ABOUT

Andrew Scahill is an Assistant Professor in the English department at the University of Colorado Denver. He was previously an Assistant Professor at Salisbury University and Assistant Editor of the journal Literature/Film Quarterly. Dr. Scahill received his PhD from the Radio-Television-Film department at University of Texas at Austin, where he also served as a Coordinating Editor for the film studies journal The Velvet Light Trap.

Dr. Scahill's work as a whole focuses upon genre and reception studies, with particular interest in representations of youth rebellion. His book The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema: Youth Rebellion and Queer Spectatorship (Palgrave Macmillan 2015) argues that the “revolting child”—whose forms include the child with a dark secret (The Bad Seed), the child who becomes a monster in adolescence (The Exorcist), or the child who forms a cabal of outcasts (Village of the Damned)—functions as a potent metaphor for queer youth. Drawing together film theory, queer theory, childhood studies, and reception studies, The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema examines the fear surrounding young bodies in revolt, and asks what pleasure the unruly child may offer for the queer spectator. He has also co-edited a collection concerning the representation of lost children in cinema, which was named a Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association in 2012.

 

Dr. Scahill has published numerous peer-reviewed articles, including: a field report on young queer filmmakers for Girlhood Studies, a study of queer film festivals as a safe creative space for GLBT youth in Cinema Journal, a reception study of The Exorcist, an auteur study of Japanese horror director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a rhetorical analysis of DVD censorship technology for Post Script, an essay on the demonization of youth culture in Jump Cut, and an examination of lesbian spectatorship in the New Zealand film Heavenly Creatures, and an essay for In Media Res on the potential of virtual reality filmmaking to generate empathy for queer youth. He has also contributed several chapters to book collections, including an essay on Weird Science for a retrospective on the films of John Hughes and an essay on Bates Motel and Hannibal as television prequels to horror films for the collection Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television.

 

Prof. Scahill has taught a variety of media studies courses, including Introduction to Film, Film Theory, Studies in Censorship, Literature and Film, Film History, Post-WWII American Cinema, Film Genre, The Horror Film, The Frankenstein Mythos in Cinema, Deconstructing Breaking Bad, and Remaking Hitchcock. Professor Scahill's course "Deconstructing Breaking Bad" was featured in Entertainment Weekly as an example of how academia might productively engage with popular culture.

​

For more information and articles, visit Dr. Scahill's Academia.edu page.