Mentally unpacking Penda’s Fen, a 1974 entry in the BBC’s “Plays for Today” series of television movies tackling controversial subjects often in similarly controversial fashion, can seem at first a tad overwhelming. There is so much going on in this deceptively modest looking movie that one scarcely knows […]
Folk horror is one of those nebulous sub-genres that seems, when one first sets out to define it, relatively simple. Yet the longer one dwells on it, the more one is exposed to it, the more complicated the definition becomes, until at last one simply throws up one’s […]
In 1934, following the death of Lenin, one of the new rulers of the Soviet Union identified a “conspiracy” in the upper echelons of Soviet government and began a series of murderous purges that left hundreds of officials, labor leaders, intellectuals, artists, and most importantly his personal enemies […]
For anyone with a body, it’s no surprise that there is a genre of film dealing entirely with our seemingly never-ending battle with our own mortal coils. The human body is often private enemy number one for those who inhabit it, and there are times when it seems […]
I came across Steven Barnes’ Streetlethal the way I come across most things: by accident, while looking for something else. Rereading William Gibson’s Neuromancer (and its two sequels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive) got me on a kick of rereading not just the rest of Gibson’s oeuvre, […]
Back in the 1990s, I did a fanzine that was about as successful as I could hope for given my lack of financial resources. With nowhere to print it but an all-night copy shop manned by a guy named Fred the Bastard, I couldn’t really achieve any impressive […]
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The Cultural Gutter 