Sophie Raine is a PhD student at Lancaster University studying penny dreadfuls and urban spaces. Sophie has previously published on both Victorian sex work in the VPFJ and on subterranean spaces in the Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. She is currently co-editing the collection Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic due to be published in 2022. In addition to this, Sophie is the Peer Review Editor for the Victorian Network.

Joana Rita Ramalho is Lecturer (Teaching) in Film Studies, Comparative Literature, and Portuguese at University College London, where she teaches modules on Gothic film and literature, musical satire, and Portuguese language and culture. She has published in journals and collections on topics as varied as sexsationalist feminism in postmillennial gothic musicals; haptic motifs and sensory contagion in terror cinema; thing theory and dolls in gothic and horror films; portraits in 1940s Romantic-Gothic films; intermediality and radical humour in the work of British punk cabaret trio The Tiger Lillies; and the queer failure and mock heroism of King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

Mark Rance is a documentary filmmaker who for many years was a producer at The Criterion Collection before forming his own company in Los Angeles and producing DVDs and Blu-rays for the Hollywood studios. His titles include THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS, HARD EIGHT (aka SYDNEY), BOOGIE NIGHTS, MAGNOLIA, SEVEN, I,ROBOT, THE PRESTIGE, RESERVOIR DOGS and THE DARK KNIGHT. He moved to London in 2004 and established Watchmaker Films to restore and distribute lost independent films. Those restorations include Eagle Pennell’s THE WHOLE SHOOTIN’ MATCH and LAST NIGHT AT THE ALAMO; Tobe Hooper’s first feature, EGGSHELLS; and Jack Hazan’s A BIGGER SPLASH.

Tonia Ransom is the creator and executive producer of NIGHTLIGHT, an award-winning horror podcast featuring creepy tales written by Black writers. Tonia has been scaring people since the second grade, when she wrote her first story based on Michael Myers. She lives in Austin, Texas, and is set to premiere her second audio drama, Afflicted, on Halloween of 2022. You can follow Tonia @missdefying on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

Jean-Charles Ray is an independent researcher and lecturer specializing in video games. With a PhD in film studies and comparative literature, his fields of expertise are horror and the articulation between narrative and game. He maintains a creative practice in tabletop role-playing.

Dr James Rendell is a lecturer in Creative Industries at the University of South Wales. He has published in various journals and edited collections and is the author of Transmedia Terrors in Post-TV Horror (Amsterdam University Press, 2023). He has appeared on a number of podcasts such as the Evolution of Horror and Between the Bannisters. His research largely centres on horror fans, identity, and representation with a particular focus on inclusivity and diversity. With Dr Kate Egan he is currently co-editing an edited collection of empirical studies into twenty-first century horror audiences and fandoms. He is also writing a book on His House, refugeedom, and race in British horror cinema.

Archivist by day, film lover by night, Amanda Reyes is also a freelance author who has been published online and in print. She recently edited Are You in the House Alone? A TV Movie Compendium: 1964-1999 (Headpress, 2017) which celebrates the made for television film, and expands upon her TV movie-centric blog, Made for TV Mayhem and its companion podcast.

Dr Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. His books include Gothic Cinema (2020), Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror Film and Affect (2016) and the edited collection Horror: A Literary History (2016). He is the chief editor of the book series Horror Studies, published by the University of Wales Press, and has edited weird and Gothic fiction anthologies for the British Library.

