The third in this series of conferences will focus on the important contributions of Australia and Pacific Rim and South Asia

Melbourne, Australia March 16-19 2023

Hosted by ACMI (Australian Center for the Moving Image) 17-18 March 2023

Join world-leading academics, researchers and directors as we explore the horror genre as a historical and contemporary phenomenon.

The horror genre has gone global.  In recent years, global horror has evolved with such speed, complexity, and diversity that we must now find new ways to map it.  George A. Romero’s revolutionary series of zombie films began with Night of the Living Dead in 1968, and has recently inspired films as varied as Australia’s Cargo (2017) and Japan’s One Cut of the Dead (2017). With the George A. Romero Collection as the founding acquisition of the University of Pittsburgh’s Horror Studies Archive, the stage has been set for a new mapping of global horror studies.   

What do these networks of global exchange and influence tell us about the nature of the horror genre and how it is changing in today’s media landscape?  With Australia and Japan as primary entry points for a discussion of global horror, this 2-day conference aims to provide new maps for understanding a genre that is as popular as it is socially and culturally significant across the world. New or revitalised areas of activity in the genre, such as zombies, women in horror, and folk horror, will constitute a special focus of our discussions.  Conversation between filmmakers and scholars will invite consideration of issues ranging from art to industry, from history to contemporary developments.  Romero’s living dead are still walking, and their stage is now truly global.  Now is the time to map their movements and gain a new understanding of this phenomenon called global horror.     

Join us as we focus on horror as a global phenomenon, with particular attention on Japanese and Australian horror, and on the relationship between these two distinctive localised approaches to the genre. We explore themes such as folk horror, women in horror, local/global horror cultures, and how horror is archived, produced, distributed, and consumed in the 21st century. 

 Conference Schedule 

[to confirm by Jan 31]

Friday 17 March

DAY ONE

10-11.30

Women in Horror: Japan & Australia and Beyond

Alexandra Heller Nicholas (Deakin University)

Chika Kinoshita (Kyoto University)

“The horror of motherhood” or similar

Charles Exley (University of Pittsburgh) 

“critical appreciation of Asakura Kayoko” 

Claire Henry (Flinders University)

“Rape revenge”

Audience remarks 

11.30-12

Coffee Break

12-1.30

George A. Romero’s Impact on Global Horror

Angela Ndalianis (Swinburne University) “Zombies, Pandemic, Social Imaginary”

Adam Lowenstein (University of Pittsburgh), “Horror and Aging in Relic and The Amusement Park”

Ben Rubin (Romero Collection Coordinator) [virtual]  and ACMI curator 

Reece Goodwin (ACMI curator)?; show Ben’s prerecorded video on collection?; focus on future collaboration possibilities: ACMI exhibition, etc?; screen Romero’s Elegy (21 minutes, possibly silent)?

1.30-2.30

Lunch

2.30-4

Folk Horror as Global Horror

Chair:

Jessica Balanzetegui (RMIT)

Bliss Cua Lim (University of Toronto) Filipino?

Akira Lippit (USC) Japan/Korea?

Saige Walton (U South Australia)

Lexi Kannas (RMIT) keen to attend but doesn’t think she has something to present here

4-5??

Break

5  ??

Check times with ACMI

In Conversation with Natalie Erika James and Screening of Relic

(Introduction by Alexandra Heller Nicholas)

Saturday 18 March

DAY TWO

10-11.30

Streaming Genre and Horror Roundtable

Alexa Scarlata (RMIT)

Andy Lynch (Swinburne)

Jess Balanzategui (RMIT)

Mark David Ryan (Queensland University of Technology) 

11.30-12

Coffee Break

12-1.30

Roundtable: Filmmakers on Horror

Kayoko Asakura and Natalie Erika James

Isabel Peppard (multi award-winning Australian director, artist and stop-motion animator)

Caitlin Koller (award-winning Australia filmmaker)

Adam Daniel (chair)

1.30-2.30

Lunch

2.30-3:30pm

Horror Exhibition and Festivals - Roundtable

Grant Hardie - (Convenor of MonsterFest)

Hudson Sowada - (Convenor of Fantastic Fest)

Lee Gambin - (Cinemanaics)

Briony Kidd - (Stranger With My Face Horror Film Fest)

4:00pm-5:00pm

Roundtable: Mapping Global Horror

Akira Lippit (University of Southern California), Chika Kinoshita (Kyoto University), Bliss Lim (University of Toronto), Stacey Abbott (Roehampton University), Kris Woofter (Dawson College, Montreal),

Charles, Adam, Angela, Jess 

In Conversation with Asakura Kayoko and screening of an Asakura film

  (Introduction by Charles Exley) (Q+A with Charles and Akira Lippit?)

