Our annual conference, Horror Studies Now, began in 2017. Initially a small event titled “Researching Horror, Cult and Exploitation Cinema”, the conference aimed to offer to support to new voices in the field, focusing on PhD and Early Career researchers. 

Since rebranding as Horror Studies Now in 2020, the conference has become a major international conference, spanning two days with three parallel streams.

The conference aims to showcase the best research being undertaken in horror studies, platforming a diversity of voices in the field, representing the breadth of horror studies research coming out of different disciplines, accounting for practice-based as well as traditional forms of research, and foregrounding various media types including comics, games, audio, written fiction (not just film). Our call for papers explicitly asks speakers to think about how their research pushes horror studies forward.

The diverse research presented at Horror Studies Now demonstrates that the genre offers far more than entertainment: it reflects the most essential social and political concerns of the moment and also allows audiences to think through fundamental elements of the human condition, including loss, grief, death, suffering, fragility, and fear.