Larry Fessenden (writer, director, producer, editor), winner of the 1997 Someone to Watch Spirit Award, and nominee for the 2010 Piaget Spirit Award for producing, is the writer, director and editor most recently of DEPRAVED, as well as the art horror films HABIT (Nominated for 2 Spirit Awards), WENDIGO (Winner Best Film 2001 Woodstock Film Festival) and NO TELLING. His film, THE LAST WINTER (Nominated for a 2007 Gotham Award for best ensemble cast), premiered at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Fessenden directed SKIN AND BONES for NBC TV’s horror anthology FEAR ITSELF and the feature film BENEATH for Chiller films. He wrote the screenplay with Guillermo del Toro of THE ORPHANAGE, an English language remake of the successful Spanish film EL ORFANATO. He is the co-writer with Graham Reznick, of the hit Sony Playstation videogame UNTIL DAWN, which won a Bafta, and of several subsequent games for Supermassive gaming company. Fessenden has produced dozens of films including FOXHOLE (Jack Fessenden), THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (Ti West), WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt) and STAKE LAND (Jim Mickle). As a character actor Fessenden has appeared over 100 films including THE DEAD DON’T DIE (Jim Jarmusch), THE MOUNTAIN (Rick Alverson), IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE (Ti West), BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (Martin Scorsese), BROKEN FLOWERS (Jim Jarmusch), THE BRAVE ONE (Neil Jordan), ANIMAL FACTORY (Steve Buscemi), WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt), as well as many independent horror films including JAKOB’S WIFE, WE ARE STILL HERE, YOU’RE NEXT, I SELL THE DEAD and TV shows including “Louie” and “The Strain”. Graham Reznick is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. In 2009 he wrote and directed the critically acclaimed experimental horror feature film I CAN SEE YOU (“heralds a splendid new filmmaker” - The New York Times) and the award winning microbudget stereoscopic 3D sci-fi short THE VIEWER (featuring Lena Dunham). With Larry Fessenden, he is the co-writer of the BAFTA award winning Playstation 4 video game UNTIL DAWN (featuring Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere, for Sony / Supermassive Games) and its best-selling PSVR tie-ins RUSH OF BLOOD and THE INPATIENT, and several more. Fessenden and Reznick hold a 2015 Guinness World Record for their work on the UNTIL DAWN screenplay. In 2015 he wrote and directed the iTunes chart topping audio drama THE CHAMBERS TAPE (featuring SUPERNATURAL’s Misha Collins), and in 2016, Graham co-wrote the Sundance premiere BUSHWICK, an action/thriller starring Dave Bautista and Brittany Snow. In 2017 he wrote and directed RAPID EYE, a live action, interactive sci-fi horror thriller pilot for Sony / Olive Bridge / Eko. Most recently, Graham created, directed, and executive produced the thriller/sci-fi/horror television series DEADWAX for AMC’s Shudder. As a sound designer and musician, Graham has designed audio, mixed, and/or composed additional music for over 20 feature films, including Ti West’s IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE, THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, and THE INNKEEPERS, Jon Watts’ CLOWN, Larry Fessenden’s BENEATH, and Jim Mickle’s STAKELAND, as well as the 2013 Academy Award winning short CURFEW and the 2016 Academy Award nominated short documentary WITHIN THE WALLS. He has also edited music videos for numerous bands including LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, THE JUAN MACLEAN, and JIMMY EAT WORLD. In 2018, Graham’s debut electronic music album GLASS ANGLES was released on vinyl by Death Waltz / Mondo and the follow-up ROBOPHASIA was released on Burning Witches Records. (Image credit: Nelson Bakerman) --- Graham Reznick is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. In 2009 he wrote and directed the critically acclaimed experimental horror feature film I CAN SEE YOU (“heralds a splendid new filmmaker” – The New York Times) and the award winning microbudget stereoscopic 3D sci-fi short THE VIEWER (featuring Lena Dunham). With Larry Fessenden, he is the co-writer of the BAFTA award winning Playstation 4 video game UNTIL DAWN (featuring Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere, for Sony / Supermassive Games) and its best-selling PSVR tie-ins RUSH OF BLOOD and THE INPATIENT, and several more. Fessenden and Reznick hold a 2015 Guinness World Record for their work on the UNTIL DAWN screenplay. In 2015 he wrote and directed the iTunes chart topping audio drama THE CHAMBERS TAPE (featuring SUPERNATURAL’s Misha Collins), and in 2016, Graham co-wrote the Sundance premiere BUSHWICK, an action/thriller starring Dave Bautista and Brittany Snow. In 2017 he wrote and directed RAPID EYE, a live action, interactive sci-fi horror thriller pilot for Sony / Olive Bridge / Eko. Most recently, Graham created, directed, and executive produced the thriller/sci-fi/horror television series DEADWAX for AMC’s Shudder. As a sound designer and musician, Graham has designed audio, mixed, and/or composed additional music for over 20 feature films, including Ti West’s IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE, THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, and THE INNKEEPERS, Jon Watts’ CLOWN, Larry Fessenden’s BENEATH, and Jim Mickle’s STAKELAND, as well as the 2013 Academy Award winning short CURFEW and the 2016 Academy Award nominated short documentary WITHIN THE WALLS. He has also edited music videos for numerous bands including LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, THE JUAN MACLEAN, and JIMMY EAT WORLD. In 2018, Graham’s debut electronic music album GLASS ANGLES was released on vinyl by Death Waltz / Mondo and the follow-up ROBOPHASIA was released on Burning Witches Records. (Image credit: Tina Thorpe)

