A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
I'm Emily Zarka. I earned a Doctor of Philosophy in English from Arizona State University, specializing in British Romantic literature with an emphasis on the Gothic. I approach literature and film through monsters, applying the theory that human history is monster history. I am the writer and host for "Monstrum," an online series with PBS's Storied channel on YouTube that looks at complex histories and motivations behind some of the world's most famous monsters. I also wrote and hosted a one-hour documentary for PBS called Exhumed: A History of Zombies. My teaching experience includes undergraduate and graduate courses in literature, composition, and film and media. Currently, I am part of the faculties of both Arizona State University and Mesa Community College.
Writer:
2020 Exhumed: A History of Zombies
Creator:
2020 Exhumed: A History of Zombies
Writer:
2018 Monstrum
2020 Exhumed: A History of Zombies
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.