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.