In a 2006 issue of The Velvet Light Trap, scholar Matt Becker pointed out that horror filmmakers like George A. Romero, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, and Sean S. Cunningham were directors making films that Becker identified as "hippie horror." As with most scholarship, Becker is thorough in his research and provides intriguing details about the various directors' personal lives. (For example, who knew Craven smoked pot with his students and dropped his career as a college professor to live in a communal setting in New York City?) Becker's main argument, however, is that these

I had not realized the sort of existing prejudices against horror as a genre until I began to consider what precisely it was that I wanted to study in literature and film as a graduate student. Obviously, I was well aware of horror's reputation in the mainstream, but I had little idea of how far that reputation carried over into academia. I was astonished when one professor refused to even watch a horror film that was the topic of a discussion panel he was serving on. His grievance was that he had been informed that the film's subgenre was morally vapid and ethically disturbing, so he boyco

When I began dating my wife (Jen Morgart) over seven years ago, her paintings introduced me to what she considered to be her own brand of feminist-response artwork. As a filmmaker and student of Gothic horror, I was immediately drawn to the anxieties that some of these paintings exhibited. In some instances, Jen chose to feature themes that people of any gender would identify with such as loss, heartache, and insecurities of the body. In other works, she featured anxieties and fears occurring on multiple levels. As one of Jen's paintings from a series titled "Headless Woman" illustrates, i