January 14, 2020
Dr. Scahill was interviewed this month following the announcement that the documentary Scream, Queen!: My Nightmare on Elm Street won the Dorian Award fro Best LGBTQ Documentary. In this feature interview for Westword, reporter Lauren Antonoff asked Prof. Scahill to weigh in on the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and the potential of the horror genre to give voice to minorities and to give form to their greatest fears. Read the full interview h...
January 9, 2020
The winners were announced this week for the Dorian Awards (the LGBTQ Oscars), and Scream, Queen! has taken the prize for Best LGBTQ Documentary! Dr. Scahill is featured in the documentary as a film historian and horror genre expert. Scream, Queen! has really been the Little Film That Could, funded by Tyler Jensen and Roman Chimienti through a Kickstarter campaign by fans of the queer cult classic.
Described by Rogerebert.com as "entertaining, inf...
November 4, 2019
The queer horror documentary Scream Queen!: My Nightmare on Elm Street made its official world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. Fantastic Fest is the largest genre film festival in the world specializing in horror, fantasy, and sci-fi premieres. The weekend featured a sold-out premiere for the film and drag celebration with an astounding rainbow Freddy Kreuger cake by world-renowned Sideserk Cake Studio.
The film, by directors Ro...
October 30, 2019
Dr. Scahill was recently approached by the University of Colorado's "City Stories" desk to speak to his specialization in horror cinema and social history. City Stories asks professors to address contemporary issues through the lens of their research, and in this edition Dr. Scahill examines the history of the horror genre, its potential for social change, and the postcolonial politics of the two Colorado-set horror films, The Shining and Dr. Sle...
July 30, 2019
Making the film festival circuit this summer is the documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street, which features Prof. Scahill as an authority on horror cinema and queer audiences.
Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street opened in June at San Francisco's Frameline Film Festival, the world's first and largest queer film festival, now in its 43rd year. The film then made its Denver debut as the offical opening night film at Ci...
July 25, 2019
Dr. Scahill was interviewed for a second time by VICE magazine to give his thoughts on the current slate of horror films and what they might reveal about contemporary cultural anxieties. Last August, Dr. Scahill was contected to give his thoughts of the shark attack film The Meg and the retrun of revenge-of-nature films like Jaws.
In this follow-up interview about the alligator attack film Crawl, Scahill talks with Miles Howard about the film's us...
June 11, 2019
Dr. Scahill's "From Literature to Film" Maymester course was honored to welcome comic book author Sean Benner (West of Oz) and artist Jorge Corona (Middlewest) to class for a Q&A. This year's course is centered around adaptations of L. Frank Baum's book The Wizard of Oz, and both Benner and Corona's comics offer original and inspiring takes on the Ozified narrative.
Jorge Corona was previously nominated for an Eisner Award (comic book's vers...
April 22, 2019
Dr. Scahill was interviewed recently by Voice of America to give his thoughts on the movie US and the future of minority filmmakers using the genre of horror to wage social critique. VOA correspondant Penelope Poulou asked Dr. Scahill to provide historical context for genre and what the success of films like Get Out and Us might mean for forecasting genre trends.
As Scahill notes, the horror genre has traditionally been antagonistic to minorities,...
April 16, 2019
Check out the latest issue of Girlhood Studies for Dr. Scahill's new essay "Fanfic'ing Film: Queer Youth Cinema Reclaims Pop Culture." The essay is guided by a simple question: if given the means to make their own films, what stories would young queer people today tell about their own lives?
To answer this question, Dr. Scahill traveled to Calgary in 2018 to attend the Fairy Tales Film Festival, where festival organizers provided training and reso...
March 26, 2019
Dr. Scahill was quoted recently in a piece about the long-range box office success of recent horror films like Get Out, A Quiet Place, It, and the recent Jordan Peele project Us. As Sarah Shevenlock notes, 2017 was the first year that the horror genre made over $1 billion collectively. Weekend box office returns for Us show a record-breaking $70 million opening, doubling Peele's previous film Get Out, and ranking as the third-largest ever opening...
