“Have a Good Time All the Time”: ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ and the Art of Longing
1984’s This is Spinal Tap is all about the pining—epic pining, as high and fulsome as the band’s hair and the wailing notes they (try to) hit…
Shopping Mauled: Revisiting ‘The Mall: An Attempted Escape from Everyday Life’
By now, dead shopping malls are as much a part of the popular imagination as they are blighted fixtures of suburban landscapes: sprawling vestiges of a bygone era when droves of consumers flocked to self-contained hubs of retail commerce…
Doom, Détente, Dr Pepper: ‘Godzilla 1984’ and ‘Godzilla 1985’
By Alex Adams
Also known as The Return of Godzilla and simply Godzilla, Godzilla 1984 is what we would now call a reboot: part remake, part sequel, a fresh start that retrieved some things from Godzilla’s past while discarding others…
The Lonely, Horny Prophecies of Lynne Tillman’s ‘Weird Fucks’
By Sam Moore
What’s prescient about Weird Fucks is how everything both is and isn’t a matter of life and death; violence is an undercurrent, and every breakup may or may not be the end of the world…
The Violence of Reason: ‘Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985’
By Eve Tushnet
Dangerous Visions is the third in a series, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, exploring the radical elements in pulp and genre publishing of the Cold War era. (We Are the Mutants has reviewed the first volume, on postwar youth culture, and the second, on revolution and the 1960s counterculture.)
The Golden Hydra: King Ghidorah, Astro-Colonizers, and Cold War Empire
By Alex Adams
In Toho’s 1965 tokusatsu spectacular Invasion of the Astro Monster, humanity makes contact with ruthless hive-mind aliens from Planet X, a new stellar body discovered on the far side of Jupiter…
Mind Eats Matter: Ed Hunt’s ‘The Brain’
Outside of David Cronenberg’s work and stray oddities like 1980’s The Changeling, the Canadian horror and sci-fi movies of the 1970s and ‘80s often get overshadowed by their counterparts from the US and Europe…
Eternal Artifice: ‘Cuadecuc, Vampir,’ ‘Martin,’ and the Deconstructed Vampire
By Sam Moore
The cinematic vampire is a fragile thing, not only for its many vulnerabilities—sunlight, crosses, garlic—but for the ways in which it can be rendered hollow, a construction…
Rise of the Smog God: Ecological Apocalypse in ‘Godzilla vs. Hedorah’
By Alex Adams
Many of the fifteen Shōwa films are rich with social commentary and formal and stylistic innovations. Perhaps the boldest of them all—and perhaps the most unfairly maligned—is 1971’s psychedelic eco-horror Godzilla vs. Hedorah…
Fractal Accidents: Attachment and Agency in Chris Shaw’s ‘Split’
Watching Split left me with the distinct feeling that I just missed five minutes of it without leaving my seat…
Marrying the Monster: Apocalyptic and Utopian Impulses in 1950s Sci-Fi Cinema
By Pepe Tesoro
If you are even mildly interested in science fiction criticism, chances are that you have bumped into Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” Written at the tail end of the long 1950s golden era of sci-fi film, the text is a bold and keen examination of a genre…
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