Leah Richards is a professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York; a Goth Martha Stewart; editor of Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture; and a feminist killjoy. A horror and pop culture scholar, she studies reanimated corpses as monstrous challenges to capitalism; white, cis heteropatriarchy; and general human stupidity. She has a cat named Renfield who sometimes eats bugs.

Jolene Marie Richardson is a New York-based costume designer, fashion historian, and writer. Her designs can be found in various film, stage, and television productions including The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs. She lecturers at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, NY, and her research is published on her blog Hanging By A Thread, and in the pages of Fangoria.

James Riley is author of The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties (Icon Books, 2019), a cultural history of the late-1960s and early 1970s. He is Fellow of English Literature at Girton College, University of Cambridge where he works on modern and contemporary literature. Previous publications have included a multi-volume collection on the work of film-maker and novelist Peter Whitehead and his next book will be Playback Hex, a study of William Burroughs and the tape recorder. James has lectured on his work internationally and has performed spoken word shows in London, Vienna and Coney Island, New York. He has written for Vertigo, The i, Fortean Times, Monolith and blogs at Residual Noise.

Kate Robertson is an Australian writer and academic based in New York. She writes about art, film and culture for a range of publications, including Senses of Cinema, The Atlantic, i-D, Vice, and Complex. Her first book, Identity, Community & Australian Artists, 1890-1914 Paris, London and Further Afield came out late-2019 with Bloomsbury Academic and her second, Trouble Every Day, is due out with Auteur in 2020. She is an affiliate of the University of Sydney, Australia, where she completed her dissertation and taught for several years.

Dr David Clarke is Associate Professor at Sheffield Hallam University and a co-founder, with Dr Diane Rodgers and Andrew Robinson, of the Centre for Contemporary Legend. From 2008-13 he acted as curator for the UK National Archives open government project that oversaw the release of the MoD’s UFO archive. He most recent book, UFO Drawings at The National Archives was published in 2017 by Four Corners Books. Andrew Robinson is a photographer, artist, and senior lecturer in photography at Sheffield Hallam University, where he co-founded the Centre for Contemporary Legend (CCL) with Dr David Clarke and Dr Diane Rodgers. His art practice investigates expressions of identity, folklore and related material culture through a visual anthropology of people, place, and trace. His research explores the folklore, myth and legend associated with photographs and photographers including subjects as diverse as the Photography of the Crimean War; Lover’s Leap Legends; English Calendar Customs; A.I Generated Imagery, and the Calvine UFO. Recent publications include chapters in; ‘Behind the Mask: Vernacular Culture in the Time of COVID’ (Utah State University Press, 2023) and ‘Folklore and Nation in Britain and Ireland’, (Routledge 2021) along with papers presented at ‘Off The Shelf Literary Festival’ (Nov 23) ‘AI and Photography’ Royal Photographic Society (Oct 2023); ‘International Society of Contemporary Legend Research Annual Conference’ (June 2023).

