electricsheep

Electric Sheep is the online magazine for lovers of offbeat, left-field and cult cinema. It celebrates the celluloid dreams of the most outlandish, provocative and visionary directors, the marginal and the transgressive, the poetic and the subversive.

Read reviews of new releases, in-depth articles and festival reports from around the world - Watch bizarre and beautiful trailers and short films - Listen to podcasts of interviews with the most exciting filmmakers - Spin the Film Roulette and win DVDs and cinema tickets - Enjoy our fantastic comic strip reviews - Check out our screenings!

From September 2007 to December 2009, Electric Sheep existed as a print magazine. In May 2011, we published our first book of film essays, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology (Strange Attractor Press).


What they say about us:

'Unlike mainstream film sites such as rottentomatoes.com, electricsheepmagazine.co.uk avoids industry chit-chat and cheap abuse. It writes about film for people who like film: a classic approach.'
Norman Lebrecht, The New Statesman

'Electric Sheep is a film magazine for anyone who feels short changed or left out by the brainless celebrity worship of Empire or the dour academic tones of Sight & Sound. Electric Sheep is idiosyncratic, intelligent, informed and it really knows and cares about cinema. Long may it prosper.'
Tony Herrington, The Wire

'Electric Sheep is a refreshing and original magazine that explores the world of film from myriad angles with wit and imagination.’
Jennifer Higgie, Frieze

‘With its distinctly quirky eye on the arts in all forms, Electric Sheep offers new perspectives on all media that broadens established demographics.’
Alan Jones, FrightFest

'The coolest magazine in town.'
Suzanne Ballantyne, Raindance Film Festival

And about our book, The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology:

'Superb - a masterly accomplishment. Beautifully produced - and its content and vision could not be more accurate and timely.'
Peter Whitehead


For any enquiries, comments or submissions, contact thepuppetmaster [at] electricsheepmagazine.com.

FOUNDER AND EDITOR IN CHIEF Virginie Sélavy founded the Electric Sheep website in February 2007 and edited it from 2007 to March 2013. She also edited the Electric Sheep print magazine from 2007 to 2009 and the book The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology (Strange Attractor Press, 2011). She is the author of a thesis on Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma. Her work has appeared in a wide range of publications, including The Guardian, Sight & Sound, Cineaste and Frieze. She has contributed to the anthologies World Directory Cinema: East Europe and the London volume of Film Locations: Cities of the Imagination. She hosts a monthly radio show on Resonance 104.4 FM and occasionally curates screenings.
Reviews, Features, Blogs and Events & Media

ART DIRECTOR Emerald Mosley is a freelance print and new media designer whose clients include Carlton, Disney, the BBC, British Council, Sotheby’s & UKTV. Working with Virginie Sélavy, she designed and built the Electric Sheep website in 2007 and designed the print magazine from 2007 to 2009. Her other home is at goldtop.org.

MANAGING EDITORPamela Jahn is an independent film curator and magazine editor. For six years, she worked at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) where she programmed film seasons and thematic retrospectives, and co-edited the ICA's 60th anniversary book How Soon Is Now. Pamela is also the editor of Vertigo Magazine and works as a regular contributor for German and Austrian film magazines and broadsheets. Together with Virginie Sélavy, she organises Electric Sheep screenings and events.
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DEPUTY EDITORSarah Cronin graduated from the respected Communication Studies programme at Montreal's Concordia University before moving to London to work in publishing as a graphic designer and copyeditor. She has been a writer and assistant editor at Electric Sheep since it was founded in 2007. She has contributed articles about Hal Hartley, Whit Stillman and Terence Malick in Intellect's Directory of World Cinema: American Independent, Volumes 1 and 2.
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ASSISTANT EDITORS:

Alex Fitch is the commissioning editor for illustrations and comics and produces the Electric Sheep podcast. He contributes to Resonance FM’s film show I'm ready for my close-up and is the regular presenter of Panel Borders, the UK's only weekly radio show about comics. He has been published by University Press of Mississippi and Intellect Books, University of Chicago Press, on the subject of film and has written about comics for The Oxford Journal.
Reviews, Features , Blogs and Events & Media

Eleanor McKeown researches still images by day and writes about moving ones at night, following her interest in the magic of early film technologies, inventive cinematography and imaginative animation.
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Richard Bancroft is a proof-reader and web editor who has worked on several books, mainly for Strange Attractor Press. He has an abiding love for old horror and exploitation films.

