is a biographer and journalist. He has written definitive books on Al Green, Neil Young, Tammy Wynette, Russ Meyer and Andy Milligan. TIME magazine declared his Milligan biography The Ghastly One “a masterpiece” and John Waters repeatedly names it one of his all-time favorites. Jimmy first started writing The Exotic Ones: That Fabulous Film-Making Family From Music City, USA – The Ormonds! in 1986. Currently he is finishing another years-in-the-making project, a biography of honky-tonk singer Gary Stewart. Jimmy is Editor-In-Chief of byNWR.com.

Maura McHugh lives in the West of Ireland, and began her career in academia. Her first Masters examined Irish nineteenth century supernatural fiction (making her a life-long Dracula nerd). After a sojourn in IT she later explored her love of cinema through a Diploma in Film Studies followed by a Masters in Screenwriting. Her dark fantasy and horror short stories and non-fiction essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in America and Europe. Her two collections - Twisted Fairy Tales and Twisted Myths - were published in the USA, and she's written award-winning comic book series, including co-writing Witchfinder with Kim Newman for Dark Horse Comics. Her short story 'Bone Mother' is being adapted into a stop-motion short film by See Creature in Canada. She has also served on the juries of international literary, comic book, and film awards. Her web site is http://splinister.com and she tweets as @splinister

Rebekah McKendry, PhD is an award-winning film and television director with a strong focus in the horror and science fiction genres. She has a doctorate focused in Media Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University, a MA in Film Studies from City University of New York, and a second MA from Virginia Tech in Media Education. Rebekah previously has worked as the Editor-in-chief at Blumhouse Productions and as the Executive Director of Marketing for Fangoria Entertainment. She is also a co-host of Blumhouse's SHOCK WAVES podcast. Her newest feature film, ALL THE CREATURES WERE STIRRING, is a horror-comedy releasing this Fall.

Dr Shellie McMurdo is a senior lecturer in film and television at the University of Hertfordshire, and a founding member of the Horror Studies Special Interest Group for the British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies. She is the author of Blood on the Lens: Trauma and Anxiety in American Found Footage Horror Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and Devil’s Advocates: Pet Sematary (Liverpool University Press, 2023). She had also published and presented on a variety of horror media including post-peak torture horror, American Horror Story and Fangoria Magazine. She is currently researching and writing her third monograph: Splatter Matters: Gore and Practical Effects in American Horror Cinema (forthcoming).

Dr Laura Mee is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Her research focuses on horror, adaptation, and seriality. She is the author of Reanimated: The Contemporary American Horror Film Remake (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) and Devil’s Advocates: The Shining (Auteur, 2017). She has published in journals and collections on topics including rape-revenge remakes, the critical reception of horror remakes, Room 237 and cinephilia, American Psycho and gender, and James Wan’s horror franchises.

David Metcalfe is a researcher, writer and multimedia specialist focusing on the interrelationship of art, culture, and consciousness. He serves as Scholar in Virtual Residence with the Windbridge Institute and Editor-in-Chief for the Windbridge Research Center's Threshold: Journal of Interdisciplinary Consciousness Studies. In 2011 he established the Liminal Analytics: Applied Research Collaborative to focus on combining applied scholarship, digital media and social network development to build strategic transdisciplinary lines of communication.

Maude Michaud is a Montreal-based writer-director who specializes in genre entertainment. Her debut feature film DYS- World Premiered in July 2014 at the Fantasia International Film Festival where it won the Audience Award for Best Canadian Feature. Her body of work includes over a dozen critically acclaimed short films which have toured the international festival circuit. She recently obtained her Master’s degree in Media Studies at Concordia University. She also created a documentary web series about the women in horror movement which served as a basis for her thesis project: “Horror Grrrls: Resistance and Agency within the Interpretive Community of Women Horror Filmmakers”.

