As you know, I’m very tuned into the doom meme, and I write and tweet a lot about past and current cultural variations on the fear and fascination of apocalypse. But I think I’ll never outdo George Carlin, who, in an absolutely brain-bending and jaw-dropping riff on the subject (see the video below), mounted the…
Category: Arts & Entertainment
‘The Twilight Zone’ for teachers: ‘Changing of the Guard’
In 1962 The Twilight Zone ran an episode titled “The Changing of the Guard.” It starred Donald Pleasence (in his first American television appearance) as an elderly literature professor who is forced into retirement and decides to kill himself on Christmas Eve when he’s overcome by the sense that his entire life and career have…
New Outer Limits: “Stream of Consciousness”
If you, like me, are feeling more and more haunted in our information-glutted age of universal online connectedness by T.S. Eliot’s famous lines “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” then maybe you’ll find this 1997 episode from Season 3 of The New Outer…
A Lovecraftian tragedy? ‘Prometheus’ may have finally killed del Toro’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’
The sad news is currently sweeping through the fantasy/SF/horror community and the movie-oriented corridors of the Interwebs: Guillermo del Toro has publicly announced that his long-anticipated adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is really and truly dead. What’s more, the (unintentional) culprit is Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Prometheus. Say what? I wrote a recent…
Ultimate audition: One man plays every character in the history and future of science fiction
Thanks to an emailed link from my friend Don Webb (the Austin-based horror writer, writing teacher, and former High Priest of the Temple of Set), I kicked off my day with the funniest video I’ve seen since Funny or Die’s “Wax On, F*ck Off with Ralph Macchio.” I literally almost did the proverbial coffee spit-take…
Mesmerizing: An excerpt from Antero Alli’s experimental film ‘The Greater Circulation’
Here’s a profoundly haunting and mesmerizing excerpt from The Greater Circulation, the 2005 film directed by legendary underground filmmaker Antero Alli — who is also, of course, the author of Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman’s Guide to Reality Selection, which presents a thoroughly heady exploration of Timothy Leary’s and Robert Anton Wilson’s eight-circuit model of…
Will Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’ be a Lovecraftian ‘2001’?
In the latest installment of Stained Glass Gothic, my intermittent column for SF Signal, I raise the question of whether director Ridley Scott’s forthcoming science fiction/horror film Prometheus will be, in effect, a hybrid film of ideas that invokes and resonates with themes previously explored by Stanley Kubrick (and Arthur Clarke) in 2001: A Space…
New documentary follows Vatican-approved exorcist
This new documentary titled The Exorcist in the 21st Century, is slated to be released this month. Judging by the trailer, it looks to be truly interesting: The film’s website shows that it’s from the Swedish production company Gammaglimt AS. They offer this description: The Exorcist in the 21st Century takes the viewer into the…
“Solipsist”: A surreal short film that’s “a meditative and hypnotic experience for dreamers”
SOLIPSIST from Andrew Huang on Vimeo. As I type these words, I’m still in a daze from this short experimental film, and I invite you, too, to come and have your mind turned inside-out. Anything I could say by way of introduction or explanation would only be a hindrance, so I’ll just leave off talking…
On learning to read Joe Pulver’s ‘Portraits of Ruin’ by writing the introduction to it
Today I stumbled across the first full review, or at least the first one I’ve seen, of Joe Pulver’s imminent new book Portraits of Ruin (due out next month from Hippocampus Press) at Hellbound Times. The book will arrive with an introduction by me, and I was surprised to see the reviewer not only mentioning…