COLUMNS:

CINE LIT James Evans is an Anglo-Canadian writer on film and has contributed to Electric Sheep Magazine, Little White Lies, Frightfest Ezine, AN, Total Film and Cinema Scope. He has contributed to books including The End: an Electric Sheep Anthology, Directory of World Cinema Locations: London, Under Fire: A Century of War Movies, Jerzy Skolimowski and Directory of World Cinema: East Europe. He is currently Books Editor for Electric Sheep. He has served on the prize jury for international film festivals in Haifa, Bratislava, and Karlovy Vary as well as the Iranian International Film Festival in London. He is a lecturer in film and visual culture at the University of Brighton, University of Sussex, and the University of the Arts, London.
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ALTER EGOEithne Farry
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Sean Azzopardi – phatcatz.org.uk

Lucy Bergonzi - lucybergonzi.co.uk

Hannah Berry - info about Hannah's graphic novel Britten and Brulightly

Pamela Brabants - pamelabrabants

Greg Butler - gregbutler.co.uk/

Adam Cadwell - adamcadwell.com

Francesca Cassavetti - fabtoons.com

Andrew Cheverton - angrycandy.co.uk

Chris Doherty - bittersweetfatkid.com

Lisa Gornick - lisagornick.com

Tom Humberstone – ventedspleen.com

Dave Lander - decadencecomics.com

Meera Lee - Meera Lee's blog

Dan Lester – monkeysmightpuke.com

Ellen Lindner - littlewhitebird.com

Daniel Locke – daniellocke.com

Julien Loison - greyscales83.daportfolio.com

Kirsten McNee - kirstenmcnee.co.uk

Mike Medaglia - Facebook page

Benjamin Mills - benjamintmills.co.uk

Douglas Noble – strip-for-me.com

David O'Connell - scribblehound.com

Lee O’Connor – leeoconnor.com

Emma Price – tinymaster.co.uk

Pearlyn Quan - poisonpencomics

Paul Rainey - pbrainey.com

Karen Rubins - karenrubins.com

Julia Scheele – poweredbyrobots.co.uk

Lauren Sharp - laurenannesharp.co.uk

Oli Smith – theolismith.com

Elisa Gomez Sobelman - Flicker page

John Spelling - hellcourt.wordpress.com

Philip Spence - philipspence.com

Mark Stafford – hocus-baloney.com

James Stringer – abjectdesign.com

Ryan Thomas

Alex Willmore - alexwillmore.co.uk

Richard Badley is a freelance entertainment journalist and web designer based in Brighton and examples of his work can be found at reelcitizen.co.uk. He also desperately tries to find time to write screenplays.
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Richard Bancroft is a proof-reader and web editor who has worked on several books, usually for Strange Attractor. He has an abiding love for old horror and exploitation films.

Robert Barry is a freelance journalist and composer, based in London. He has authored (or co-authored) chart-breaking pop hits and short film soundtracks while writing about horror films, slapstick comedy, opera and electronic music. He is also very partial to Middle-Eastern cookery and collects tube maps and other travel ephemera. He was in charge of the Reel Sounds column in Electric Sheep for many years. Read his blog.
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John Berra is Professor of Film Studies at Nanjing University. He is the author of Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production (2008) and the editor of the Directory of World Cinema: American Independent (2010) and the Directory of World Cinema: Japan (2010).
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Emily Bick
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Adam Bingham completed his doctorate on Japanese cinema in 2008, producing a thesis entitled Kitano Takeshi: Authorship, Genre and Stardom in Japanese Cinema. He has written for CineAction, Cineaste, Sight and Sound, Electric Sheep, Senses of Cinema, Asian Cinema and Screen. His particular areas of interest and research are post-war Japanese documentaries, the Japanese new wave director Yoshida Kiju, transnational genre and Hong Kong cinema, and Eastern European cinema.
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John Bleasdale lives in Italy and teaches at Ca' Foscari in Venice.
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Caroline Blinder: Following the old adage that those who can't write teach, Caroline is a lecturer in American Literature at Goldsmiths. She has previously taught on crime cinema and American photography and documentary practice from the 1930s and onwards. She has written on Henry Miller, Georges Bataille, James Agee and other politically suspect figures, and hopes to continue to do so.

