Those nice folks at ABERTOIR, Wales' premier horror film festival, have kindly asked me to speak at ths year's special COURT OF CULT segment, where I will join three other leading scholars to defend who I think is the ultimate cult British horror star.

My star of choice is the horribly underrated SHEILA KEITH of Frightmare fame. Sheila will be up against PETER CUSHING (defended by Peter Hutchings), CHRISTOPHER LEE (defended by Russ Hunter) and MICHAEL RIPPER (defended by Matt Hills).

The event takes place at 15.00 on Wednesday 6 November 2013.

Mark McKenna, a PhD student at the University of Sunderland, has recently launched an offshoot of the university's highly popular film club CineClub. McKenna's venture, CineClub Extreme, seeks to consider some of cinema history's more controversial outputs. Last week's screening was Ruggero Deodato's infamous Cannibal Holocaust.

Next week, on 24 October, I will introducing the theatrical version of Scum and leading a discussion on the film afterwards. The event will take place in the David Puttnam Media Centre Cinema, at the St Peter's campus, and will start at 6pm.

It is inevitable that some of us will be headed for a drink or two afterwards. Please come along!

Thanks to Rosie Mossey, who is a Design student at Northumbria University, I will be introducing a screening of Kubrick's horror masterpiece, The Shining, on Wed 30 Oct at B&D Studios, Pilgrim Street, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Things kick of at 20:00 and its £5 to get in or £8 if you want some horror-themed food. Tickets can be bought directly from Rosie. For more info and to get tickets, email Rosie at: [email protected].

I will talk for a short while about the film's production history and introduce some its key themes.

On 2 November 2013 I am joining forces with Dr Sarah Godfrey of the University of East Anglia to present a paper exploring "authenticity" in relation to the British media star Danny Dyer. We will be delivering our paper on the second day of the two-day conference, Exploring British Film and Television Stardom, at Queen Mary University of London.

Entitled 'The "Real" Danny Dyer', the paper builds on both of our interests in contemporary British cinema. It also allows me to develop further some of the ideas I explored in my paper at Revisiting Star Studies at Newcastle University earlier this year.

We will eventually be expanding the paper into a joint-authored journal article.