I had lots of fun being interviewed yesterday for Jason Impey's latest documentary project: VIPCO: The Untold Story.

Video Instant Picture Company (VIPCO) was among Britain's first video programme distributors, and the first to be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for handling 'video nasties'. VIPCO would go on to see success throughout the 1990s and early 2000s with numerous video nasty reissues and a host of other exploitation films. The company features in my latest book project Britain and the Video Boom: An Industrial History.

Impey's doc is due to finish shooting at the end of the year. I'm so happy to be a part of it and I can't wait to see the end result!

In February, Film and Television Studies lost an eminent figure whose work on popular genres -- specifically horror -- inspired two generations of academics (myself included).

In the latest issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television, I pay tribute to Peter, appraising his writing on British film and television, with an emphasis on his horror output.  This can be accessed here (though you or your institution will need to hold a subscription).
 
I had the pleasure of working with Peter at Northumbria from 2013 until his death. He's sorely missed. 

In tribute to the great man, my colleague Russ Hunter and I are currently preparing a second edition of Peter's groundbreaking first book, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film. More news to follow!

One of my former undergraduate students, Adam Herron (currently an MA student at University of East Anglia), has just sent off the final manuscript for his first article, to be published in Film Matters. Entitled "Victim Sells: The Commercial Context of Snuff Fiction and A Serbian Film", it is based on his excellent undergraduate dissertation. Adam will continue at UEA as a PhD student from September.

Many congratulations, Adam!

It's that time of year again!

Next week sees me deliver a paper at the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference as part of a panel on Transnational Identity and Exploitation Cinema. My paper is concerned with the birthing of the "shot on video" horror film and represents early forays into a future book-length project.

The panel, organised by Ryan Rashotte, looks great, and I'm really happy to be part of it:
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• Johnny Walker, Northumbria University: “Transnational Splatter Cinema and the Birth of the ‘Shot-on-Video’ Horror Film”
• Erin Wiegand, Northumbria University: “Mondo Americano: Tracing American and Italian Exploitation Traditions in the Mondo Films of Lee Frost and Bob Cresse”
• Ryan Rashotte, Lakeland University Japan: “Assimilating the Nude in Canuxploitation’s The Naked Flame”
• Iain Robert Smith, King’s College London: “The Whiteness of Cult”

In June 2018 I will return to the university where I got my first academic job, De Montfort in Leicester, to deliver a keynote at the 7th annual postgraduate conference. The theme -- to mark the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein -- is "New Perspectives on Horror, Science Fiction and the Monstrous Onscreen". I can't wait for this  one! I'm especially excited as I get to share keynoting duties with a good friend of mine, Dr Laura Mee (University of Hertfordshire).  

I need to confirm the topic of my talk soon. Watch this space...