Bios of Participants

[Charles added bios from past conference participants.  Editing still needed]

[Andy will add draft bios for Aus participants]

Adam Daniel (Australian Film Television and Radio School)

Adam Daniel is an Australian-based emerging writer/producer, with a passion for genre storytelling. A film and media studies PhD and sessional academic, Adam completed his Masters in Screenwriting at Australian Film Television and Radio School in 2020. He is the author of the book ‘Affective Intensities and Evolving Horror Forms: From Found Footage to Virtual Reality.' His graduate TV pilot The Replicas was shortlisted for the 2020 Australian Writers’ Guild John Hinde Award for Excellence in Science Fiction Writing and was selected as an AACTA: Pitch Finalist and AWG Monte Miller Award Finalist. His most recent pilot Omega was a Quarterfinalist in the Final Draft Big Break Competition and was also a finalist for the John Hinde Award in 2022. He was also a participant in the inaugural AWG First Break initiative. His graduate short film The Replica screened at Monsterfest and Sydney Sci-Fi Film Festival in 2021. He also co-produced the short film Mud Crab, which premiered at Melbourne International Film Festival in 2022, and was selected for Raindance and Aesthetica Film Festivals.

Akira Lippit (University of Southern California) 

Akira Mizuta Lippit is Vice Dean of Faculty in the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, and the T.C. Wang Family Endowed Chair in Cinematic Arts in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies.  He is also Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures in the USC Dornsife College.  His interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video, and visual studies.  Lippit’s work includes Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005); Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000); and his most recent book, Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016).  His work appears widely in journals and anthologies.  Active in the film community as a programmer, interviewer, and jury member, he has been deeply involved in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Visual History Project.  Lippit is Senior Editor of the journal Discourse and serves on the editorial board of Film Quarterly.  He regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the visual culture journal Ecce.

Kristopher Woofter (Dawson College, Montreal) Kristopher Woofter is Researcher in the Department of English at Dawson College (Montreal, Canada). He teaches courses on horror, the American Gothic, and the Weird tradition in literature and the moving image. He is Co-Editor of Monstrum and Associate Editor of Slayage: The Journal of Whedon Studies. His publications include Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2015; co-edited with Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare and Charlie Ellbé).

Stacey Abbott (Roehampton University) Stacey Abbott is Emerita Professor of Film and Television (Roehampton University) and a freelance writer/speaker. She has taught courses on horror at Roehampton, Kingston University, and the British Film Institute. She is the author of Celluloid Vampires (2007), Undead Apocalypse: Vampires and Zombies in the 21st Century (2016), the BFI Film Classic on Near Dark (2020) and, with Lorna Jowett, she is the co-author of TV Horror (2012). She is the co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Horror and co-editor of Global TV Horror (2021). Abbott is currently researching Horror Animation and co-writing a book on Women Creators of TV Horror. 

Alexa Scarlata (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

alexa.scarlata@rmit.edu.au 

Alexa Scarlata is a scholar of media and cultural industries. She has a special interest in internet distributed television, content production and national screen policy. Alexa’s PhD thesis (University of Melbourne, 2022) was entitled ‘A Stream Come True? The Rise of Online TV in Australia and its Impact on Drama Production (2015-2020)’. In recent years, Alexa has worked on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, ‘Internet-Distributed Television: Cultural, Industrial and Policy Dynamics’ (RMIT/QUT, 2019-2022, DP190100978), with Ramon Lobato,  Amanda Lotz and Stuart Cunningham. This research investigated the impact of multi-territory services on national screen industries, explored how government, local industry and consumers responded to SVOD services, and impacted the subsequent development of SVOD policy in Australia. Alexa is currently working with Ramon Lobato on the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship Project, ‘Television in the platform ecosystem’ (RMIT, 2020-2024, FT190100144), which is investigating smart TV software and its implications for television distribution and consumer access to content.