Luke Robinson is a PhD candidate and a casual academic in the School of the Arts & Media, University of New South Wales, Australia. His thesis is on scenes of disappearing faces in 1940s Hollywood gothic woman’s films. He is part of the executive of the Sydney Screen Studies Network (https://facebook.com/SydneyScreenStudies/) and a video artist working with Move in Pictures (https://www.move-in-pictures.com). His research interests are in classical Hollywood film, film theory, politics and aesthetics of erasure, film fascism, and theories of film sound. He is currently co-editing a book called Sound Affects: A User’s Guide to be published by Bloomsbury (due for publication early 2023). Luke is also co-editing a book on single shots in Alfred Hitchcock’s films, forthcoming with Oxford University Press (most likely published late 2023).

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.

Matt Rogerson works in UK Health & Social Care research. A PAGE International Screenwriting Awards finalist and film critique writer specializing in Italian genre film, his work often concerns the intersection between horror and the Roman Catholic faith. He has featured in in House of Leaves Publishing’s Filtered Reality: The Progenitors and Evolution of Found Footage Horror, and appears not infrequently for Arrow Video and The Nottingham Horror Collective. His books, The Vatican Versus Horror Movies, and Fulci’s Inferno: Faith in the Films of a Giallo and Horror Auteur, are both published by McFarland & Co.

Julia Round is an award-winning writer and scholar whose research examines the intersections of Gothic, comics and children’s literature. Her books include Gothic for Girls: Misty and British Comics (2019, winner of the Broken Frontier Award for Best Book on Comics), Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach (2014), and the co-edited collection Real Lives Celebrity Stories (2014). She is a Principal Lecturer at Bournemouth University, UK, co-editor of Studies in Comics journal (Intellect) and the book series Encapsulations (University of Nebraska Press), and co-organiser of the annual International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference (IGNCC). She shares her work at www.juliaround.com.

Shelagh Rowan-Legg received her PhD from King’s College London in 2014, and her first book, The Spanish Fantastic: Contemporary Filmmaking in Horror, Fantasy, and Sci Fi was published in 2016. She is a Contributing Editor for ScreenAnarchy, a programmer for FrightFest, a script consultant, a filmmaker, and recently becomes the Executive Director of The Miskatonic Institute.

Joe Rubin is a film collector, programmer and preservationist who founded Vinegar Syndrome with Ryan Emerson in 2012.

Matt Ruff was born in New York City in 1965. He is the award-winning author of six novels, including Fool on the Hill, Bad Monkeys, Set This House in Order, The Mirage, and Sewer, Gas & Electric. His most recent novel, Lovecraft Country, tells the story of two black families fighting both supernatural horrors and the more mundane terrors of racism in Jim Crow-era America. Lovecraft Country is being adapted as an HBO series by Jordan Peele, Misha Green, and J.J. Abrams. Author Photo by Lisa Gold.

Emmalea Russo's poetry and writings on film and visual art have appeared in many venues including Artforum, BOMB, Granta, Compact, Return, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Her most recent book of poetry is Confetti (Hyperidean Press, 2022). She has taught courses on literature, philosophy, and film at Northeastern University, GCAS, The Home School, Saint Peter's University, and elsewhere. 

Sukhdev Sandhu runs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University where he is also Director of the Center for Experimental Humanities and teaches classes on hydropoetics, ghosts and sound art. His books include London Calling (2003), I’ll Get My Coat (2005), Night Haunts (2007), and Other Musics (2016). A former Critic of the Year at the British Press Awards, he writes for The Guardian, The Wire, Frieze, Sight and Sound, Bidoun, and Suddeutsche Zeitung. He makes radio documentaries for the BBC and runs the publishing imprint Texte und Töne.

