I sometimes feel like a bit of an imposter. As women working in academia, we probably all feel a little like this. With me, that feeling is also because being an academic is my second career; my first was as a programme maker for the BBC, something I loved doing for twenty years.

Like many people, I binge-watch horror films or movie franchises in the run-up to Halloween. With the release of Saw X this October , I decided to revisit the series’ nine predecessors that belong to the wave of ‘torture porn’ films popularised in the 2000s. While many franchises employ serial storytelling, I was struck by how Saw felt more like ‘TV’ than other horror series I’ve watched over the years. Fig.

The trope of aliens visiting Earth has been a science fiction staple since long before the Lumière Brothers first recorded and (re)played a train coming into a station. Aliens coming in peace and trying to hide in plain sight in contemporary (ish) society is slightly newer and can be used to great comedic effect.

WARNING: The following article contains the words “Who” and “Doctor”, but not necessarily in that order.

In person ONLY The American University of Rome 13-15 June 2024 The twenty-first century has witnessed a burgeoning of non-fiction filmmaking in Italy, facilitated in part by technological developments and in part by the desire to respond to rapidly shifting social realities and changes in the natural environment.

CFP: Media Values: The Velvet Light Trap, Issue 95 (to be published Spring 2025) Media industries utilize a number of different strategies to assign value to their commodities. Box office receipts have long been a benchmark of success for theatrical film releases, despite proliferating ancillary revenue streams. Audience ratings determined advertising dollars as the dominant form of evaluation in linear commercial television.

Using a distinct but, to my mind, representative episode from the series, I enjoyed drawing out the way The Last of Us engages with meanings and configurations of home. “Home,” as the first part of my video essay suggests, can constitute a safe space, sometimes a place of active retreat from danger.

This video essay was created in response to a provocation given at the Critical Studies in Television Conference, 2023: ‘What strategies do marginalised audiences, individuals and communities employ to satisfy their needs?’ The essay focuses on how trans reading as a fandom activity can enrich the storyline and characters on network and cable genre television shows in the face of cisnormative and heterosexist hegemony.

Edited by Irena Jurković, Marko Lukić and Tijana Parezanović Urban myths and legends continuously serve as a source of fascination and creative inspiration in anglophone cultures, especially in the context of horror genre, within which they have a specific way of articulating collective fears and fascination with the unknown.

The European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana (UL FDV), and the Slovene Communication Association will host the 10th European Communication Conference (ECC) in Ljubljana (Slovenia) from 23 to 27 September 2024.