Adam Lowenstein (University of Pittsburgh)                                                                   Adam Lowenstein is Professor of English and Film/Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also Director of the Horror Studies Working Group and Faculty Fellow for the University Honors College scholar community “Horror Genre as a Social Force.”  He is the author of Horror Film and Otherness (Columbia University Press, 2022), Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (Columbia, 2015), and  Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (Columbia, 2005).  He serves on the board of directors for the George A. Romero Foundation.

Andrew Lynch (Swinburne University of Technology)

alynch@swin.edu.au 

Andrew Lynch is a lecturer in cinema and screen studies in the department of Media and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology. His research examines topics including "prestige" television, genre development in sci-fi, horror and fantasy television, and the diverse approaches of niche streaming services. Andrew's work has appeared in several edited anthologies and leading refereed journals including Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Senses of Cinema and Refractory. He is the author of Quality Telefantasy: How US Quality TV Brought Zombies, Dragons and Androids into the Mainstream, published by Routledge in 2022. 

Angela Ndalianis (Swinburne University of Technology)

Angela Ndalianis is Research Professor in Media and Entertainment and Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne, Australia). Her research focuses on entertainment culture and the history of media technologies and how they mediate our experience of the world around us. Her expertise is in the transformative nature of media technologies. Her publications include The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (McFarland, 2012).

Ben Rubin (University of Pittsburgh)

Ben Rubin is the Horror Studies Collection Coordinator (Archives & Special Collections) for the University of Pittsburgh Library System.  In this role he serves as the curator for the George A. Romero Archival Collection as well as working to build up research collections in support of horror studies ranging from archives and other primary sources to general collection materials including books, media, and journals.  He serves as a subject area expert for the library in assisting researchers to navigate and utilize library resources.  He also participates in programming and exhibit building as a way to engage students, faculty, staff, and the public with the horror studies collections.  Lastly, he works closely with faculty to incorporate primary source literacy and engagement within their classes and provide students with an opportunity to handle and actively learn from archival and rare book collections. 

Bliss Cua Lim (University of Toronto)

Bliss Cua Lim is Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto. She is the author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic and Temporal Critique (Duke University Press, 2009; Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2011). Some of the courses she is most invested in teaching are undergraduate classes on “Global Horror,”  “Queer Asian Cinemas,”  and “Philippine Indie Cinema.” She is a member of the Editorial Collective of the journal Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, published by Duke University Press, and serves on the Advisory Board of Plaridel: A Philippine Journal of Communication, Media and Society published by the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication. Her next book, The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (forthcoming from Duke University Press),  analyzes state, private, and informal archival efforts as well as a tenacious advocacy movement that arose in response to the crisis-ridden history of film archiving in the Philippines.

Briony Kidd (Stranger With My Face Horror Film Fest)

Briony Kidd is a film and theatre maker based in nipaluna/Hobart in lutruwita/Tasmania in the far south of Australia. With a love of the intense genres of storytelling, like horror, thriller, melodrama and black comedy, she has a slate of projects in development, including feature film projects that have been supported by Screen Tasmania, Film Victoria and Screen Australia. Along with fellow Tasmanian filmmaker Rebecca Thomson, Kidd co-founded a feminist horror film festival in 2012, called Stranger With My Face International Film Festival. With a global reach despite its size, the event was influential to many careers from 2012-2017. As a freelance critic and arts journalist she has written for outlets including The Guardian, SBS Movies, Metro Magazine, Island Magazine and her own platform for Tasmanian arts criticism, Memory Palace.

Caitlin Koller (award-winning Australia filmmaker)

Caitlin Koller is an award-winning Australia filmmaker. She completed an Honours degree in Film and Television at Swinburne University in 2012, and her graduate film Maid of Horror (2013) has since played around the world. Her latest short film, Blood Sisters (2017), premiered at Stranger With My Face International Film Festival in 2017 and won a gold award at the Spotlight Horror Film Festival, Best Foreign Horror Comedy Short at the Atlanta Horror Film Festival, Best Special Effects at the Sick Chick Flicks Film Festival, and has played at over 20 international festivals. Her first feature film, 30 Miles From Nowhere (2018) premiered at a sold out screening at Monster Fest in 2018 and stars Emmy award winner Carrie Preston (The Good Wife, True Blood) and Rob Benedict (Supernatural).

