Authentic Music from Another Planet: The Howard Menger Story
From the opening years of the 1950s, various terrestrials came forward claiming to be in contact with the occupants of flying saucers. Their stories were often quite similar…
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…
Between Mushroom Cloud and Monastery: Douglas Coupland’s ‘Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture’
By Eve Tushnet
I came to Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, thirty years after its 1991 publication date, expecting sharp sociocultural observation and maybe some economic critique…
Fire Islanders: The Myth-Making Geography of ‘Boys in the Sand’
By Sam Moore
One of the first, most potent images in Wakefield Poole’s groundbreaking 1971 adult film Boys in the Sand is that of Casey Donovan emerging from the waves before making his way onto the beach. The image feels like a queering of a common cultural touchstone…
A Floating Black Feather: Ján Kadár’s ‘The Angel Levine’
The Angel Levine was greeted with irritation, befuddlement, and a good amount of indifference upon its release in 1970. Organized and produced by Harry Belafonte, the movie is an allegorical discussion of Black-Jewish relationships using a mix of realism and fantasy…
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