As an author Jack Sargeant’s work has been described as "dangerously inspirational". His numerous books include Against Control, Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground and Naked Lens: Beat Cinema (like Deathtripping now in its third English language edition). His forthcoming book Flesh and Excess on Underground Film is due for publication in late 2015. He has written on film and culture for numerous books, anthologies and journals, and introductions for books by Lydia Lunch, Romain Slocombe, Joe Coleman and for William Burroughs’s Unforgettable Characters. He writes a regular column for FilmInk, and has written for The Wire, Xochi 23, Fortean Times, World Art, Real Time and many other publications. Jack has frequently appeared as a documentary interviewee in films including Blank City, The Advocate for Fagdom and Llik Your Idols. He is regularly called upon to assist in research for television and film documentaries. In addition to writing, Sargeant has lectured on underground film and culture, beat culture, William Burroughs and many other topics across the world. He has curated numerous film and art events, including co-curating the critically acclaimed 'Sex' at Melbourne's Strange Neighbour gallery. He is currently program director for the Revelation Film Festival in Western Australia.

Ned Schantz is a professor in the Department of English at McGill University, where he teaches courses on Hitchcock, horror, and the uncanny. His work on Hitchcock can be found in the journal CAMERA OBSCURA (2010) and in his book GOSSIP, LETTERS, PHONES: THE SCANDAL OF FEMALE NETWORKS IN FILM AND LITERATURE (Oxford 2008). His article on reenactment and GRIZZLY MAN appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of CRITICISM.

Brontë Schiltz is a writer, journalist and PhD candidate researching the Televisual Gothic at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. Her academic work has appeared in journals including SFRA Review, The Sibyl, Fantastika Journal, Aeternum Journal, SIC Journal, Revenant Journal and Horrified Magazine, as well as edited collections including Vision, Contestation and Deception: Interrogating Gender and the Supernatural in Victorian Shorter Fiction (2021), Penny Dreadfuls and the Gothic: Investigations of Pernicious Tales of Terror (2023), The Gothique: Myriad Manifestations – A Study of the Various Forms of the Gothic (2023) and Nigel Kneale and Horror (2025). She has appeared on podcasts including Victorian Legacies, The Ghost Story Book Club, The Death Studies Podcast, BERGCAST, There’s Not Always A Twist, The Folklore Studies Podcast and Scarred For Life. She previously worked as social media manager for horror film festival Grimmfest, co-organised Manchester Metropolitan University’s 2024 International Gothic Summer School, and has given talks with Romancing the Gothic, the National Science and Media Museum, the UK Ghost Story Festival and The Evolution of Horror. She provided commentary for Hammer’s 2025 Blu-ray rerelease of Quatermass 2 (1957) and appeared in documentary The Legend of Nigel Kneale: The Creeping Unknown, featured on Quatermass 2 as well as the 2025 rerelease of The Quatermass Xperiment (1955). Her creative work has been published in Hungry Ghost Magazine, Olney Magazine and Lotus-Eater Magazine, as well as Comma Press collections The Book of Manchester (2024) and The Monster, Capital (2025). She is the members coordinator of the International Gothic Association and the deputy editor of Hive Journal.

Amy Voorhees Searles is an award-winning Senior Producer in the Content division of Trailer Park, Inc. A proud, second-generation horror fan, Amy’s lifelong passion for horror and exploitation cinema saw her working for genre luminaries Joe Bob Briggs and Roger Corman at the start of her professional career. Though she found herself drawn into the field of mainstream home entertainment, she never turned her back on her first love, and she remains an active member of the Los Angeles horror community. Her essay on the depiction of female monsters in Mexican horror cinema of the 1950s and 1960s will be featured in the upcoming book Creepy Bitches, a collection of compositions by female horror creators and fans.

Carl Sederholm is Associate Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. His publications include, "What Screams Are Made of: Representing Cosmic Fear in H.P. Lovecraft's 'Pickman's Model'" (2006), and the books, POE, "THE HOUSE OF USHER" AND THE AMERICAN GOTHIC (2009) and ADAPTING POE (both with Dennis Perry).