Charles Exley (University of Pittsburgh) 

Charles Exley is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Film and Associate Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He coordinates the biannual Japan Documentary Film Award, held in conjunction with Pittsburgh’s Asian Film Festival Screenshot: Asia.  His research emphasizes the global dimensions of Japanese cultural practices, and he has published on such topics as contemporary Japanese artist Morimura Yasumasa, the film-novel in Japan, Japanese performers of vaudeville and popular musical theater, the influence of Edgar Allan Poe in Japan, and the Japanese Western and the politics of the remake.  His publications include Satō Haruo and Modern Japanese Literature (Brill, 2016) and Old Crimes, New Scenes (Merwin Asia, 2018; co-edited with Michael Tangeman).  Current research projects include transnational detective fiction and the question of borders and travelling Japanese performers and global circuits in the 20th century.

Chika Kinoshita (Kyoto University)

Chika Kinoshita is an associate professor of Film Studies in the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. Her research interests are in Japanese film history, film culture and gender and sexuality (particularly reproductive politics), and intermediality. She received her BA in Comparative Literature and MA in Culture and Representation from the University of Tokyo, Komaba, and a joint PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago in 2007. She was an assistant professor in the.Department of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She had taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Shizuoka University of Art and Culture, and Tokyo Metropolitan University before joining Kyoto in 2016. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and collections in both English and Japanese. Her first book Mizoguchi Kenji ron: eiga no bigaku to seijigaku (Mizoguchi Kenji: Aesthetics and Politics of the Film Medium, Hosei University Press, 2016) received the Ministry of Education’s 67th Art Encouragement Award in the Criticism in the First Book category (Geijutsu Senshō Shinjinshō, Hyōron nado). Her forthcoming book A History of the Pregnancy Film sheds light on complex relationships between film and visual culture, the cinematic body, and reproductive politics in Japan.

Claire Henry (Flinders University)

claire.henry@flinders.edu.au 

Claire Henry is the author of Revisionist Rape-Revenge: Redefining a Film Genre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the BFI Film Classics title on David Lynch’s Eraserhead (BFI/Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023), and co-author of Screening the Posthuman (with Missy Molloy and Pansy Duncan, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023). She has published in journals including Journal of Digital Media & Policy, Cine-Excess,Porn Studies, Open Cultural Studies, Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, Senses of Cinema, Studies in European Cinema, Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, and Frames Cinema Journal. She has also published chapters in edited collections including Adult Themes: British Cinema and the “X” Certificate in the Long 1960s (Bloomsbury, forthcoming June 2023), Australian Screen in the 2000s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond: Contemporary Scandinavian and Anglophone Crime Fiction(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Grant Hardie (Convenor of MonsterFest)

Grant Hardie, an RMIT film graduate, has worked within the Australian film industry for over twenty years in roles ranging from production through distribution. Grant’s passion for film harks back to late nights as a child, waiting for his parents to fall asleep before he would sneak out to the living room to catch a Hammer Horror film on television. This enthusiasm for genre cinema carried through Grant’s adult life and has proved a driving force behind co-founding Monster Pictures in 2010.

Hudson Sowada (Convenor of Fantastic Fest)

Isabel Peppard (multi award-winning Australian director, artist and stop-motion animator)

isabelpeppard@gmail.com 

Isabel Peppard is a highly skilled multidisciplinary artist who works across the mediums of film, sculpture and stop-motion animation.  Her multi-award winning work has screened at top-tier festivals, including MIFF, Sitges and Annecy, as well as at institutions such as GOMA (QLD) and MOMA (Rio De Janeiro) ACMI (Melbourne) and The National Film and Sound Archive. Her short film Butterflies (starring Rachel Griffiths) won the Dendy award at the Sydney Film Festival and was broadcast nationally on SBS Television. Isabel's hybrid feature documentary 'MORGANA' (co-directed by Josie Hess) had it's world premiere at Melbourne International Film Festival 2019 and received a national cinema release through The Dendy cinema’s in 2020. As an artist, performer and arts facilitator Isabel has been involved in underground, queer and feminist art spaces since early 2000. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Age, The Guardian, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, Fangoria and Artlink.