Mark Bould is Reader in Film and Literature and the University of the West of England and co-editor of Science Fiction Film and Television. His books include Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City, Parietal Games: Critical Writings By and On M. John Harrison,The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star, The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction, Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction and Neo-Noir. He is currently writing The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction and The Routledge Film Guidebook: Science Fiction.

David Cairns is an asthmatic wretch who is alive in Edinburgh and writes Shadowplay, the willfully eccentric film blog. He also writes a column, The Forgotten, for the Daily Notebook and contributes articles and liner notes here and there. His 2001 short film Cry For Bobo won a slew of awards, and he has since been at work on a number of screenplays of wildly varying quality. His close circle includes a woman and a cat.
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Ben Cobb is Editor-at-Large of Wonderland magazine and the author of Anarchy and Alchemy: The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (Creation Books). He released his debut feature film Banshee in 2003.
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Jessica Dickenson made her directorial debut at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam 2004 where her short film Manthrax, a re-edited spoof highlighting the homoerotic undertones apparent in the sport of bodybuilding, was screened. Jess then spent almost three years travelling in Australia, New Zealand and Asia. When she returned in 2007, she made Helmut’s House from the footage collected during her travels. Screened for the first time in July 2009, the film was compared by BBC Radio 4's Francine Stock to Herzog’s early short films. Jess has just finished her first feature-length film The Dust Never Settles, further developing a unique visual language that transcends the conventions of traditional documentary.
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Nick Dutfield works for one of the UK's beleaguered entertainment retail companies. During the early weeks of 2007 he used his influence to propel the Rocky Story soundtrack CD into the outer outskirts of the national album charts. He occasionally claims to have invented berets and Stephen Hunt.
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Evrim Ersoy is a freelance journalist based in London. For the past five years he has been working as the London Correspondent for independent US news portal Monsters & Critics as well as contributing various features and interviews to UK publications such as Film & Festivals and Electric Sheep Magazine. He is also the co-founder and director of The Duke Mitchell Film Club which runs monthly at The Cross Kings in Kings Cross and has been described as a monthly night dedicated to unearthing the most abstruse and deranged of cinematic marginalia by Time Out. Evrim worships film and looks forward to the day when he can dedicate his every waking hour to write and talk about the subject without ever having to dealing with the annoying minutiae of life.
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Ian Francis is a film curator and writer. He is also a founding director of mobile exhibition outfit 7 Inch Cinema and the Flatpack Festival, which takes over venues across Birmingham each March. He has written on early cinema and animation for publications including Little White Lies and Electric Sheep.

Alison Frank received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, with a thesis on Surrealism in French and Czech cinema. She is Associate Editor for the Wide Screen journal. She currently works as a freelance film critic based in London. You can follow her on Twitter @alisonfrank.
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Simon Guerrier has written novels, short stories, comic strips and audio plays for Doctor Who, Being Human, Primeval, Robin Hood, Blake's 7 and Sapphire and Steel. He lives in London with a bright wife and a dim cat.

Alexander Godfrey once worked on a soap magazine and ironically still feels dirty. After finishing his degree in film and some other stuff he now works for The Times.

Paul Gravett: Acknowledged by The Times as 'the greatest historian of the comics and graphic novel form in this country', Paul Gravett is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster about international comics, director of the Comica Festival in London and co-director of Escape Books. This year he is also curating exhibitions about Tove Jansson's Moomins, Jack Kirby, comics from Argentina and interactive and installational 'Hypercomics'.
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Peter Hames is a programme advisor to the London Film Festival and research associate at Staffordshire University. He is author of Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition, The Czechoslovak New Wave, and editor of The Cinema of Central Europe, The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer, and Cinemas in Transition (with Catherine Portuges). He is a member of the editorial board of Studies in Eastern European Cinema.
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Jim Harper is a freelance film critic and writer with a passion for cult and cinema from around the globe. He is the author of several books, including Legacy of Blood: A Comprehensive Guide to Slasher Movies, Flowers from Hell: The Modern Japanese Horror Film and the forthcoming Dark Dreams: The World of Anime Horror. He is also a contributor to two volumes in Intellect’s pioneering Directory of World Cinema series. Currently Jim writes articles, essays, reviews and liner notes for anyone who will publish them, and requires at least two espressos to get up to working speed each morning.

