What is America and what does it look like? In the ‘80s, it looked like the world as re-imagined by the Memphis Group, Syd Brak, and Steven Spielberg. Reality was far grimmer, but no one seems to remember all that. Instead, we have a convenient and informal shorthand consisting, in part, of skyscrapers and saxophones…
For any Italian, the Summer of 1982 means one thing: the country’s victory at that year’s FIFA World Cup final. The faded images of the nation’s president, 86-year-old Sandro Pertini—a socialist partisan who had fought against Nazi-Fascism during World War II—practically beside himself with joy when Alessandro Altobelli scored the third goal against Germany…
Fowles wants to destroy master narratives, but he’s too fascinated with mastery to do it…
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…
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…
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…
We Are the Mutants 