While other bands swimming in that sketchily charted ocean sometimes called synthpop are remembered as pioneers—or at the very least with some residual affection—London’s New Musik seem to have simply evaporated…
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…
By the summer of 1979, the inhabitants of the north of England were living in a state of barely suppressed terror: for the previous four years, a serial killer dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper had been attacking and murdering women in an area centering around the industrial city of Bradford in West Yorkshire…
By K.E. Roberts
Rock and roll was maligned as an “unholy pleasure” almost from the get-go, just as dancing was decried as the “Heritage of Hell” centuries before. After John Lennon declared the Beatles “more popular than Jesus” in 1966, Christian fundamentalists immediately condemned all music that “aroused the lower instincts,” and the smear campaign would last for more than a quarter-century…
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…
Caedmon’s vast catalogue of abridged texts—read by acclaimed actors or by the authors themselves—was hugely eclectic, ranging from Pakistani actor Zia Mohiuddin reading selections from the Bhagavad-Gita and Colette reading passages from her Gigi and Cheri to Rainer Maria Rilke reading his poetry in the original German, Boris Karloff reading Three Little Pigs, and Eartha Kitt reading a selection of African folk tales…
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…
If you have small kids, wear something nondescript, take them out, and let them soak up whatever thrills are left. If you don’t have small kids, stay home and read a motherfucking book. And no, Harry Potter doesn’t count…
Political readings or interpretations of horror films are nothing new. But in Mark Steven’s 2017 study, Splatter Capital, an explicit connection is made between the bloody gore of what Steven terms “splatter” horror films and the dehumanizing, mutilative forces of global capitalism…
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…
We Are the Mutants 