Johnny Walker

• Horror film and video
• Exploitation cinema
• Film and video history
• Media industries
• British cinema

Johnny Walker is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University in the UK. From 2018 to 2021 he was Programme Leader of the BA Mass Communications framework, for which he won "Programme Leader of Year" at the Student Union Awards 2018-19. As of September 2021, he is the Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded Fellowship: Raising Hell: British Horror Film of the 1980s and 1990s.

Johnny began working at Northumbria in 2013, prior to lecturing in Film Studies at De Montfort University and Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, in addition to having written or edited a number of books in the fields of film history and popular culture, with an emphasis on horror and exploitation film and video.

Johnny's books include, as author, Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-92 (Edinburgh University Press, in press, 2022) and Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), as editor, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (by Peter Hutchings, 2021), and as co-editor, Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2016). His scholarship has appeared (or is due to appear) in leading journals such as the New Review of Film and Television Studies (2022), the Journal of Popular Culture (2022), the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2017), the Journal of British Cinema and Television (2012, 2015), Post Script (2016) and Horror Studies (2011), as well as in books such as Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema (2014), Italian Horror Cinema (2016), the Routledge Companion to British Cinema History (2017), the Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema (2020) and ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay (forthcoming, 2022).

A recognised expert on the history of horror and exploitation film, Johnny is an editorial board member for the book series Horror Studies (University of Wales Press) and journal MONSTRUM, and has provided expert commentary on such topics for BBC Radio, The Independent, The NME, and Real Crime magazine. He is regularly asked to deliver research seminars and guest lectures at universities throughout the country and beyond (including, for example, King's College London, University of Warwick, University of Kent, University of Leicester, Kiel University of Applied Sciences), and has delivered keynote talks or plenary sessions at conferences hosted at the Technical University of Dortmund (2016), Canterbury Christ Church University (2017), De Montfort University (2018) and the University of Leeds (2019). He is asked regularly to peer-review manuscripts for leading journals and academic presses.

​Johnny is Membership Secretary (elected) for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), co-chair of the SCMS Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group, and founding co-editor of Bloomsbury's Global Exploitation Cinemas series.

Johnny supervises a number of PhDs and welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students on topics relating to his research interests.