[If you would like to write about the intersection of Christian orthodoxy and horror cinema, please contact us, either through the Contact page or through Twitter. We would love to talk to you about joining the team. Seriously. Our ability to speak into much of anything is as limited as our own experiences. Help us out by adding yours.]
ryan ellington
Ryan is a gorilla who escaped from the zoo and currently resides in North Carolina, where he’s a student at a seminary school. His favorite book is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, but Richard Woodley’s novelization of the 1997 Nicholas Cage blockbuster, Con Air, is a close second. His favorite film is either Michael Haneke’s adaptation of The Castle or Love, Actually. He is married to Elyse. He is not convinced there isn’t a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
turner bass
Turner is an aspiring music producer and composer with a bent toward creepy, disorienting sounds. He and his wife Erica live in Denver with their daughter Indigo who enjoys pretty colors, hip-hop, and crawling practice. An avid wearer of cargo pants and pineapple pizza evangelist, he spends his days developing web apps and his nights painting, laying new tracks and solving the world’s problems. Also, has a personal record of 1,642 hops on a pogo stick in one session. Will watch any horror movie…except those involving suggested or explicit use of paper cuts.
chris crane
Chris is a freelance writer, bookworm, and film nerd. He spends most of his time as a grad student, studying theology and the arts. In his free time, when he’s not watching movies, he enjoys frequenting his favorite local coffee shops, drinking whiskey, and reading a good book. He has a wide taste in films outside of the horror genre, from classic animated films to indie cinema. He is an avid listener of hip-hop. His writing has also been featured in other online publications, including Fathom Magazine and Reel World Theology. You can follow him on Twitter and Letterboxd.
frederick gero heimbach
Fred lives a pulp fictional life and takes notes. His wife and children live with him, warily, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has been at various times a Methodist, a Plymouth Brethren, a Charismatic, and an Orthodox-manque, before finding his true home as a Lutheran. He edited the Protecting Project Pulp podcast throughout its run. He would say (were he writing about himself in the third person) his fiction is preoccupied with the numinous; others would simply call it weird. His speculative fiction may be experienced at Every Day Fictionand the Untold Podcast. His story “Something Unburiable” (in which a barely anonymized Angela Merkel exhumes the corpse of Friedrich Nietzsche) was runner up in the Liberty Island “Trigger Warning” contest. His first novel, The Devil’s Dictum, imagines an alternative United States founded by Satan-worshiping pirates. His twitter handle is @Fredosphere.
caleb stallings
Caleb lives in Georgia and is the pastor of a small Baptist church. He holds an M.Div. from Beeson Divinity School, Samford University. He spends the dead of night listening to The Misfits, reading Swamp Thing comics, and writing sermons from The Petrine epistles. You can read his other work at Mockingbird.
jared wheeler
Jared lives in Waco, TX. By day, he teaches teenagers math and folksy life lessons. By evening, he parents 2 young kids. And then he has an internal struggle: Read a book? Watch a movie? Do a little writing? Or . . . get a reasonable amount of sleep? You can find a sort of record of some of the times sleep lost at Moviegoings, on Letterboxd, or on Goodreads. When his kids are old enough to watch horror movies, he’ll probably start them here.
trevor almy
Trevor lives in Tampa, Florida where he teaches middle school English for a charter school. In the past, he taught high school English for three years and also moonlighted for a time as a barista. He earned an M.A. in Theology from Reformed Theological Seminary. In 2013, he established an online literary magazine known as The Wolf Skin that operated until 2016. Having a penchant for the bizarre and weird, he alternates spending the odd moments of his existence by reading Magical Realism literature, rewatching Twin Peaks, analyzing the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, and crafting surreal fiction. He may or may not have helmed a Stranger Things-esque, Call of Cthulhu RPG campaign. The soundtrack to his offbeat capers would be a melange of Bob Dylan, Bon Iver, and Ella Fitzgerald. Most significantly, he is a husband and the father to two daughters, a stepdaughter, and a son. You can read his other nonfiction work at Mockingbird. His short story, “First Tape” was published by Bewildering Stories, Corvus, and Scarlet Leaf Review.
mckenna rishmawy
McKenna currently lives in the northern suburbs of Chicagoland, and hails from the bright lights of Southern California. She earned her B.A. in social science and her M.A. in education at Hope International University and has found her occupational gifts best used in schools and churches. She also currently serves as small group Bible study coordinator for Trinity Wives Fellowship, a ministry serving the wives of seminarians at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. She very much enjoys cats, psychological thrillers, and Italian food (and considers herself the embodied human form of all these things). McKenna loves waxing poetic about serums and Lupita Nyong’O’s eyeshadow on her own beauty blog, thebrightblush.com. She is, for sure, an Enneagram 6, has every single episode of I Love Lucy memorized, and really likes hanging out with her husband, Derek.
ian olson
Ian lives in Wisconsin with his wife and children and is just trying to hold on amidst the vicissitudes of life under the Trump regime and insanely long wait times for inter-library loans. Ian wonders if the Eucharist isn’t the body and blood of Christ then what the hell the point is. Do you ever dream of describing what is achingly beautiful, is nauseatingly horrific, in the fathomlessly idiosyncratic ways that it feels like only you yourself could understand, and in describing them you aren’t having to explain yourself at all? Ian does, too. Much of his other work can be found at Mockingbird.
Grindhouse Theology 