Daniel Illger earned his PhD in film studies and now works as a freelance writer. He studied film studies, comparative literature and philosophy in Berlin and Münster. As film scholar, he then worked at the Freie Universität Berlin for seven years. His research focused on the aesthetics and poetics of different film genres, classical genre theory as well as the historicity of film. Daniel Illger also was the co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Fantastikforschung. His focus as a writer is genre literature, especially horror and fantasy.

He is the author of Skargat – Der Pfad des schwarzen Lichts and Skargat – Das Gesetz der Schatten
(2015/16). His publications as film scholar include Heim-Suchungen. Stadt und Geschichtlichkeit im italienischen Nachkriegskino (2009), Demokratisierung der Wahrnehmung? Das Westeuropäische Nachkriegskino (ed. with Hermann Kappelhoff, Bernhard Groß, Berlin, 2010) and Pedro Almodóvar (ed. with Hermann Kappelhoff, München, 2008).