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Aurora Borealis (1865) by Frederic Edwin Church. • December is over-stuffed with enervating cultural lists, most of them reminding you of things which received enough attention earlier in the year. Better value than these—and always unpredictable—is John Waters‘ choice of favourite films; unpredictable and enlightening are the Secret Satan selections at Strange Flowers which come […]

The aesthetics of Surrealism are largely absent in the art of Soviet Russia but they can be found in some of the early animated films of Andrei Khrzhanovsky. One of these, The Glass Harmonica (1968), shows the influence of Magritte and De Chirico, among others, and is also distinguished by being the only animation to […]

Art by Rand Holmes for Gay Comix No. 1, September 1980. • In the universe next door, Los Angeles in November, 2019 looks like the drawings in the Blade Runner Sketchbook (1982). The book has been out of print for many years but available online for a while, although seldom in a downloadable form. A […]

Frontispiece. My recent film viewing has included two early adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, the superb Lon Chaney version from 1925, directed by Rupert Julian, and the not-so-superb 1943 version with Claude Rains as the Phantom. I’d not seen the latter before but it was included in a blu-ray collection of Universal horror […]

Cover art by Gahan Wilson for Monster (1980) by Herbie Hancock. • RIP Gahan Wilson, a great cartoonist with a flair for horror, the macabre and grotesque. Many of his best cartoons are buried in back issues of The New Yorker, Playboy and National Lampoon but book collections of his work are worth seeking out. […]

The Weirdness is Coming, an illustration by Robert Beatty for an NYMag feature about the near future. • I’m slightly late to this news, but better late than never: The Doll’s Breath is a 22-minute animated film by the Brothers Quay, shot on 35mm film and with a soundtrack by Michèle Bokanowski. It may take […]

An engraving from The Geometric Landscapes of Lorenz Stoer (1567). • Curtis Harrington’s cult horror film, Night Tide (1961), receives a lavish blu-ray reissue from Powerhouse in January. The limited edition will include an extra disc of Harrington’s early short films which encompass Poe adaptations and also Wormwood Star, his portrait of occult artist (and […]

Typhonic Neural Tantra by The Wyrding Module. • November 2019, as many people have been noting, is the month in which Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner takes place. At Dangerous Minds Paul Gallagher writes about the unrelated William Burroughs script whose title was borrowed for Scott’s film. • More Ridley Scott (sort of): disco was still […]

My annual Halloween post breaks with its usual music mix/playlist format this year for a recording of The Stone Tape, Peter Strickland’s hour-long radio drama made for Halloween in 2015. This was an adaptation, co-written with Matthew Graham, of Nigel Kneale’s celebrated TV play of the same name, first broadcast in 1972 for the BBC’s […]

Poster by Zdenek Ziegler for Markéta Lazarová (1966), a film by Frantisek Vlácil. • I’ve spent the past couple of weeks watching a number of films by Béla Tarr, including his 432-minute masterwork, Sátántangó (1994). The latter was based on a novel by László Krasznahorkai, an author who not only worked with Tarr on the […]

Art by Joe Mugnaini (1955). • Mixes of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. XIX by David Colohan, and The Ephemeral Man’s Teapot 2—Atmosphere insomniac by The Ephemeral Man. • Patrick Clarke talks to Morton Subotnick and Lillevan about Subotnick’s pioneering synthesizer composition, Silver Apples Of The Moon (1967). • A second volume of London’s […]

Magma concert poster, 2017. Art by Jofre Conjota. • The Dream Foundry is a new venture with a mission “to bolster and sustain the nascent careers of professionals working in the field of speculative literature.” This includes artists as well as writers, and to this end I was asked to answer a few questions about […]

Alien Technology (2014) by Monira Al Qadiri. • “William S. Burroughs wrote, in a long, zigzag ode: ‘You can hear metal think in the electromagnetic fields of Takis sculpture.’” Geeta Dayal on the sound sculptures of the late Panayiotis Vassilakis (1925–2019), better known as Takis. • “Everything about this song is mysterious, from the creation […]

Fantastic Sea Carriage (1556) by Johannes van Doetecum the Elder. • I’ve grown increasingly tired of Kubrick-related micro-fetishism (despite contributing to it myself with previous posts) but this piece at Film and Furniture about the history of David Hicks’ Hexagon carpet design is a good one. • “In hindsight, we can see how rarely one […]

The Gourmet (1986), an original television drama written by Kazuo Ishiguro and directed by Michael Whyte, has long been in the top ten of TV films I was hoping would turn up on YouTube, and here it is at last. With a running time of under 50 minutes this is shorter than one-off dramas tend […]

Hades II (2004) by Ana Maria Pacheco. • I’ve been reading a lot of Angela Carter over the past few weeks so the news of her house in Clapham being awarded a blue plaque was coincidental but also timely. Related: Angela Carter Online, and The Holy Family Album (1991), “a sacrilegious take on the history […]

L’Hamestoque (1977) by Christine Gaussot. • Another announcement from Strange Attractor Press: Of Mud & Flame A Penda’s Fen Sourcebook edited by Matthew Harle and James Machin will be published at the end of October. Among the contents will be the screenplay of David Rudkin’s cult television play, an item that’s always been impossible to […]

Tadanori Yokoo (1974) by Tadanori Yokoo and Will van Sambeek. A poster from the Colourful Japan exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. • The first decade of space-rock pioneers Hawkwind is explored by Joe Banks in Hawkwind: Days of the Underground — Radical Escapism in the Age Of Paranoia, coming soon from Strange Attractor Press. […]

Cover art by Mike Hinge. • “[The Family] is an unforgettable fusion of journalism and poetic prose that still holds up precisely because it has no use for category, for genre, or for being anything other than its own unique, obsessive self.” Sarah Weinman on how Ed Sanders wrote the definitive account of the Manson […]

Poster by Tadanori Yokoo for The Trip (1967). • Post of the week is this long-overdue introduction by Warren Hatter to the French rock and electronic music of the 1970s and 80s, a variety of Continental culture which has never commanded the same level of interest in the Anglophone world as its German equivalent. The […]