All the Kind Strangers also seems to have helped birth a genre all its own centered around isolated, cultish “lost children”—from Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn” (1977) to 1979’s classic of suburban anomie Over the Edge…
The Sears catalog was, by the outset of the 1980s, an American institution nearly a century in the making, providing an A-to-Z inventory of mail-order household goods for even the most far-flung consumers in the United States…
To interested observers in the 1970s, Ira Einhorn was the paragon of the bleeding-edge, Age of Aquarius thinker. He founded free classes on psychedelics, conducted one of the first “Be-ins” on the East Coast…
Fans of fraternal Scottish music duo Boards of Canada could be forgiven for being a little overexcited when news of the feverishly anticipated fifth LP, Inferno, the group’s first new music in 13 years, arrived through a series of postal packages stuffed with VHS tapes…
A couple of years ago, a canny and intelligent friend referred to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons setting of the Forgotten Realms as “post-apocalyptic.” I thought for a moment, ready to dismiss the fictional world’s bog-standard fantasy feudalism as nothing of the sort…
The suggestive commonalities of these disparate MUFON presenters does seem to buttress the now-common view that the entire world of postwar American ufology was a giant blind alley meant to distract from and obfuscate top secret U.S. military programs…
Near the end of Richard Nixon’s first term, the forces of conservatism and reaction were in the ascendancy in America. This public resurgence of “traditional values” was itself a counter-revolution against the turmoil unleashed by the young…
This Halloween, I decided to give another of Kolchak producer Dan Curtis’s horror TV movies a try. The Norliss Tapes, which aired on NBC in February of 1973, features another favorite of genre sci-fi and horror TV, Roy Thinnes, in the lead role…
I’m sure many members of Generation X have taken a moment to look around the pop culture landscape over the past decade and a half and had a sudden moment of realization: there are certainly a whole lot of people trying to sell me things using the media of my youth…
Invitation to Hell definitely follows on well-trod thematic ground, examining the American nuclear family’s impulse to conform and keep up with the Joneses in suburbia. But it’s on the execution, in the casting, and in a few of the left-field plot developments that the film really shines…
