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, as often "monsters" like Nosferatu or King Kong have been presented xenophobic or racialized as threats to the social order which must be suppressed. In the late 1960s, films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead, and Stepford Wive
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 resources to young queer filmmakers and allowed them to exhibit their films to the festival audience. Dr. Scahill sat down with the directors to talk about their lives, their films, and what filmmaking means to them. This essay argues that the filmmaker