Max Hattler is a German experimental animator and media artist based in London. His films have screened in hundreds of festivals and have received many awards. He has made music videos for bands including Basement Jaxx and The Egg. More information at www.maxhattler.com.

Jeff Hilson: When he’s not on study leave Jeff Hilson teaches Creative Writing at Roehampton University. He’s a poet whose most recent publication is stretchers (Reality Street Editions, 2006). He is currently writing a prose poem sequence on British birds and compiling an anthology of experimental sonnets which will be published, again by Reality Street, later in the year. When he’s not writing he runs Crossing the Line, a monthly poetry reading series in Central London.
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Paul Huckerby: Although cruelly limited to a mere seven and half hours of television a day by his bookish parents Paul nonetheless developed an obsession with the moving image. He studied film and television at university and has appeared on BBC1’s Animal Hospital with his sick cat, Barbara.
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Joel Karamath
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Greg Klymkiw has been a film critic, film buyer, art cinema programmer, screenwriter and producer of numerous feature films including Guy Maddin’s Archangel and Careful, Cynthia Roberts’s The Last Supper, the controversial porn satire Bubbles Galore (which holds the record for the most references in Canada’s Parliamentary House Sittings when The National Post ran the front page headline ‘Lesbian Porn Funded By Canadian Government’) and numerous other iconoclastic works. In addition to his tireless efforts as Marketing Director of the Winnipeg Film Group, he has, for the past 12 years, served as the Producer-in-Residence at Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Centre where he has taught and mentored hundreds of young filmmakers. He is currently writing three screenplays and a book on screenwriting. He has, at last count, seen over 30,000 feature films.
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Pat Long
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James Merchant studied his little heart out at Goldsmiths College, from which he graduated in 2006. He is now the Assistant Producer of London’s Raindance Film Festival, which runs annually in October. One of his many tasks includes letting over 1000 filmmakers know that their films haven’t made it into the festival, but he makes up for this apparent lack of compassion by writing candidly about films he actually likes. One day he hopes to write a feature of his own.
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Siouxzi Mernagh: Siouxzi is a film writer and filmmaker and was the Festival Coordinator for the Sydney Underground Film Festival in 2007. Her most recent ventures include a 10-mins David Lynch inspired 16mm short titled Third Eye Open and two new shorts on the way titled Swallow My Pride and The Dangers. A few years back, Siouxzi also wrote and directed two award-winning 16mm shorts, Two White Lines (a Natural Born Killers inspired mini road movie), and Jet Black (an experimental horror piece shot in her haunted house). She has also written a feature-length screenplay (an experimental road movie) and a novel about a young filmmaker researching for a horror film in Iceland, White Tales.
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Tom Mes is the founder and editor-in-chief of the influential website on Japanese film Midnight Eye and author of Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike and Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto. He co-wrote The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film with Jasper Sharp and Tokyolife: Art and Design with Ian Luna, Jasper Sharp, et al. With Anna Harrison he also translated Cinema & the Shoah from the original French edition by Cahiers du Cinéma.
Reviews & Blog

Peter Momtchiloff is editor for philosophy books at Oxford University Press. He has played guitar in many bands, including Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Marine Research, the Would-be-goods, and Scarlet's Well.
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Frances Morgan is a writer and musician based in London. The former editor and publisher of Plan B magazine, she has written about music, sonic art, books and film for Frieze, The Quietus, Loops, Terrorizer and New Statesman.
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Tina Park is a writer from Hong Kong. She has written about Asian cinema and organised an underground film club in Hong Kong from 2006 to 2007.

Alexander Pashby has worked as a script reader in Hollywood and London, and is a former assistant editor of LOVEFiLM.com. Currently freelancing, his reviews and interviews can be found in Little White Lies as well as Electric Sheep.
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Brad Prager
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Mark Pilkington runs Strange Attractor Press and edits Strange Attractor Journal. He has written for numerous magazines and anthologies in the UK and USA. A collection of his weird science columns for the Guardian newspaper, Far Out: 101 Strange Tales from Science's Outer Edge is available now. His first full-length book, Mirage Men, was written in 2009.

