Dark Recesses in the House of Hammer

Christian Chelebourg is a Professor in French literature and youth literature at Lorraine University. A specialist of the imaginary, he started with research on French 19th century literature before focusing on youth and mass culture. His latest books are: Le Surnaturel – Poétique et écriture (Paris, Armand Colin, « U », 2006), Les Écofictions: Mythologies de la fin du monde (Les Impressions Nouvelles, « Réflexions faites », 2012), Les Fictions de jeunesse (PUF, « Les Littéraires », 2013) et Walt Disney ou l’avenir en couleur (Les Impressions Nouvelles, « Réflexions faites », 2018).

Ian Conrich is a Professor at the University of Vienna. The author of Studies in New Zealand Cinema (2009), and The Cinema of Sri Lanka: South Asian Film in Texts and Contexts (2021) and co-author of Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature: The Body in Parts (2017), he is an author or editor of a further fourteen books, including The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror (2004), Film’s Musical Moments (2006), Contemporary New Zealand Cinema (2008), Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema (2009), and Rapa Nui –- Easter Island: Cultural and Historical Perspectives (2016). He has contributed to more than sixty books and journals, and his work has been translated into French, Danish, Persian, Polish, Hungarian, and Hebrew.

Jean-Michel Durafour is a philosopher, a poet and a professor of Film theory and aesthetics at Aix-Marseille University. He is also the head of the Studies in Sciences of the Art research group (EA 3274). He is the author of numerous articles on the cinema and of several books, recently: Cinéma et cristaux. Traité d’éconologie (Mimésis, 2018) and L’Étrange Créature du lac noir de Jack Arnold. Aubades pour une zoologie des images (Rouge profond, 2017). He will soon publish Tchernobyliana. Esthétique et cosmologique de l’âge radioactif (Vrin) and Gene Tierney. Une irradiation blême (Circé).

Gaïd Girard is a professor Emeritus at the University of Western Brittany in Brest (France). She works on the Fantastic and Science -Fiction, both in literature and cinema. She wrote on Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Conan Doyle, Eoin McNamee, William Gibson, Marge Piercy among others, and on films by Kubrick, Roeg, Epstein, Svankmajer. She has lately focused on Science Fiction films in the 70s and feminist SF.

Marisa C. Hayes is a Franco-American scholar and artist. Her interdisciplinary research explores is situated at the crossroads of the performing arts and moving images. In 2017, her monograph Ju-on: The Grudge was published by Auteur, Liverpool University Press in the Devil’s Advocates series. It focuses on how supernatural themes found in traditional Japanese dance-theater and butoh have been transposed in Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 J-horror classic. Hayes also edited Fan Phenomena: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Intellect, 2015), in addition to other printed and electronic publications. She is currently editor in chief of the dance research journal Repères, cahier de danse at the National Choreographic Development Center near Paris and co-directs the International Screendance Festival of Burgundy.

Rehan Hyder is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of the West of England and author of Brimful of Asia: Negotiating Ethnicity on the UK music scene He is co-founder of BLIMA (Bristol Live Independent Music Archive) focusing on the study of music, local identity and ethnicity. Current research is analysing portrayals of violence and otherness in colonial and post-colonial fiction with a particular focus on the representation of Thuggee in popular literature, film and television.

Isabelle Labrouillère is a lecturer in Performing Arts and Film Aesthetics at the ENSAV (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’AudioVisuel). She is the author of articles on fantasy and cinema, inter and transmediality and postmodernism (“The New Conditions of Post-classical Entertainment: Duplication, Repetition and the Loss of Authenticity in Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars”). Her recent work also includes articles on David Fincher (“Le récit « suspendu » ou le discours menacé par la puissance imageante dans Seven de David Fincher (1995)”, Crossways Journal, Canada, 2019). She is currently co-editing a new entry in Adam Barkman and Antonio Sanna’s Critical Companion to Contemporary Directors series, with a focus on the cinematic work of Christopher Nolan.

Jean-Marie Lecomte is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lorraine (France). He specializes in Anglo-American literature and film studies. His cross-study of literature and film has mostly focused on 19th-century literature and its audio-visual metamorphoses in American and English cinema. He has a keen interest in the aesthetics of film dialog and sound (an area of research often neglected in film studies). He is the author of some thirty research articles on poetry, cinema and English literature and has co-directed, with Gilles Menegaldo, a book on American director King Vidor. He is also a videographer and is currently directing an archival documentary on Jack Kerouac.