By Brother Bill
Three hominid creatures, possibly mankind’s evolutionary ancestors, creep through the brush in a primeval forest, drawn by an otherworldly sound. They come upon an obelisk standing in a clearing, its symmetrical perfection defying nature. They are awestruck. They want to touch the smooth surface but are afraid…
This isn’t a movie review. For those poised at the inevitable crossroads of whether or not to watch 1984’s Ninja III: The Domination, plenty of helpful play-by-plays are out there…
As the 20th century grew more precarious, humans often found comfort in the idea of incorporating “superior” technology into their all-too-fragile flesh and blood…
By J.G. Newman
Spacewar! (1962) was the first video game the way that Little Richard was the first rock star. Both wrote a fairly complete rulebook for a future worldwide obsession, yet were known to such niche (or, in Richard’s case, unfairly marginalized) audiences that they now play footnote to the Pongs and Presleys of history…
John Williams cut his teeth as a composer for B-movies and TV series in the 1950s; his creative partnerships with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas in the 1970s, beginning with Jaws (1975), catapulted him into super-stardom…
By K.E. Roberts
John Carpenter wrote the original script for Escape from New York (1981) in 1974, inspired by Death Wish, Michael Winner’s film from the same year—specifically its seedy portrayal of New York “as a kind of jungle.” Both Death Wish and Escape from New York did extremely well commercially and launched their respective genres, the citizen vigilante film and the dystopian actioner…
Upon first coming across them, it is barely possible to believe that Warning is not simply a superhumanly dexterous hoax, so perfectly engineered do they seem for the purposes of titillating the psychological taste buds of anyone who grew up in the incipient Star Wars era nurturing an unsophisticated love of horror, the occult, cosmic electronica, and sci-fi…
Known colloquially as the Serpentone (“big snake”), the Corviale is a vast housing development on the outskirts of Rome originally intended to house some 8,500 inhabitants in three structures dominated by a single, kilometer-long, eleven-story block…
The Simon Necronomicon, as it has come to be called, was first published in 1977 and has been in print continuously since the Avon Books edition of 1980…
As a child, I spent a lot of time in the manageable, organized worlds that board games offered. Rules, a sense of order and fair play, and brightly-colored game pieces and boards appealed to me: they were a safe haven from the uncertainty of the outside world…
The glow-in-the-dark “Nuclear Death” mask was released in 1979 by Don Post Studios, an American company specializing in producing merchandise for the burgeoning Halloween industry…
When someone chooses a computer to purchase today, they usually consider only what the computer can do based on available software. They’re thinking about what games they can play, what kinds of entertainment media they can enjoy, and how fast they can access the web. But in the 8-bit home computer boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, choosing a new computer was based largely on what kind of software you wanted to create yourself…
By K.E. Roberts
In the summer of 1965, as the first U.S. troops put boots on the ground in Vietnam, a gathering swell of young, educated, dissident Americans discovered a then obscure epic fantasy written by an Oxford don—a devout Catholic and World War I veteran—between 1937 and 1949…
I’ve only recently, at the beginning of my fifth decade of life, begun exploring the richness of 1950s ufology. As a child of the 1970s, my formative UFO matrix exists at the nexus of the uncanny/horrifying child-Greys toddling down the gangplank of the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)…
With a reputation for intractability and a ubiquity afforded him by a decades-long involvement in the Italian equivalent of the pulps, Magnus (not to be confused with his robot-punching namesake) was, until his death in 1996, one of Italy’s most prolific and distinctive comic book artists…
