Personal / Website News
Citations Galore
Happened across two new citations of my Stranger Things/synthwave essay, so I’d like to share them and invite you to take a gander at these scholars’ work:
- “Oor nostalgie (en retro-estetika): die ikonografie van Beyond the Black Rainbow en Ready Player One” by Cilliers van Der Berg at LitNet Akademies.
- “O retrofuturo, onde a música antiga e nova colidem: memória e literacia audiovisual na cultura ciberpunk” by Andre Malhado at Musimid.
And coming from Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern, there is a citation of Danny Rhodes’ essay:
- “Archaeological, industrial and biological dimensions of subterranean horror in L.T.C. Rolt’s The Mine” by Gabriel Moshenska in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, Vol 17.
Panthans Journal #331
The newest issue of the The National Panthans Journal has been published. This issue contains a re-print of my review of The Moon Maid: Catacombs of the Moon #2.
Paraphrased from the zine: The National Capital Panthans Journalis a monthly publication issued as a .PDF file on the Saturday before the first Sunday of each month. Contribution of articles, artwork, photos and letters are welcome. Send submissions to the editor: Laurence G. Dunn at laurencegdunn@gmail.com in a Word document for consideration.
A Hero Will Endure Paperback Relese + Discount
Vernon Press, the publisher of A Hero Will Endure: Essays at the Twentieth Anniversary of Gladiator, has just released a cheaper, paperback version of the book, just in time for Gladiator 2!
The paperback is at the much more friendly price of $57 compared to $96 for the hardcover and $107 for an electronic version. All editions of the book can be found at the Vernon Press product page.
In addition, the publisher is offering a coupon on purchases of the collection! From now until the end of January 2025, if you use code SLZM30 at check out, you’ll get 30% off the title. So, the $57 book now becomes $39.99. Nice!
ECOF 2025
In September of 2025 there will be an Edgar Rice Burroughs Chain of Friendship (ECOF) event down in Willcox, AZ. This event is to celebrate the 150th birthday of Burroughs while also honoring him with a plaque in the town due to his stationing with there the 7th U.S. Calvary in the 1890s. (Note: another ERB convention was held in Willcox back in 2019 and an event recap of that can be read at ERBZine #7059).
Here is a flyer for the 2025 event:
I’ll share more information about the event as I find out more on my website updates. There currently is a fundraiser going on to raise funds for the ERB plaque, and details for that can be found in the QR code in the above graphic, or by checking out the donation page at the Sulphur Springs Valley Valley Historical Society. 3.8K of 5K has been raised already.
Michele and I will be in attendance for this convention, so I’ve added it to the appearances section of my website as well.
Publishing Recap
Below is a recap of my publishing endeavors so far in 2025.
Comic Book Review: “The Moon Maid: Catacombs of the Moon #2″ reprinted in the National Capital Panthans Journal #332.
Calls for Papers/Proposals
Here are some new pop culture CFPs that have crossed my path. Links to these will also be in the CFP page on the navigation bar.
The Gore Gore Film Book
Edited by:
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Kevin Wetmore (Loyola Marymount University)
We, the editors, are looking to put together an edited collection on gore on film and gore films. The recent success of films such as the Terrifier franchise and Smile has shown that there is a growing interest in gore films. This interest is not recent, as the gore film began in the mid-sixties, with the godfather of gore, Herschell Gordon Lewis, directing Blood Feast, a fringe hit that would bring gore to the forefront. That first success would be followed by others, each of them bloodier (The Wizard of Gore; The Gore Gore Girls) but gore would not reach mainstream cinema until the 1980s, with the rise of the slasher and its inventive murders. This new visibility would clash many times with the MPAA and feed the UK “video nasties” controversy. Magazines like Fangoria would be in charge of rescuing the gore scenes from the editing room floor, putting exploded heads on their covers.
However, gore was always frowned upon, a trashy resource to attract unsophisticated viewers. It is in our contemporary times that gore reached a novel point: mainstream recognition as another cinematographic tool to tell a story and appeal to the spectator’s sensorium. Today gore seems to have reached a certain degree of respectability.
However, it has not yet achieved critical recognition, with few studies on gore cinema within academic scholarship. This edited collection aims to begin to fill this gap by offering several chapters that conceptualize gore from different interdisciplinary perspectives, while offering close readings of gore films.
This collection will be divided into two main theoretical sections: the first will be focused to analyzing gore itself, centering on its aesthetics, its ethics, its relationship with the spectator, etc. The second section will be devoted to close readings of gore films of any period and nationality.