Jessica Balanzategui (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Jessica Balanzategui is a Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT. She is the Founding Editor of Amsterdam University Press's book series, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures. Jessica's research examines entertainment cultures and aesthetics, with a particular focus on screen genres for and about children - particularly those that trouble expectations and definitions of "child appropriateness" - and horror and the Gothic. As part of these areas of speciality, her widely published research illuminates how genre, storytelling, and aesthetics operate in digital cultures (such as YouTube, subscription video on demand services, and online scary storytelling cultures), and in tandem, the impacts of technological, industrial, and cultural change on screen genres and their audiences, including child audiences. Her book, The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2018.

Lee Gambin - (Cinemaniacs)

gambinsgoregalore666@gmail.com 

Lee Gambin has written for such notable websites and publications as Scream, Fangoria, Delirium, Diabolique, and Shock Till You Drop. Moreover, Lee not only runs the film society Cinemaniacs based in Melbourne, Australia and lectures on cinema studies, but also has provided commentaries for various DVD and Blu-ray releases. In addition, Gambin is the author of several books that include "Massacred by Mother Nature: Exploring the Natural Horror Film," "Nope, Nothing Wrong Here: The Making of Cujo," and "Hell Hath No Fury Like Her: The Making of Christine."

Mark David Ryan (Queensland University of Technology) 

m3.ryan@qut.edu.au 

Dr. Mark Ryan, publishing as Mark David Ryan, is an Associate Professor in film and screen and a Chief Investigator for the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC). He is an expert in screen industries research, Australian genre cinema,  genre film studies, and digital media. He was the President of the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (SSAAAZ) between 2015 and 2018 and an Executive Member of Australian Screen Producers Education and Research Association (ASPERA) in 2015/2016. Mark has edited several collections on Australian screen that are widely adopted as required readings in undergraduate screen studies courses in Australia. He and Kelly McWilliam edited Australian Genre Film (2021, Routledge), he is the lead editor of Australian Screen in the 2000s (2017, Palgrave Macmillan), and is a co-editor of Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand 2 (2015, Intellect). Mark is a chief investigator - with Sue Turnbull, Stuart Cunningham, Steinar Ellingsen, Nicola Evans, and Emilia Zboralska - of the 4-year ARC 

Natalie Erika James (multi award-winning Australian director)

Natalie Erika James is a Japanese-Australian writer, director, and producer based in Melbourne, Australia. Her debut feature, RELIC, is a horror/drama starring Emily Mortimer, Bella Heathcote and Robyn Nevin, produced by Carver Films (SNOWTOWN, PARTISAN) & Nine Stories (Riva Marker, Jake Gyllenhaal), and supported by the Russo Brothers’ AGBO, Screen Australia and Film Victoria. Natalie is currently developing DRUM WAVE, a Japanese folk horror with development support from Screen Australia and Film Victoria. Drum Wave was one of 14 projects selected for the project market at the International Film Festival & Awards Macao, and won the Best Co-Production prize. Her 2018 proof-of-concept short for DRUM WAVE was nominated for Best Australian Short Film at the Sydney Film Festival and premiered internationally at Fantastic Fest. 

Saige Walton (University of South Australia)

Saige.Walton@unisa.edu.au 

Saige Walton is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies and one of the Associate Directors of the Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) research centre. She is a film and visual culture studies scholar who works in American, European and World Cinema contexts. She is particularly interested in issues relating to screen aesthetics and the body, often using phenomenological philosophy as well as other film-philosophical frameworks to make 'sense' of the cinema. She also teaches and conducts research in areas relating to popular film genres, experimental film/media, art and inter-mediality. Saige's first scholarly monograph - Cinema's Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement - was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2016 (reviewed in Film-Philosophy; reviewed in Screening the Past; reviewed in Alphaville). Saige's second monograph explores the embodiment and ethics of a contemporary cinema of poetry.  Publications arising from Saige's work on film and the poetic have appeared in leading international film and critical theory journals such as Paragraph and Projections.