Death Spirals: A History of the Hypnotic Horror Film

Anguish (1986) is an obscure and overlooked horror film from Spanish director Bigas Luna, a name perhaps better known for weird and erotic art-house dramas. Zelda Rubinstein (Poltergeist and Poltergeist II) stars as the overbearing mother of adult son John (Michael Lerner, Barton Fink) who still lives at home and under her thumb. Mother has a psychic connection with her slavish son and can communicate with him over long distances, a power she will use to direct him as her instrument of revenge…

This Is the End: American Apocalypse in Ira Levin’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby’

By K.E. Roberts

Rosemary’s Baby, both Ira Levin’s 1967 bestseller and Roman Polanski’s meticulously faithful film adaptation of 1968, seeded the American consciousness with infernal terror at precisely the moment the country was supposed to be suffering its most desperate crisis of faith…

Falken’s Maze: Game Theory, Computer Science, and the Cold War Inspirations for ‘WarGames’

By Michael Grasso

The 1983 film WarGames, directed by John Badham and written by Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker, was a box office smash and eventually became a generational touchstone, offering mainstream audiences their first glimpse at the computer technology that would ineluctably become part of their lives in the next decade and beyond…

13 Tzameti: The Game

By Brother Bill

A wave of dark, violent horror films arrived in the early-to-mid 2000s, all set in the present-day real world and centered on people caught up in deranged systems or subcultures. It seemed as though the lone psycho supermen of earlier decades (Hannibal Lecter, Max Cady, endlessly respawning Freddies, Michaels, and Jasons) were being supplanted…

Temples Among the Stars: AudiSee Adventures and the Mormon Sci-Fi Connection

By Richard McKenna

“Brace yourself for an exciting, realistic sight and sound journey into another world…” Such was the promise emblazoned on the star-spangled blue packaging of the AudiSee titles, a series of “stereo dramatizations,” science-fiction audiobooks on cassette, each accompanied by a glossy, full-color illustrated booklet…

“Even the Ocean Doesn’t Look as It Should”: A History of the Bermuda Triangle Legend

By K.E. Roberts

Along with Bigfoot, UFOs, and all manner of “mysteries of the unknown,” the Bermuda Triangle permeated the weird wilderness of 1970s pop culture. While primed by a cult following dating to the mid-1960s that was heavily influenced by the writings of paranormal researcher Charles Fort, the myth can be traced all the way back to Plato’s description of a lost land called Atlantis…

Getting Lost in Warren Robinett’s ‘Adventure’

By J.G. Newman

I typically don’t role-play when I play games. Which isn’t to say I don’t invest deeply in whatever game I’m playing; my emotional connection to my avatar is just fueled more by traditional audience-to-character empathy than actually inhabiting the role of whatever druid or space marine whose shoes the game places me in…

Adventures in Atari BASIC: Lesson Three – Enemy Ships and Player/Missile Graphics

By Mikey Walters

In Lesson Two, we finished drawing Space Assault’s playfield, complete with our seven Vegetation Processing Plants that we must protect with the Fission Gun Tower. The planet Kala is strangely quiet, which can only mean the Clovis aliens are ready to attack—as soon as we learn how to get them on the screen!

You Dropped a Bomb on Me: Jerry Ahern’s ‘The Survivalist’

By Richard McKenna

In the early 1980s, the spectrum of opinions regarding life after a nuclear exchange ranged from that held by the scientific establishment—at best a severely compromised environment, and at worst the extinction of the human race—to another, less pessimistic view that sensed an opportunity for a mankind neutered by the shackles of modern society to return to the more unambiguous, manly, uncompromised moral certainties of a simpler age…

“It’s Living That’s Treacherous”: Pop Culture Reflections of Jonestown