He has authored or edited more than thirty books and a range of articles focusing on the American Gothic tradition, monsters, cult film and television, popular culture, weird fiction, pedagogy, and goth music.

Weinstock's academic work has covered a variety of research areas, but clusters around theorizing the ways in which Gothic texts and practices give shape to culturally specific anxieties and desires.

To develop this argument, he focuses on serial killers, terrorists, faceless corporations, viruses, and natural phenomena such as global warming.

Relatedly, he and Regina Hansen published the co-edited collection of scholarly essays, Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema, 2021.

Weinstock's interest in ghosts and hauntings began with his doctoral dissertation, Dead Letters: Ghostly Inscriptions and Theoretical Hauntings, an analysis of the "spectrality of language" indebted to the post-structural theorizing of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan and focusing around the idea of the "dead letter" in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Toni Morrison.

[14] In Scare Tactics, Weinstock argues for the existence of a little-acknowledged feminist tradition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women writing ghost stories to contest various forms of legal and social oppression.

[17] In the introduction to this book, indebted to the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Henry Jenkins III, he asserts seven principles governing the cinematic representation of vampires: The Vampire: Undead Cinema was the winner of the 2013 International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Lord Ruthven Assembly Award for Best Nonfiction Title.

Weinstock's 2007 book, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of the first three titles published as part of the now well-established "Cultographies" series from Wallflower Press (now an imprint of Columbia University Press), offers a survey of the film's history, considers its sexual politics, examines its interweaving of references to other cinematic texts, and theorizes the audience's famous response as a vacillation between empathic and ironic behavior.

Together with Carl Sederholm of Brigham Young University, Weinstock edited a 2016 scholarly collection on American author of weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft.

[28] Weinstock’s interest in pedagogy has extended to publishing two textbooks: The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition (A Somewhat Cheeky but Exceedingly Useful Introduction to Academic Writing) (2020) and Pop Culture for Beginners (2021).