John A. Riley is a writer and dilettante currently based in South Korea. He has worked variously as a video technician, university lecturer, bureaucrat, fleet-fingered factotum and English teacher. Currently, he is on the editorial team of desistfilm and he has his own nascent blog at fastfood-slowcinema.com.

James Rose is predominately concerned with interpretations of contemporary horror and science fiction cinema and television. He has written a number of books and contributed chapters to a range of scholarly collections alongside writing critical texts for a range of national and international journals.
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Julian Ross is a commissioning editor at Vertigo Magazine and the programme coordinator for the Theatre Scorpio season at Close-Up Film Centre and the Art Theatre Guild season at the BFI Southbank.
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Jack Sargeant is the author of numerous articles, essays, screeds and books focusing on underground, cult and independent cinema. He is Programme Director for the Revelation Film Festival and has co-curated the film series for the Sydney Biennale. He enjoys searching out the nether regions of cinema culture and is currently working on his PhD.
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Matthew Sheret is a freelance writer based in London. He has worked as an editor and copywriter for Last.fm, Newspaper Club, ditto.tv and Men’s Health Online, has contributed to Plan B Magazine, Solipsistic Pop and Electric Sheep Magazine and writes a column for Global Comment. His personal projects have seen him taking on roles that include journalist, web-hack, curator, market trader, teacher, student, critic, photographer, DJ, editor, and publisher, often at the same time. In 2008 he co-founded We Are Words + Pictures, a team who create comic-book-themed events and workshops promoting the UK small press. He can be found at matthewsheret.com.
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Mark Stafford is still cartoonist in residence at the cartoon museum, and is currently working on book two of Cherubs! with Bryan Talbot, promotional art for the Circus of Horrors and a series of paintings of dead hillbillies. Check out Hocus-baloney.com
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Kate Taylor
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Richard Thomas
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Stephen Thomson: Embracing academia like a lost puppy, Stephen has taught at the University of Reading for a decade. His PhD at the Uni of Glasgow was on children's literature, educational theory and social control, but work since has been on Derrida, Flaubert, Beckett, and others. Currently working on a book on sleepwalking.
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Lindsay Tudor is studying for a degree in film but hopes to one day run her own cinema where you can see great films for £1. She is also currently co-writing a script that will undoubtedly become the best British film since Billy Elliot.
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Toby Weidmann is an experienced film and video journalist of 12 years having worked on two industry trade magazines, timecode and RRP Magazine, as well as a stint as editor of the UK’s official Star Trek magazine. He blames Star Wars for influencing his career path, realising in his early teens that his dream to be Han Solo when he grew up was sadly never going to happen so he might as well do the next best thing and write about his favourite films instead.
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Lisa Williams’s dream was to be like Patricia Franchini, reporting from the parlour to the gutter of Godard’s Paris. Now here she is in London, reporting on school fêtes and health scares by day, and strange films and music by night.
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Philip Winter was born in South Wales in June 1962, he has served in the Royal air Force as a pilot and has been in a St.John's ambulance as a patient. For fun he occasionally works on building sites. In December 2006 his debut novel Denim For A Solo Leg was published by Ampersand & Ampersand. For money, Winter produces mediocre announcements for in-store public address systems and writes tepid, weak-tea articles for The Guardian and The South Wales Argus. Presently he is completing his second novel Yeti Necrotic, due to be published by Hodder & Stoughton in Winter (of course). Philip Winter likes a drink, if you meet him buy him a stout! Philip Winter marvels at banality and has no freckles.
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Jason Wood is the director of programming for Curzon cinemas and the author of several books on cinema, including The Faber Book of Mexican Cinema and 100 Road Movies. His writing also appears in Sight and Sound and Little White Lies.
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Nicola Woodham has written broadly on Nigerian evangelist horror films and is contributing to Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and TV out in 2011. She spends the rest of her time tracing animistic practices in morbidly dull, suburban West London locations for her short film Empty Orchestra.
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