Alex MacFadyen is a muppet-identified writer, bookworm, and creator of strange liminal creatures. You can find more of his creations and musings at Critter Lab on Wordpress.
Some part of my brain still responds to the idea of a new Jurassic franchise movie with excitement, even though experience tells me it’s going to fail to fill the dino-sized shoes of Jurassic Park. It’s the same with Alien. Maybe there’s some element of the inevitable in […]
every so often I come across something where the twist is so effective that watching it really is a totally different experience when you don’t know where the story goes and I’m glad it was a surprise. I felt that way about the first season of The Good Place, and it’s the same with Shin’ichirô Ueda’s zombie horror-comedy film, One Cut of the Dead. So I’m going to attempt to pull off the neat magic trick of telling you about it without, you know, telling you about it.
The truth is that all I really want to read is fantasy. Stories set in other worlds, other solar systems, other versions of reality that don’t entirely resemble this one. I used to read a much wider range of fiction and every so often I still pick up […]
Making something adorable terrifying generally has the potential to be either shocking or hilarious. Sometimes it’s intentionally hilarious, and sometimes it’s just funny in its failure to be shocking. And what is more synonymous with adorable than fuzzy bunnies? So, naturally, there are a whole raft of horror […]
My experience is that the result of trying to replicate or revisit something you felt nostalgic about often ranges from puzzling to truly regrettable. Unless you know exactly what about it made you feel the way you want to feel again it’s likely it will be missing that […]
The first article I ever wrote for the Gutter was about an innovative video game called The Indigo Prophecy (Quantic Dream, 2005). It was described as “a breakthrough in interactive narrative”, which may have been an attempt to dissociate it from the short-lived interactive movie genre of the previous […]
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The Cultural Gutter 