Almost as soon as the television entered the American home, forever changing the course of the American family, it became a novel, uncanny presence. With the introduction of telegraphy in the mid-19th century, a new virtual world—an uncanny “otherspace” of instantaneous communication over long distances, utterly new to the human experience—was unleashed…
There Will Come Soft Rains (Будет ласковый дождь) is an animated film produced in the former Soviet Union, based on the Ray Bradbury short story of the same name. Though obscure in the rest of the world during the Cold War, it has gained a cult following in recent years…
By J.E. Anckorn
In 1985, vampire flick Fright Night was released upon an unsuspecting world, with The Lost Boys stalking close on its heels in 1987. Two rightfully revered vampire movies with a curious number of parallels, but who wore the cape better? Which film deserves to reign as dark ruler of be-fanged ’80s nostalgia? Today, we pit them head to head in an attempt to find out…
Although the slasher film developed out of Italian giallo films, particularly the work of Mario Bava, the genre began with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which was extremely controversial at the time for its graphic violence, sexuality, and the final act’s depiction of a cross-dressing Norman Bates…
I’ve always hated realism. In his Histoire du Cinema, Godard includes an almost touching dedication to Italian neorealism, stating that Italy is the only country in Europe to possess a “cinema of resistance.” Personally, I’ve never understood what people actually mean when they talk about a “cinema of resistance,” but in Italy it’s a legacy whose weight we have been carrying upon our backs for decades now…
When John Lennon told British journalist Maureen Cleave in March of 1966 that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now,” and that “Christianity… will vanish and shrink,” there was no controversy apart from a handful of letters sent in to the paper that ran the story, the London Evening Standard…
Thirty-seven years ago this month, the 13-part television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, hosted by Cornell University planetary scientist Carl Sagan, began airing weekly on PBS. While I was likely a little too young to have watched that premiere broadcast, I definitely remember watching the entire uncut series during one of its many rebroadcasts in the early 1980s…
I’ve chosen to talk about the cutaways of the Thunderbirds from a Thunderbirds annual, but I could just as easily have chosen the ones of the vehicles from Captain Scarlet or Fireball XL5, because they’re all beautiful. Despite the fact that they’ve got practically nothing in common with each other, the Thunderbirds and pretty much all of the vehicles featured in the the Andersons’ TV shows somehow form a cohesive aesthetic whole which often transcends the programs themselves…
Sid Davis produced nearly 200 “social guidance films” between 1950 and 1975, beginning with The Dangerous Stranger (1950), which gave us the quintessentially American maxim: “Never take candy from strangers.” Davis worked as an extra and child actor in Hollywood until landing the gig of stand-in for actor-icon John Wayne, who befriended him…
In the Britain of the early 1970s, growing salaries meant that private car ownership was on the rise. Yet children were still often expected to circulate unsupervised, and worry was growing at the increasing numbers of them who were being hurt or killed on the roads…
We Are the Mutants 