Icy Sedgwick is a podcaster, author, lecturer and researcher based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She is the host of the Fabulous Folklore podcast, investigating European folklore, weird tales, and legends, with a view to examining their links to documented history and their appearances in popular culture. She is also working on a PhD in Film Studies, examining the representation of the haunted house in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Icy is the co-author of Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature: The Body in Parts alongside Ian Conrich. In case she tires of research, former ghost hunter Icy also writes Gothic horror fiction inspired by ghost stories and folklore.

Meheli Sen is Associate Professor in the department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures, and the Cinema Studies program at Rutgers University. Her research area is post-independence Indian cinema, particularly Hindi and Bengali language films. She is especially interested in questions of gender, genre, modernity, globalization, and new media cultures. Her work has been published in journals such as Cinema Journal, Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, South Asian Popular Culture, among many others. She has co-edited an anthology titled Figurations in Indian Film (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). Sen’s book, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema was published in 2017 by The University of Texas Press and Orient BlackSwan. She is currently working on a book manuscript focusing on horror, digital media, and political cultures in South Asia.

Jasper Sharp is a critic, curator and co-founder of the long-running Midnight Eye.com (2001-2015) website. He book publications are The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film (2003, with Tom Mes), Behind the Pink Curtain (2008), The Historical Dictionary of Japanese Film (2011) and The Creeping Garden: Irrational Encounters with Plasmodial Slime Moulds, (2015). He is the co-director, with Tim Grabham, of The Creeping Garden (2014), an award-winning documentary about slime moulds and the people who study them.

J. Shea teaches in the Department of English at Dawson College in Montreal. Years before becoming a Shakespearean and receiving a PhD in English from McGill University, J. was weaned on low-budget horror films broadcast on local Chicago television.

Sigmund Shen is a Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York, Editorial Board member of the journal Supernatural Studies, and former Professional Staff Congress chapter chair. His essays on pop culture and politics have appeared in Supernatural Studies, In These Times, Inside Higher Ed, Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, G-Fan, and three book-length collections: Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture, アメリカ人の見たゴジラ、日本人の見たゴジラ[Nuclear Monsters, Transcending Borders], and Giant Bug Cinema: A Monster Kid’s Guide. He is currently working on a study of eco-fascist narratives in post-millennial Godzilla films.

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.

A writer, producer and director, currently in post-production of his latest film, 39: A Film by Carroll McKane, has a long list of feature film credits including such horror classics as Death Line (aka Raw Meat), Dead and Buried, Poltergeist III and the highly successful, innovative action thriller Vice Squad. He has also created and/or produced many television series including Sable (based on the Mike Grell comic book), Missing Persons and Poltergeist: The Legacy. Aside from his known creative abilities, he has run several successful production companies and holds patents on some hi-tech systems he has invented. A self-confessed technophile, he has been “possessed” by computers and new media since his first “516K word-cruncher” back in the Dark Ages.

Erica Shultz is the co-host of the Unsung Horrors podcast, which focuses on horror films with fewer than 1000 views on Letterboxd. She has contributed booklet essays, visual essays, and commentary tracks for various boutique Blu-ray labels such as Vinegar Syndrome, Severin, Terror Vision, Fun City Editions, and Cinephobia releasing. Her 2024 self-published book The Sweetest Taboo: An Unapologetic Guide to Child Kills in Film categorizes and reviews nearly 1200 films that depict a child death. She is currently working on a second volume, and living blissfully child-free in Austin, Texas.

Kali Simmons (Oglala Lakota) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Riverside. She has taught classes on Indigenous film and media and her research explores the history of Indigenous representation in American and Canadian horror films. Her work on Indigenous media practices has been published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

