Russ Hunter is an Assistant Professor in Film & Television Studies in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University and works closely with a number of European film festivals. His work focuses upon two main research areas: film festivals and genre film (particularly Italian genre cinema).

In 2023 Russ was a keynote speaker, outlining his genre festival research, at Fear 2000 (Sheffield Hallam University) and was invited by the Norwegian Federation of Film Societies as one of their presitgious annual Film Seminar series speakers.  He has have given talks at a wide variety of international film festivals to both general audiences and to filmmakers, including Babel Film Festival (Cagliari, Italy), The European Minority Film Festival (Husum, Germany) and Sunderland Shorts Film Festival (Sunderland, UK).  Russ is currently working with a number of European genre film festivals, such as Offscreen Film Festival (Brussels, Belgium), Kurja Polt Genre Film Festival (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and Abertoir Horror Festival (Wales, UK), where he organises a variety of educational initiatives.

Russ co-edited Italian Horror Cinema with Dr Stefano Baschiera (Queens University Belfast) and is currently writing a book on Italian giallo and horror director Dario Argento. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Studies in European Cinema, Film Studies, The Italianist, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal Italian of Cinema and Media Studies, as well as in books such as International Film Festivals: Contemporary Cultures and History Beyond Venice and Cannes (2018), Italian Horror Cinema (2016), Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film & Television (2013) and European Horror since 1945 (2012).
 
He is a recognised expert on both film festivals and genre cinema and has provided analysis for numerous media outlets. In this respect, he has been interviewed for a variety of mediasources such as BUZZ (Brussels), Radio Študent (Slovenia), Radiotelevizija Slovenija (Slovenia) and The New York Times (USA). He has also appeared on a numver of documentaries, such as: ‘Fascism on a thread: The strange story of Nazisploitation films’ for the American Severin release of Luigi Batzella’s The Beast in Heat (1977) and ‘The Prince of Plasma: The Gianetto de Rossi story’, a retrospective on Italian SFX/make-up maestro Gianetto De Rossi for the German Turbine release of Rob Cohen’s Daylight (1996) and the USA release of Killer Crocodile for Severin.
 
Russ has written for a number of popular film publications including When Animals Attack: The 70 Best Horror Movies with Killer Animals, This is Cinema, 101 Cult Films, 101 Action Films, 101 Horror Films, 101 War Films, 101 Science Fiction films, 501 Movie Stars and 501 Movie Directors.

My research interests lay in both the area of film festival studies and genre cinema. My current research is based around genre filmfestivals and  I also write on Italian horror cinema, European horror cinema and Italian genre cinema more generally.