“An Enthusiastic Corporate Citizen”: David Cronenberg and the Dawn of Neoliberalism

The cinematic corpus of David Cronenberg is probably best known for its expertly uncanny use of body horror, but looming almost as large in the writer-director’s various universes is the presence of faceless, all-powerful organizations. Like his rough contemporary Thomas Pynchon and the conspiracies that litter Pynchon’s early works—V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)—Cronenberg’s shadowy organizations offer fodder for paranoid conspiracy…

Ghost in a Box: The Haunting History of Television Broadcast Intrusions

By Michael Grasso

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…

“If Mankind Perished Utterly”: Nazim Tulyahodzhaev’s ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’, 1984

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…

Tale of the Tape: ‘Fright Night’ vs. ‘The Lost Boys’

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…

The Killer in Me(n): Slasher Film Posters, 1980 – 1988

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…

Giallo: The Dirty Underwear of Italian Auteur Cinema

By Andrea Veltroni

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…

Beware the Beat: ‘Rock: It’s Your Decision’, 1982

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…

Recollections: Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’

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…

Recollections: Vehicle Cutaways from the 1966 ‘Thunderbirds’ Annual

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…

Tuned Out, Copped Out: Sid Davis’ ‘Keep Off the Grass’, 1970

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…

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Film & TV