David J. Skal is widely recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on horror in popular culture. His signature book, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, called "The best book on horror movies I have ever read" by Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, has been in continuous print for twenty-five years, including three American editions, a British edition, and translations into Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese and Japanese. His other critically acclaimed books include Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (“the ultimate book on Dracula,” according to Newsweek); Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture, Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning (with Elias Savada): V is for Vampire, Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween; Dracula: The Ultimate Illustrated Edition of the World-Famous Vampire Play; and, with Jessica Rains, Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice. With the late Nina Auerbach he is co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, widely regarded as the definitive academic text. In collaboration with John Edgar Browning he is currently preparing a revised second edition for release in 2019. As a documentary filmmaker he has written, produced and directed a dozen DVD/Blu-ray features on Universal Studio's classic monster movies, as well as a behind-the-scene chronicle of Bill Condon’s Academy Award-winning film Gods and Monsters. His audio commentaries appear on the special-edition DVDs of Tod Browning’s Dracula and Freaks, and he also acts as host/narrator for his own Universal documentaries The Frankenstein Files, Back to the Black Lagoon, and Abbott and Costello meet the Monsters. His hundreds of media appearances have included The Today Show, A&E Biography, NPR's All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and Fresh Air. He has lectured internationally on monsters and horror at leading colleges, universities, and cultural institutions, including the Musée du Louvre, and taught courses based on The Monster Show at the University of Victoria and Trinity College Dublin, where he was named a Visiting Research Fellow in 2010. The fellowship supported the primary research for his most recent project, Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, which was a 2017 finalist for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for biography and criticism. His journalism and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times and the Boston Globe, and he has served for many years as a film critic for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

John Skipp is a Saturn Award-winning filmmaker (TALES OF HALLOWEEN), Stoker Award-winning anthologist (DEMONS, MONDO ZOMBIE), and New York Times bestselling author (THE LIGHT AT THE END, THE SCREAM) whose books have sold millions of copies in a dozen languages worldwide. His first anthology, BOOK OF THE DEAD, laid the foundation in 1989 for modern zombie literature. He's also editor-in-chief of Fungasm Press, championing genre-melting authors like Laura Lee Bahr, Autumn Christian, Danger Slater, Cody Goodfellow, and Devora Gray From splatterpunk founding father to bizarro elder statesman, Skipp has influenced a generation of horror and counterculture artists around the world. His latest book is THE ART OF HORRIBLE PEOPLE.

Justine Smith is a writer and film programmer based in Montreal, QC. She is the screen editor for Cult MTL and has contributed to publications like Hyperallergic, Little White Lies and Ebert Voices. She is the programmer for the Underground Section at the Fantasia International Film Festival and is on the programming committee for Cinéma Moderne in Montreal.

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.

Steven C. Smith is a four-time Emmy-nominated producer, and the author of A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann. That book was the main research source for the Oscar-nominated documentary Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann. Steven’s latest book is Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer. He has written about movies and music for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly and Hollywood Reporter. He was a supervising producer on the long-running TV documentary series Biography (A&E) and Backstory (AMC). His other documentaries include The Lure of the Desert: Martin Scorsese on Lawrence of Arabia and Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood. Photo by Mark A. Vieira

Iain Robert Smith is a Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. He has published extensively on cult and horror cinema, with a particular emphasis on international remakes. He is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (EUP, 2016) and co-editor of the collections Transnational Film Remakes (with Constantine Verevis, EUP, 2017) and Media Across Borders (with Andrea Esser and Miguel Bernal-Merino, Routledge, 2016). He is also the co-founder of the Remakesploitation Film Club and he is currently working on a book about global cult cinema.

Kristen J. Sollée is a lecturer at The New School and founding editrix of Slutist, a sex positive site that examines the intersections between sex, feminism, and the occult. Sollée’s signature college course, “The Legacy of the Witch” follows the witch across history, pop culture, and politics, from the Venus of Willendorf to The Love Witch. Her first book, Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, was published by Stone Bridge Press in 2017.

Candis cut her horror teeth at an early age, sneaking scary books off her dad’s bookshelf and reading by flashlight late into the night. She graduated to slasher films, B-movies and creature-features shortly thereafter. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia in 2009, and has been a lecturer at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Women’s Studies since 2002, teaching classes on feminism and popular culture, girls and girlhoods, deviant bodies, postfeminism and marxist analysis. She also teaches courses revolving around issues of representation, power and the media in the Humanities department at John Abbott College.

