I will be participating in a roundtable discussion that will close the forthcoming Transnational Monstrosity in Popular Culture event at York St John University on 3rd June.

From the official website:

• This one-day conference will explore the figure of the monster in transnational popular culture, across cinema, television, games, comics and literature, as well as through fandoms attached to global monster cultures. It is our intention to bring together researchers to consider how transnational monstrosity is constructed, represented and disseminated in global popular culture.

My fellow panellists comprise: Dr Colette Balmain (Kingston University), 
Dr Donna McCormack (University of Surrey) and Professor Andrew Smith (University of Sheffield). 

The full programme can be accessed here.

My latest article on children's video entertainment has just been published in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.

The article is based on research undertaken for my current book project on the history of pre-recorded video entertainment in Britain.

• Abstract: Published work which addresses video’s formative years in Britain typically frames children in one of two ways: either as victims of ‘video nasties’, or as scapegoats used by social guardians and policy-makers to further a profoundly moralistic, censorious, agenda. The centrality of youngsters to this historical moment cannot be denied, but there is much more to be learned about their relationship with video entertainment during the early 1980s. It would be unreasonable to suggest – as some have – that, because the video industry lacked governmental regulation between the years 1978 and 1984, video distributors were so ‘brash and out for profit’ that they disregarded children’s welfare. On the contrary, and as this article will reveal, many distributors traded in an array of videos intended specifically for a child audience, ranging from age-appropriate feature films to cartoons to non-fiction education videos, while others dealt exclusively in children’s entertainment. Indeed, far from simply being irresponsible peddlers of horror and pornography, some companies went to great lengths to appeal directly to youngsters – including companies that would be subsequently prosecuted for trading in ‘obscene publications’. Situating the video boom in its historical context, this article examines how distributors marketed ‘kidvids’ in the trade and consumer press, and how they sought to promote children’s product that was not only designed to entertain, but also to educate.

This month sees the publication of mine and Austin Fisher's special issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies -- now in its fifth year -- on 'Italian horror'.

To access the journal, click here. For a full table of contents, see below. 

• Introduction: Italian horror cinema / Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker 
• ‘I have a picture of the Monster!’: Il mostro di Frankenstein and the search for Italian horror cinema / Russ Hunter 
• All the colours of the dark: Film genre and the Italian giallo / Alexia Kannas 
• A comparative analysis of the factors driving film cycles: Italian and American zombie film production, 1978–82 / Todd K. Platts 
• ‘Why are there always three?’: The Gothic occult in Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy / Lindsay Hallam 
• The cultural capital of the gothic horror adaptation: The case of Dario Argento’s The Phantom of the Opera and Dracula 3D / Xavier Aldana Reyes 
• Streaming Italian horror cinema in the United Kingdom: Lovefilm Instant / Stefano Baschiera 
• An interview with Sergio Martino: An American in Rome / Giulio Olesen 
• Spaghetti Cinema, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK, 9–10 May 2014 / Neil Fox 
• The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh and the Giallo: An International Film Conference, Rome, 7–9 June 2015 / Louis Bayman