Tom Holland is an American director and screenwriter of horror and thriller films. His early writing projects include Class of 1984 (1982) and the Robert Bloch-inspired Psycho II (1983), the latter starring Anthony Perkins as the menacing psychopath, Norman Bates which spawned the Psycho franchise. Tom gained more notoriety, however, as a director. His directorial debut was the popular 1980s vampire film, Fright Night (1985) which, at the time, was said to have been responsible for redefining the sub-genre, influencing later films like The Lost Boys (1987) and Near Dark (1987). The film was a box office hit and garnered three Saturn Awards and one Dario Argento Award. In 2016 Tom produced a documentary of the film called ”You’re So Cool Brewster” – The Story of Fright Night. For his next project, Child's Play (1988), Tom again cast Chris Sarandon. The film was a Number One box-office hit in America and a worldwide success, despite controversy over its thematic content. It, like Fright Night (1985), has since gathered a cult following amongst horror fans and they have made 8 films in total. Tom then went onto direct two films based upon adaptations of Stephen King's novels: The Langoliers (1995) for TV and the feature film Thinner (1996). He also took a cameo role in the Stephen King miniseries The Stand (1994). Tom also wrote the films ‘Class of 1984’, ‘Cloak & Dagger’ and ‘The Beast Within’. Tom's other projects have included The Incredible Hulk episode 'Another Path', Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories (1985), three episodes of Tales from the Crypt (1989), and the prestigious Masters of Horror (2005) anthology. He starred in A Walk in the Spring Rain (1970) with Ingrid Bergman. In 2009 Tom took a starring role in Hatchet II (2010) alongside Kane Hodder and Tony Todd. Mark Alan Miller has been working as a writer since 2005 when he started as a columnist for OC Weekly. From there, he became assistant editor to Clive Barker. Eventually he was promoted to Vice President, and developed and wrote dozens of books, movies, comics, tv shows and more. Mark’s work is not limited to horror, however, and in early 2014 he produced a series of animated shorts with the comedy troupe Superego for Nerdist Channel. He can also be heard on various Nerdist channel podcasts, including The Nerdist, Bizarre States, The Dork Forest, The Nerdist Writers Panel and The Todd Glass Show. His comic writing can be seen in the bestselling Boom! Studios comic books Hellraiser, Hellraiser: Bestiary and the critically acclaimed Next Testament, as well as The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down released by Dark Horse from a story by Joe R. Lansdale. Though he often works as a ghost writer, he has also has penned two books that bear his name, Next Testament published by Earthling, and Hellraiser: The Toll, published by subterranean Press, the audiobook for which is narrated by horror icon Tom Holland. Mark is also founder and president of Encyclopocalypse Publications, which has released over a hundred titles, including Fright Night, The Howling, Bubba Ho Tep, Vamp, Titan Find, Scared to Death, Manborg, and Re-Animator. He keeps a bottle of Miskatonic Eau de Parfum from Black Phoenix Alchemy lab on his desk at all times.

David Misch has been a comic folksinger, stand-up comedian and screenwriter; his credits include the multiple-Emmy-nominated “Mork & Mindy”, the Emmy-losing “Duckman”, the Emmy-ignored “Police Squad!”, the Emmy-engorged “Saturday Night Live” and the Emmy-ineligible “The Muppets Take Manhattan.” David’s written Funny: The Book and A Beginner’s Guide To Corruption; he blogs for The Huffington Post and appears in the anthology Horrific Humor and the Moment of Droll Grimness in Cinema: Sidesplitting sLaughter. His play “Occupied” is in development at the Skylight Theatre in Los Angeles. David’s taught comedy at the University of Southern California, musical satire at UCLA, and spoken about comedy at Oxford University, the Smithsonian Institute, the University of Sydney (Australia); Yale, 92nd St. Y, the Actors Studio, New York Public Library, American Film Insitute, Grammy Museum (Los Angeles), Lucasfilm, Austin Film Festival, Midwest Popular Culture Association and VIEW Cinema Conference (Torino, Italy). More at davidmisch.com.

Stephanie Monohan is a writer, illustrator and researcher from New York City. She has a BA in American Studies from the College of William & Mary and an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. Her work focuses on the intersections of film/technology, horror, and capitalism. She is a regular contributor to Screen Slate, covering repertory film screenings in NYC, and is a member of the collective behind Spectacle Theater, a microcinema in Brooklyn. She has also written for Real Life, Lux Magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more. Her illustrations are inspired by horror films, the occult, and socialism. Illustration clients include Verso Books, OCN Distribution, New York Review of Books, Motherboard, Screen Slate, Season of the Bitch, and more. You can usually find her sipping coffee and watching a midnight movie.

Frances Morgan is a music and film critic based in London. A former deputy editor of The Wire, she has written regularly for Sight & Sound about sound and music in cinema. She is currently researching electronic music histories at the Royal College of Art and the Science Museum.

Mo has lectured at Prairie View A&M's Nightmares from Monkeypaw: A Jordan Peele Symposium, No Return: A Yellowjackets Symposium, and The Whole Damn Swarm: Celebrating 30 Years of Candyman. She’s spoken at Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, Cine-Excess, and Fear2000: The Horror Evolution Will Be Colorized – Black Horror Cinema. Her work appears in A Quaint and Curious Volume of Gothic Tales, The Encyclopocalypse of Legends and Lore, and 206 Word Stories. Her debut novella Love the Sinner will be released July 5th, followed by Clairviolence: Tales of Tarot and Torment in 2024-2025, and her essay in Vampire States of America in 2025. As a core member of Nyx Horror Collective, she’s partnered with The Shudder Channel and Stowe Story Labs. She’s also featured in 160 Black Women in Horror by Sumiko Saulson, Kenya Moss-Dyme, and Kai Leakes.

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.