Escape from New York was John Carpenter’s most ambitious and biggest-budget film to date, and his first choices to handle visual effects were Jim Danforth (7 Faces of Dr. Lao) and John Dykstra, the latter the talk of the special effects world for his Academy Award-winning work on Star Wars…
By K.E. Roberts
The idea that alien astronauts visited the Earth at some point in primitive human history, endowing us with imagination and ingenuity—and possibly our genetic code—has become the cult religion of a hyper-materialistic Western world that consecrates nothing beyond its own egomaniacal gadgetry…
The computer camp concept was pioneered in 1977 by Dr. Michael Zabinski, a physics and engineering professor at Connecticut’s Fairfield University. Zabinksi had received several federal grants to train teachers at the University to integrate computers into their classrooms, and wisely thought of merging summer camp and computer training to reach young people…
Man, Myth & Magic, dubbed “the most unusual magazine ever published,” was the first mass market encyclopedia of the occult, published in the U.K. and Australia in 112 issues beginning in 1970…
By K.E. Roberts
Rosemary’s Baby, both Ira Levin’s 1967 bestseller and Roman Polanski’s meticulously faithful film adaptation of 1968, seeded the American consciousness with infernal terror at precisely the moment the country was supposed to be suffering its most desperate crisis of faith…
By K.E. Roberts
Along with Bigfoot, UFOs, and all manner of “mysteries of the unknown,” the Bermuda Triangle permeated the weird wilderness of 1970s pop culture. While primed by a cult following dating to the mid-1960s that was heavily influenced by the writings of paranormal researcher Charles Fort, the myth can be traced all the way back to Plato’s description of a lost land called Atlantis…
By K.E. Roberts
Early in Penelope Spheeris’ 1981 documentary on the Los Angeles punk scene, she asks Eugene, a 14-year-old skinhead who talks like a Valley kid, what he likes about punk. “It’s like, it’s not bullshit,” he responds. “There’s no rock stars now, you know?” It’s to the director’s credit that the next hour and a half, elapsing with the speed and eloquence of an autobahn car crash, both proves and refutes that answer…
By K.E. Roberts and Brother Bill
The Three Investigators series was published between 1964 and 1987, with the “Hitchcock editions” (featuring cover illustrations by Robert Adragna and Hitchcock’s shadowed profile in the top right corner) first appearing in 1978, to great success…
Michael Doret, a Brooklyn, New York-born illustrator and graphic designer, started working professionally in the early 1970s, and is responsible for several iconic images, including a series of Time magazine covers…
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…
We Are the Mutants 