Fractal Accidents: Attachment and Agency in Chris Shaw’s ‘Split’
Watching Split left me with the distinct feeling that I just missed five minutes of it without leaving my seat…
Marrying the Monster: Apocalyptic and Utopian Impulses in 1950s Sci-Fi Cinema
By Pepe Tesoro
If you are even mildly interested in science fiction criticism, chances are that you have bumped into Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” Written at the tail end of the long 1950s golden era of sci-fi film, the text is a bold and keen examination of a genre…
Between Mushroom Cloud and Monastery: Douglas Coupland’s ‘Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture’
By Eve Tushnet
I came to Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, thirty years after its 1991 publication date, expecting sharp sociocultural observation and maybe some economic critique…
Fire Islanders: The Myth-Making Geography of ‘Boys in the Sand’
By Sam Moore
One of the first, most potent images in Wakefield Poole’s groundbreaking 1971 adult film Boys in the Sand is that of Casey Donovan emerging from the waves before making his way onto the beach. The image feels like a queering of a common cultural touchstone…
A Floating Black Feather: Ján Kadár’s ‘The Angel Levine’
The Angel Levine was greeted with irritation, befuddlement, and a good amount of indifference upon its release in 1970. Organized and produced by Harry Belafonte, the movie is an allegorical discussion of Black-Jewish relationships using a mix of realism and fantasy…
The Greatest Shōwa on Earth: 1962’s ‘King Kong vs. Godzilla’
By Alex Adams
Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Godzilla is perhaps the most widely praised Kaiju film ever made. A special effects masterpiece at the time, the monochrome mother of all monster movies had bleak, fume-laden visuals, a gloomy, mournful tone, and an unambiguous anti-nuclear message…
“Beyond Human Conjecture”: Charlton Comics’ ‘Creepy Things’
Today’s sophisticated communications infrastructure did not emerge fully formed as totalitarian surveillance. Its annihilation of privacy was merely the price we had to pay for an unprecedented level of reliability within an endless array of applications…
“A Train to the Astral Plane”: The Cosmic Folk of Jim Sullivan and Judee Sill
Originally released one month after the Apollo 11 moon landing, Jim Sullivan’s psych-folk hidden gem UFO (1969) is characterized by a drifting kind of hopefulness. Over the floating strings and upbeat horns of The Wrecking Crew, who famously backed The Beach Boys and Phil Spector, the album’s lyrics consider alien abduction and psychic links…
Ghostly Messages: Australia’s Lost Horror Anthology, ‘The Evil Touch’
By Andrew Nette
In a June 2017 article in Fortean Times, the British magazine concerned with strange and paranormal phenomena, writer and broadcaster Bob Fischer discussed how the sensation of not being exactly sure what you were watching on television was a common experience in relation to consuming visual culture in the 1960s and 1970s…
“Left A Galaxy of Dreams Behind”: Joe Banks’ ‘Hawkwind: Days of the Underground’
I don’t really remember anybody actually mentioning Hawkwind in my youth. You just seemed to absorb an awareness of them from the landscape by osmosis, the same way you absorbed knowledge of the locations of short-cuts, haunted houses, and the more dangerous potholes…
We Are the Mutants 