Knocking Over Idols: Gods and Women in ‘The Magus’ and ‘Black Silk’
Fowles wants to destroy master narratives, but he’s too fascinated with mastery to do it…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Horror at 37,000 Feet’
By K.E. Roberts
There is probably something more entertaining than William Shatner devouring scenery as an alcoholic, defrocked, nihilistic priest confronting evil druidic sorcery on a double-decker 747 alongside a cast of fellow C-listers, but I can’t think of it right now…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Night Stalker’
Like many folks my age, I first encountered crusading news photographer Carl Kolchak (played by the imminently charismatic and recognizable Darren McGavin) thanks to The X-Files creator Chris Carter’s repeated praise of the character as one of the biggest influences on his creation of Mulder and Scully…
Tubular Terrors: ‘Satan’s Triangle’ and ‘Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell’
The Halloween of my Northern English youth was more an informal folk festival than anything institutional, as a quick leaf through the TV schedules of the day will demonstrate: no pumpkins were deployed and you didn’t dress up; you just stayed indoors, turned the Herbert van Thal anthologies to the wall, and hoped to god no witches attacked…
Tubular Terrors: ‘Satan’s School for Girls’
By K.E. Roberts
Of all the mutually reinforcing influences that compelled the mainstream popularization and commercialization of the horror genre in the 1970s, the role of made-for-TV films gets short shrift. Quite simply, they reached millions more viewers (impressionable kids included) than theatrical releases…
Does The Dog Die?: A Not-At-All Comprehensive Guide to Stephen King’s Canines
By J.E. Anckorn
In 1999, Stephen King was struck by a van as he took a walk to the store to buy candy bars. The van’s driver claimed to have been distracted by his Rottweiler Bullet’s attempts to steal meat from a cooler, swerving into King and throwing him fourteen feet into the woods…
Being Broken: Favorites from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival
By Audrey Fox
Another year of the Toronto International Film Festival has come to an end, and as usual it was packed full of films that will now be considered major Oscar contenders, if they weren’t already. Of course, some hotly anticipated movies took the opportunity to crash and burn on a global stage and were widely panned in early reviews…
“Stoned at Shadow Lake”: The Journals of Heron Stone, 1977
Shrunk now to an almost infinitesimally small dot in the rear-view mirror, 1977 continues to cast a strange shadow over our times. Perhaps one of what my colleague Mike has adroitly termed “hinge years”—those points when incipient forces in the psychosphere coalesce and react with one another, causing reality to shift direction…
“Looney Tunes and Squalid Criminals”: The Iran-Contra Scandal Trading Cards
When we think of trading cards, the late-1980s Iran-Contra scandal probably does not jump to mind. But in 1987, Paul Brancato, a violinist for the San Francisco Orchestra, and Salim Yaqub, then a young designer just out of art school, teamed up to create a set devoted to exactly that…
“You’re Not Gonna Like This”: The Manson Family Conspiracy in Tom O’Neill’s ‘Chaos’
O’Neill’s account of his two decades in a wilderness of conspiracies related to the Manson Family ultimately suggests some of the blame falls at the feet of a Cold War American intelligence/law enforcement/academic complex deeply compromised by its commitment to beating the Soviets at all costs…
We Are the Mutants 