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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
You may not know the name Cirio H. Santiago, but, if you grew up in the United States in the 1980s or ‘90s, chances are his films made some kind of impression on your developing sensibilities. You didn’t have to be a sheltered, Midwestern pastor’s kid starved for mainstream popular culture, forced to glean your insights and knowledge of the offerings available to your less spiritually-minded neighbors and peers…
I’ve written quite a bit about my broadcast-television-haunted childhood here at We Are the Mutants over the years; some might even call it a bit of an obsession, honestly. But this week we’ve been challenged to put together some of our memories of specifically local TV, and that’s something that I not only feel nostalgic about, but also tend to get a little political about…
Occasionally an artifact pops up that is such a perfect exemplar of the tropes we associate with a given historical period that it’s hard to believe it is real and not a bit of uncanny simulation designed to fuck with your brain. We’ve spoken about the phenomenon before, and Sounds Good is yet another such curio…
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