STEPHEN R. BISSETTE was a professional artist, author, editor and publisher in the comic book industry for 23 years. His original novella Aliens: Tribes won the Bram Stoker Award in 1993. His film criticism and scholarly articles have appeared in numerous periodicals, newspapers and books, and he is a regular contributor to Video Watchdog. Steven is currently working on a history of Vermont films and filmmakers to be published by University Press of New England.
JOEL BLACK teaches comparative literature and film at the University of Georgia. He is the author of The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative (Routledge, 2001), as well as numerous essays on literature, critical theory and cultural history.
MICHAEL J. BOWEN is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has written on exploitation filmmaker Doris Wishman for numerous publications and is currently completing a book about her life.
GARRETT CHAFFIN-QUIRAY received his BA and MA from the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. He has sponsored a film festival, taught courses on TV and cinema history and published movie and video reviews. His research interests include pornography and violence, post-War American cinema, representations of Vietnam and the 1970s. He has also managed information technology for an investment bank, had a dot-com adventure and now lives in New York City writing criticism, short-length fiction and his fourth novel.
JONATHAN L. CRANE is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has published widely on such topics as Top 40 radio, horror film specatorship and music censorship. His book, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film, was published by Sage in 1992.
ELENA GORFINKEL is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her dissertation focuses on American sexploitation films of the 1960s.
SARA GWENLLIAN JONES lectures in Television and Digital Media at Cardiff University, Wales. She is currently writing a book titled Fantastic Cult Television (Edward Arnold, 2002) and is co-editor of Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media (www.cult-media.com).
BENJAMIN HALLIGAN lectures in film at York St John College. He is currently preparing a critical biography of Michael Reeves for Manchester University Press.
JOAN HAWKINS is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
XAVIER MENDIK is Director of the Cult Film Archive at University College Northampton and the General Editor of the AlterImage series. He has published, broadcast and toured cinema events around the themes of psychoanalysis and its application to cult and horror cinema. His publications in this area include (as co-editor) Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics (Fab Press, 2000), Dario Argento’s Tenebrae (Flicks Books, 2000) and (as editor) Shocking Cinema of the Seventies (Noir Publishing, 2001). He is currently researching his next book, entitled Fear at Four Hundred Degrees: Structure and Sexuality in the Films of Dario Argento. Beyond his academic research in this area, he has also conducted interviews with many of the leading figures of cult cinema as well as sitting as a jury member on several leading European film festivals. Details of his interviews and jury accounts can be found on www.kamera.co.uk where he runs the film column ‘Scream Theory’.
ANNALEE NEWITZ is founder of the webzine Bad Subjects (www.eserver.org/bs) which is still going strong; and has published two books, White Trash: Race and Class in America (Routledge, 1997) and The Bad Subjects Anthology (New York University Press, 1998). In 1998, she graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a PhD in English and American Studies. Currently, she is at work on two books – one about sex and technology, the other about capitalism and monster movies. Her work has appeared in magazines and papers such as Salon.com, The Industry Standard, GettingIt.com, Feed, SFGate.com, Gear, Nerve.com, The Utne Reader Online, Alternative Press Review, New York Press, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Metro and several academic journals and anthologies.
MARTIN F. NORDEN teaches film as Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His articles on moving-image media have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is currently at work on a collection of essays that examine the representation of evil in popular film and television.
BILL OSGERBY is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of North London and has written widely on youth, gender and British and American cultural history. His publications include Youth in Britain Since 1945 (Blackwell, 1998), Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-Style in Modern America (Berg/New York University Press, 2001) and a co-edited anthology, Action TV: Tough-Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks (Routledge, 2001). He has never ridden a motorcycle, but still resents being hassled by The Man.
JACK SARGEANT is the author of Deathtripping: the Cinema of Transgression (Creation Books, 1996), Naked Lens: Beat Cinema (Creation Books, 1997) and Cinema Contra Cinema (Fringecore BVD, 1999); he is the co-editor (with Stephanie Watson) of Lost Highways (Creation Books, 2000) and the editor of Suture (1998, volume two forthcoming from Amok Books). He has contributed to numerous publications including Headpress, Bizarre, BBGUN, Panik, and World Art. He has curated numerous film seasons and lectured on underground film and outlaw culture across three continents, as well as acting as an advisor to the British Film Institute on contemporary underground film. He has appeared in numerous television programs discussing underground culture and its manifestations, and has also had cameo roles in several underground films. In addition, he teaches cultural theory, philosophy and film at the London College of Printing.
STEVEN JAY SCHNEIDER is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Harvard University and in Cinema Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He has published widely on the horror film and related genres in journals such as CineAction, Post Script, Film & Philosophy, Hitchcock Annual, Kinema, Journal of Popular Film & Television, Paradoxa, Scope, Kinoeye and the Central Europe Review. He is currently co-editing two volumes, Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror (Scarecrow Press) and Understanding Film Genres (McGraw-Hill), as well as researching his next book for Wallflower Press, The Cinema of Wes Craven: An Auteur on Elm Street.
DAVID SCHWARTZ is the Chief Curator of Film at the American Museum of the Moving Image (New York), where he has programmed numerous avant-garde film retrospectives including ‘Films that Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective’, ‘Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie Gehr’ and ‘The Art of Vision: A Stan Brakhage Retrospective’.
JACK STEVENSON is an American film-writer, print collector and distributor living in Denmark since 1993. He was a teacher at The European Film College in Ebeltoft, Denmark from 1995 to 1998 and has just completed a book about Lars von Trier, something of a departure from his specialities which centre on American exploitation and underground cinema.
TONY WILLIAMS received his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1974, and is currently Professor and Area Head of Film Studies in the English Department of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He is the co-editor of Vietnam War Films (McFarland, 1994) and author of Jack London: The Movies (Rejl, 1992), Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker (McFarland, 1997) and Structures of Desire: British Cinema, 1939–1955 (SUNY Press, 2000). His essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. He is currently completing The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead for Wallflower Press.
NICK ZEDD, crypto-insurrectionary visionary, filmmaker, writer, actor, theorist and xenomorphic magician coined the term ‘Cinema of Transgression’ to identify the underground movement he spearheaded in New York, directing such movies as Police State, War is Menstrual Envy and Thus Spake Zarathustra. His autobiography, Totem of the Depraved, was published by 2.13.61 in 1996.