Virginie Sélavy is the founder and editor of Electric Sheep, the online magazine for transgressive cinema. She has edited the collection of essays The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, and has contributed to World Directory Cinema: Eastern Europe and written about Victorian London in Film Locations: Cities of the Imagination - London. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Sight&Sound, Rolling Stone France, Cineaste and Frieze.

Leila Taylor, author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul is a writer and designer whose work is focused on the gothic in Black culture and horror. Her work has been published in The Journal of Horror Studies, The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene, and The Repeater Book of the Occult. She has given talks for the International Gothic Association in Mexico and the U.K., Morbid Anatomy and Night of Philosophy in New York. She received a Masters in Fine Arts from Yale University and an MA in Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is Creative Director for Brooklyn Public Library.

Alanna Thain teaches cultural studies and world cinemas, and also directs the Moving Image Research Laboratory (mirl.lab.mcgill.ca) at McGill University, where at least part of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (1981) was filmed (most of the film was filmed at Concordia University). She would like to confirm that she is still recovering from watching that film while unsupervised at a very young age, and is still waiting to be able to watch it again. Her horror specialty is the work of David Lynch. She also runs a bike powered mobile cinema project, Cinema out of the Box, and collaborated with the Volatile Den for a cemetery screening last summer (https://www.facebook.com/mobilecinemamontreal).

Stephen Thrower, writer and musician, was born in Lancashire in 1963. After moving to London in 1985 he began writing reviews for the seminal horror magazine Shock Xpress, before launching his own film periodical Eyeball in 1989 with contributors including novelist Ramsey Campbell, filmmaker Ron Peck, and critics Kim Newman, Daniel Bird and Alan Jones. His first book, Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, was published in 1999, followed by The Eyeball Compendium (2003) and Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (2007). His most recent work is Murderous Passions; the delirious cinema of Jesús Franco, published by Strange Attractor in March 2015. Thrower and his partner Ossian Brown are founders of the avant-garde music group Cyclobe, who recently recorded new soundtracks for three Super-8 films by the British filmmaker and queer activist Derek Jarman (Sulphur, Tarot and Garden of Luxor). As a solo artist, Thrower scored Pakistan’s first gore film, Zibahkhana aka Hell's Ground (2007), contributed electronic music to Down Terrace (2010) by Ben Wheatley, and was commissioned by the BFI in 2012 to score three silent short films by the pioneering director of gay erotica Peter De Rome.

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.

Jon Towlson is a film critic and the author of THE TURN TO GRUESOMENESS IN AMERICAN HORROR FILMS, 1931-1936 (McFarland, 2016), CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (CONSTELLATIONS) (Auteur/Columbia University Press, 2016) and SUBVERSIVE HORROR CINEMA: COUNTERCULTURAL MESSAGES OF FILMS FROM FRANKENSTEIN TO THE PRESENT (McFarland, 2014). He is a regular contributor to Starburst Magazine, and has also written for the BFI, Paracinema, Exquisite Terror, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Shadowland Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal, Offscreen and Digital Film-Maker Magazine. Jon contributed to the recent edited collection LOST SOULS OF HORROR AND THE GOTHIC (eds. Bernice M. Murphy & Elizabeth McCarthy, McFarland, 2016). He is currently writing a monograph on the film CANDYMAN for Auteur/Columbia University Press. www.subversive-horror-films.com. @systemshocks

Adam Twycross is a British comics scholar whose research focusses on the development and evolution of adult comics in Britain, Europe and the United States. He is a senior lecturer for Arts University Bournemouth, where he also acts as Course Leader for VFX for Film and Television. He is a co-founder of BFX, the UK’s largest festival of animation, visual effects and games, and of cgApprentice, a company dedicated to democratizing access to animation, games and VFX education for schools and colleges. He has previously worked as a 3D artist, with credits including the Disneyland Adventures and the Games Workshop graphic novel Macragge’s Honour.