Interview: Gretchen Felker-Martin on Manhunt, and Refusing to Hide the Violence of the Everyday
By Claire Davidson Gretchen Felker-Martin has an intimate knowledge of horror, and one that spans many different lenses. A fiction author, film critic, and film curator through her Deadlights Theater Discord server, Felker-Martin has made it her life’s objective to expand
Brain In A Jar: The Revolution Of Unplayability
The obtusion of Cruelty Squad forces players to confront the alienating horror of life as a tool of capital by Julia Norza You don’t notice the first time Cruelty Squad lowers your difficulty. After a rickety cutscene introduces your bed-unframed
The Writing On the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism
Before "offering solutions," sci-fi must actually grapple with the material realities of our present by Eli Horowitz The year was 2011, and the award-winning sci-fi author Neal Stephenson was drinking himself maudlin on the sweetened wine of nostalgia.
Rated “G” for “Globalization”
How the drive for easily marketable, mass-consumable children's media stifles complexity and creativity by Malcolm Rambert Cartoon Network’s Infinity Train is a unique show. Each season of the show—which were called “Books” in production—follows a vast, extradimensional train as
The Kids Aren’t Alright: The Race Essentialism of Sci-fi Hybrids
Sci-fi's use of cross-species "hybrids" highlights the persistence of race essentialism by Kathryn Finch In the 1972 blaxploitation film The Thing With Two Heads, a man who is dying of cancer arranges to have his head transplanted onto the body
REVIEW: Halloween Kills Is Melting
Although far from perfect, Halloween Kills is the film that finally delivers on the promise of the 1978 original's iconic ending. by val Loughcrewe The Shape is a God. John Carpenter and Deborah Hill knew this without realizing it when, at the end
REVIEW: Dune (2021)
Denis Villeneuve succeeds in bringing Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic back to the screen, but at the cost of some of its strangeness. by Kurt Schiller In one sense, I have seen Dune twice. In another, I have seen it dozens of times. I
Guest Curator: Jess Levine
A cyberpunk playlist for cyberpunk times. by Jess Levine As a genre, synthwave fits naturally into the mold of both the storytelling “concept album” and the instrumental album. Synthwave and its brethren are love letters to the soundtracks of the Eighties
Nowhere Here: Cyberspace & the Assassination of the Unreal
The 40-year rise and fall of cyberspace's symbolic unreality. by Kurt Schiller Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from
The Flesh Revolts
How Akira's sci-fi horror explores body, artifice, and exploitation under capitalism by Meabh Cadigan To become something more than—or other than—human is a terrifying proposition. We don’t know where we come from or why we think, and so we hold