Tubular Terrors: ‘A Cold Night’s Death’
By J.E. Anckorn
Other reviewers have said that A Cold Night’s Death is an excellent movie so long as you ignore the last five minutes, but I’m here to tell you the opposite is true…
Tubular Terrors: Wes Craven’s ‘Chiller’
By K.E. Roberts
An engraving with the words “They Shall See Tomorrow” hangs outside the cryonics facility at the beginning of Wes Craven’s Chiller (1985), probably the most damning treatment of the ultra-pseudoscientific practice that has ever made it to the screen…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Woman in Black’
The Woman in Black inhabits that odd region of British TV where extremely accomplished but vaguely oppressive location work blends with the kind of eeriness and unease that the generation who had lived through WWII were so gifted at putting on the screen…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Intruder Within’
The year is (probably) 1983 and I am an Alien-obsessed 12-year-old who spends a huge amount of his free time producing appalling felt-tip homages to Giger that not even my grandparents can pretend to be impressed by…
Tubular Terrors: ‘All the Kind Strangers’
All the Kind Strangers also seems to have helped birth a genre all its own centered around isolated, cultish “lost children”—from Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn” (1977) to 1979’s classic of suburban anomie Over the Edge…
Blank Generation: Steven Levy’s ‘The Unicorn’s Secret: Murder in the Age of Aquarius’
To interested observers in the 1970s, Ira Einhorn was the paragon of the bleeding-edge, Age of Aquarius thinker. He founded free classes on psychedelics, conducted one of the first “Be-ins” on the East Coast…
Chants, Prophecies, and Cultic Transmissions: Boards of Canada’s ‘Inferno’
Fans of fraternal Scottish music duo Boards of Canada could be forgiven for being a little overexcited when news of the feverishly anticipated fifth LP, Inferno, the group’s first new music in 13 years, arrived through a series of postal packages stuffed with VHS tapes…
Life in the Hive: Franco Leprino’s ‘Integrati… Disintegrati’
The work of 24-year-old Sicilian musician Francesco Leprino, Integrati… Disintegrati is a suite of music and sound that constantly oscillates between euphoria and anxiety, blending the “organic” sounds of “real” instruments like acoustic guitar and flute, with Moog synths…
Electronic, Ethereal, Sublime: Paul Williams’ ‘Aquarius’
By K.E. Roberts
Unlike most library music, Aquarius is a complete work in itself. It’s like a soundtrack to an imaginary film, and Williams uses both traditional and experimental arrangements to tell the story…
Tubular Terrors: ‘The Possessed’
Blatantly trying to ride the audience numbers of 1973’s The Exorcist, the same year’s Satan’s School for Girls, and 1976’s The Omen and Carrie, The Possessed is, predictably, imbued with the whole period’s ubiquitous post-Watergate feeling of gloom…