Contributions could include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
Section I:
- Gore and aesthetics (including color, thickness, digital blood vs. practical blood, etc.)
- Gore and humor
- Gore and ethics
- Gore and theology
- Gore and spectatorship
- Gore and art house sensibilities
- Gore and the body
- Gore on video vs. gore in cinema
- Gore and horror film magazines
Section II:
- American slashers
- Auteur cinema
- Gore in mainstream horror films
- European gore films
- Asian gore films
- Herschell Gordon Lewis’s films.
- Gore in classic films
We are open to works that focus on other topics as well. Prospective authors are well to contact the editor with any questions, including potential topics not listed above. Please submit a 300-500-word abstract of your proposed chapter contribution as a Word Doc (not PDF) with a brief bio (in the same document), current position, affiliation, and complete contact information to editors Kevin Wetmore and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns to goregorebook@yahoo.com by 28 February 2025. Full chapters of 5,000-6,000 words are likely due in October 2025. A renowned publisher has shown preliminary interest.
Please share this announcement with anyone you believe would be interested in contributing to this volume.
Note: Acceptance of a proposed abstract does not guarantee the acceptance of the full chapter
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (PhD in Arts, PhD Candidate in History) works as Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) – Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina)-. He teaches courses on international horror film. He is director of the research group on horror cinema “Grite” and has authored a book about Spanish horror TV series Historias para no Dormir (Universidad de Cádiz, 2020) and has edited books on Frankenstein bicentennial (Universidad de Buenos Aires), one on director James Wan (McFarland, 2021), the Italian giallo film (University of Mississippi Press, 2022), horror comics (Routledge, 2022) and Hammer horror films (Routledge, 2024). Currently editing a book on Baltic horror. He is Director of “Terror: Estudios Críticos” (Universidad de Cádiz, Spain), the first-ever horror studies series in Spain.
Kevin Wetmore (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is a professor of Theatre Arts at Loyola Marymount University, teaching courses in horror cinema and horror theatre, among others. He also transforms his university library into a literary haunted house every October. He is a six-time Bram Stoker Award nominee, author of thirteen books including Eaters of the Dead: Myths and Realities of Cannibal Monsters (Reaktion, 2021) and Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (Continuum, 2012), and editor or co-editor of another nineteen volumes, including The Streaming of Hill House (McFarland, 2020), Theatre and the Macabre (University of Wales Press, 2022) and The Many Lives of the Purge (McFarland, 2024).
Miscellaneous Tidbits
Some fun things and shout outs from these past few weeks.
Shadows Over Main Street
I shared over on my BlueSky account (link) my copy of Shadows Over Main Street.
I got my copy autographed by a handful of contributors at one of the StokerCon events: D. Alexander Ward, Stephanie M. Wytovich, James Chambers, Lucy A. Snyder, Josh Malerman, and Lisa Morton. Scroll through the gallery above to check them out.
Biblical Pepla Haul
On New Years Eve Michele and I visited our local Zia Records to do a little shopping of used music and movies. I walked away with way too much loot, but also procured three Biblical epics on Blu-ray.
The three movies were Samson and Delilah (Cecil B. DeMille, 1949), The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953), and its sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators (Delmer Daves, 1954). Plucking up Demetrius and the Gladiators on Blu-ray was extremely fortuitous. Twilight Time, a now defunct boutique label, released the Blu-ray edition and it is way out of print and commands absurd prices on eBay (the same fate as with their Blu-ray release of The Egyptian [Michael Curtiz, 1954]). Note: I did a write up of the Twilight Time release of Messalina (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1960) which can be read here.
Ride the Stream Podcast Episode 01
Michele and Travis Lakata have started a vidcast together called Ride the Stream. They are currently going through each episode of the cult TV series Lost. The vidcast’s debut episode just got published. The episode can be watched on the Ride the Stream’s YouTube channel or via the embedded player below.
Ride the Stream can be followed on Bluesky.
Cowgirls and Synthesizers
One of my favorite electro-pop bands is Hyperbubble. I’ve been a super fan of theirs since buying a copy of Candy Apple Daydreams from A Different Drum way back in the late 2000s.
Hyperbubble put together a documentary about the making of their Western Ware album, and their exploration of country and cowgirl/boy (pop toy) aesthetics. The documentary is called Cowgirls and Synthesizers and more information about it can be found at the Hyperbubble website.
I am super chuffed to discover I am listed in the Thank You section in the credits!
