Kristopher Woofter

PhD, Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University
MA, English, Concordia University
BA, English and Cinema, Denison University

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KRISTOPHER WOOFTER, PhD, is a faculty member in the English Department at Dawson College, in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal, Québec). He edits the peer-reviewed journal Monstrum, and is Co-founder of the Montréal Monstrum Society. He is a 2021 Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction for Shirley Jackson: A Companion (2021). He also co-edited American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper with Will Dodson (2021). He has recently written on Nosferatu (2022), the documentary thought-experiment film Into Eternity (with Mikaela Bobiy, 2022), and New England Folk Horror (forthcoming) and Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man (forthcoming). His forthcoming projects as co-editor include The Weird: A Companion (fall 2024, with Carl Sederholm), The Routledge Companion to Horror (with Stacey Abbott, Adam Lowenstein, and Roger Luckhurst), and The Oxford Handbook of Shirley Jackson (with Emily Banks). Kristopher's research focuses on horror and the Weird in literature and the moving image, horror ecologies, cosmic pessimism, and Shirley Jackson.

Kristopher is series co-editor (with Erin Giannini) of B-TV: Horror Television Under the Critical Radar for Bloomsbury, and an editorial board member for Horror and Gothic Media Cultures (Amsterdam UP) and the journals Shirley Jackson Studies and American Gothic Studies.

Publications & Projects

LONG FORM / MONOGRAPHS

• (forthcoming) One Step Beyond. TV Milestones. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
• (forthcoming 2025) with Erin Giannini. Mourning in America: Horror Anthology TV in the Reagan Era. London: Bloomsbury.​
• Shoot the Dead: Horror Cinema, Documentary, and Gothic Realism. PhD thesis, Concordia University, 2016.​

EDITED COLLECTIONS

• (forthcoming) The Oxford Handbook of Shirley Jackson (co-edited with Emily Banks). Oxford University Press.
• (forthcoming) The Routledge Companion to Horror (co-edited with Stacey Abbott, Adam Lowenstein, and Roger Luckhurst).  London: Routledge.
• (forthcoming) Sleep in 21st Century Horror Media (co-edited with Lynn Kozak and Alanna Thain). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• (forthcoming, Fall 2024) The Weird: A Companion (co-edited with Carl Sederholm). Oxford: Peter Lang.​​
• Shirley Jackson: A Companion. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021.
• ​American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper (co-edited with Will Dodson). Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021 (pbk. 2024).
• ​Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition: The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond (co-edited with Lorna Jowett). London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2019/pbk. 2020.
• ​​Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade (co-edited with Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare and Charlie Ellbé) . Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016.​

ESSAYS

• (forthcoming) “Eco-Horror.” The Routledge Companion to Horror, edited by Stacey Abbott, Adam Lowenstein, Roger Luckhurst, and Kristopher Woofter. London, Routledge.
• (forthcoming) (with Mikaela Bobiy) "On Cosmic Time: Reorienting the Human in Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men and Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall."  Eco-Horrors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Health and Environmental Anxieties in Media and Culture, edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell. London: Routledge.
• (forthcoming) “A Psychogeography of the Dead:: American Folk Horror Cinema and New England as a (Bad) State of Mind." Vampires and the Making of the United States in the Twenty-first Century. London: Routledge.
• (forthcoming) "Night-Dwelling, Youth Horror, and the ‘Great Resignation’: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair." ​Sleep in 21st Century Horror Media.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• (forthcoming) “Beyond the Infinite(simal): Cosmic Horror and Anti-Anthropocentrism in Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man.” ReFocus: The Films of Jack Arnold, edited by Michael Shuman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• (forthcoming fall 2024) (with Carl Sederholm) “Introduction: The Weird and Others.” The Weird: A Companion. Peter Lang.
• (January 2023) ​“Actuality in the Shadows: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, Pseudodocumentary, and Mockumentary Aesthetics.” Nosferatu in the 21st Century, edited by Simon Bacon. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press / Auteur, 2023.
• with Mikaela Bobiy. “‘To Remember Forever to Forget’: Into Eternity and the Anti-Anthropocene.” The Anthropocene and the Undead, edited by Simon Bacon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022, pp. 147-165.
• “Long Twilight (Hosszú Alkony), Shirley Jackson, and the Eerie In-Between.” Shirley Jackson: A Companion, edited by Kristopher Woofter. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021, 265-282.
• "Fuel for the Fire." Introduction to Smoldering Embers: On the Set of Tobe Hooper's Spontaneous Combustion by Stan Giesea. McLean, VA: Miniver Press, 2021.
• “Tobe Hooper’s Teenage Wasteland: Youth and Disillusionment in The Funhouse, Invaders from Mars and Mortuary.” American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, edited by Kristopher Woofter and Will Dodson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021, pp. 29-42.
• with Anne Golden. “Unsettled Architecture and Avant-Garde Strategies in Tobe Hooper’s Down Friday Street, Toolbox Murders and Djinn.” American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, edited by Kristopher Woofter and Will Dodson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021, pp. 68-80.
• with Erin Giannini. “‘That’s a Scooby-don’t!’: The Melancholy Nostalgia of ‘Scoobynatural’ for Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?.” In "Supernatural—The End of the Road: A Reflection," edited by Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown. Monstrum 3, no. 1 (September 2020): 51-62.
• “Caitlin Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl—Shirley Jackson.” Horror: A Companion, edited by Simon Bacon. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019, pp. 227-233.
• “Weird Whedon: Cosmic Dread and Radical Alterity in the Whedonverse.” Joss Whedon vs. the Horror Tradition: The Production of Genre in Buffy and Beyond, edited by Kristopher Woofter and Lorna Jowett. London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 219-242.
• “Radical Diversion: Attractions Politics in the Horror Pseudo-documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle.” Monstrum. 1 (1). April 2018.
• Editor's Introduction. “‘The Death of Death’: A Memorial Retrospective on George A. Romero.” Monstrum 1, no. 1. (April 2018).
• “Monkey Shines: An Experiment in Fear and The Dark Half.” In “‘The Death of Death’: A Memorial Retrospective on George A. Romero.” Monstrum 1(1). April 2018.
• “A ‘Darkly Hypothetical Reality’: ‘Gothic Realism’ in 1940s Hollywood Horror Cinema.” Recovering 1940s Horror Cinema: Traces of a Lost Decade, edited by Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, Charlie Ellbé and Kristopher Woofter. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, pp. 3-26.
•  “Watchers in the Woods: Meta-Horror, Genre Hybridity, and Reality TV Critique in The Cabin in the Woods.” Reading Joss Whedon, edited by Rhonda Wilcox, Tanya Cochran, Cynthea Masson, and David Lavery. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014, pp. 268-279.​
• “Once More Into the Woods: An Introduction and Provocation.” (with Jasie Stokes). “’We Are Not Who We Are’: Critical Perspectives on Cabin in the Woods (2012).” Special Issue of Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. 10.2/11.1 (36-37) Journal Editors, David Lavery and Rhonda Wilcox.
• (with Papagena Robbins) “‘Gothumentary’: The Gothic’s Unsettling of Documentary’s Rhetoric of Rationality.” Textus: English Studies in Italy. Special issue: “Gothic Frontiers,” edited by Glennis Byron and Francesca Saggini. 25 (3) (September-December 2012): pp. 49-62.
• (2010) Article. “Little Red Riding … Buffy?: ‘Buffy vs. Dracula’ in Explorations of Intertextuality in Introduction to College English.” Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with the Vampire Slayer. Edited by Meghan K. Winchell and Jodie A. Krieder. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.

JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUES

• Co-Editor (with Jasie Stokes). “'We Are Not Who We Are’: Critical Perspectives on The Cabin in the Woods.” Special Double Issue of Slayage. 10.2/11.1 (36-37) (December 2014 – January 2015) ​

MONSTRUM 

• Monstrum 6.2 (December 2023, "Shirley Jackson — Intertexts and Afterlives," guest edited by Emily Banks and Alexis Fiinc)
• Monstrum 6.1 (June 2023, with Dossier on Russian, Belarusian and Sakha Horror guest edited by Eva Ivanilova and Denis Saltykov)
• Monstrum 5.2 (December 2022, "Short Form Horror: History, Pedagogy, and Practice," guest editors Sonia Lupher and Alanna Thain)
• Monstrum 5.1 (June 2022)
• Monstrum 4 (October 2021)
• Monstrum 3.1/2 (October 2021/January 2022, "Supernatural — The End of the Road: A Reflection," guest editors, Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown)
• Monstrum 2 (June 2019)
• Monstrum 1 (April 2018)

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

• (February 2021) “Troubling SPACE S: In Search of Secret Knowledge." SPACE: Sciences Participating with Arts and Culture in Education. Dawson College. 
• (October 2015) “Review: One Step Beyond 6-DVD Set.” Spectacular Optical. 
• (March 2015) “Introduction: The American Gothic: A Trans— Discourse.” SPACE: Sciences Participating with Arts and Culture in Education. Dawson College. 
• (August 2013) Interview (with Simon Laperrière) “The Snuff of Legend.” Spectacular Optical. 
• (August 2013) “Dead Tech: Found Footage at Fantasia.” Spectacular Optical. 
• (July 2013) Interview (with Marçal Forés) “Ghost Stories of Youth: Animals (2012).” Spectacular Optical. 
• (June 2013) Interview (with Dr. Stacey Abbott, Dr. Lorna Jowett and Dr. Mike Starr). “‘Fan(g)-Scholarship’: TV Fangdom: A Conference on Television Vampires.” Fangoria Online.

RECENT PRESENTATIONS / INTERVIEWS

• Interview Subject. 2024. For the documentary short, Web Of The Weird: Placing SPIDER LABYRINTH In The Weird Genre. The Spider Labyrinth. Blu-ray. Severin Films.
• Speaker. March 2023. "Mapping Global Horror: Academic Roundtable." Mapping Global Horror Conference, Melbourne, Australia, 17-18 March 2023.
• Amanda Barbour. Senses of Cinema (November 2023). https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2023/interviews/mapping-global-horror-academic-roundtable/.

PROJECTS & OUTREACH

• 8-12 July 2024  — Workshop/Conference Co-organizer (with Lynn Kozak and Alanna Thain). "Horror Ecologies: Un/human Body Genres, New Materialisms, New Methodologies." Montréal, Québec. Funded by a SSHRC Connection Grant.
• 3-8 July 2023  — Workshop/Conference Co-Organizer (with Lynn Kozak and Alanna Thain). "I'll Sleep When I'm Undead: Sleep Horror in Contemporary Media." Montréal, Québec. Funded by a SSHRC Connection Grant.
• 11 March 2023 — Symposium Co-Organizer (with Stacey Abbott, Mark Jancovich, Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Gary D. Rhodes). "Horror Reverie 2: Celebrating 50 Years of The Exorcist." Online, published in Monstrum 6.1 (June 2023), https://www.monstrum-society.ca/horror-reverie-2---exorcist.html. 
• 19 February 2022 — Symposium Co-Organizer (with Mark Jancovich, Gary D. Rhodes). "Horror Reverie 1: Celebrating 100 Years of Nosferatu." Online, published in Monstrum 5.1 (June 2023), https://www.monstrum-society.ca/horror-reverie-1---nosferatu.html.