For many genre film enthusiasts in the UK, the mythic and beloved all-American horror setting of the summer camp is something akin to an alien world, and while similar experiences exist for young people here, they’re often provided through schools or organisations like the Scouts or Guides. This is why […]
Pop Culture
Transcending Dimensions (Frightfest 2025)
When did spirituality stop being cool? Our collective faith in faith seems to have taken a beating from the moment we stopped believing in religious middle-managers who got outed for the narcissists and manipulators they often were … but as a species and as individuals, does that cut us off […]
Doctor Who A-Z #79: Revenge of the Cybermen (1975)
Revenge of the Cybermen is a real oddity. It’s not an oddity because it’s the only Tom Baker Cyberman story, or even because it’s the only 1970s Cyberman story, though these are the clearest symptoms of its true underlying strangeness. And it’s not odd simply because it’s a Patrick Troughton […]
Doctor Who A-Z #78: Genesis of the Daleks (1975)
Part of the fascination I have with things that run as long as Doctor Who has is that it repeats; to you, it might be mere repetition, to me it’s an endlessly fascinating series of variations that shapes the story. There may be, for instance, a parallel universe where only the nerdiest […]
Buffet Infinity (Fantasia 2025): Innovative and Hilarious Genre-Shifting Filmmaking
If you’ve seen classic Adult Swim videos like Too Many Cooks or Unedited Footage of a Bear and wondered what they’d be like as a feature film, then look no further than Buffet Infinity, which I can only describe as Adult Swim meets Welcome to Nightvale. If you’re familiar with […]
Doctor Who A-Z #77: The Sontaran Experiment (1975)
In retrospect, it’s hard to believe anyone was ever nervous about Tom Baker taking over as the Doctor. At the time, though, Jon Pertwee was both the longest-running and most popular Doctor, so producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes came up with a number of strategies to ease […]
Outside the Blue Box: Claws (1987)
Looking back on the history of Doctor Who means looking back over the last sixty-plus years of British television. Along with a few other titans like Coronation Street and Blue Peter, it’s one of the few shows whose contemporaries can include anything from Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? to Adolescence. The fact […]
Doctor Who A-Z #76: The Ark in Space (1975)
With Tom Baker’s debut story, Robot, handled by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, this is the first story to be produced and script edited by the iconic team of Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes. The break feels sudden and immediate. Even the Troughton era was never this single-mindedly concerned with being […]
Doctor Who A-Z #75: Robot (1974-5)
Interviewed ahead of Peter Capaldi’s debut in Deep Breath, Steven Moffat said he’d already written his Spearhead from Space in The Eleventh Hour, so why not do Robot for the next Doctor? The comparison has to do with familiarity: Pertwee’s debut, like Smith’s, was a sudden, startling break with the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #74: Planet of the Spiders (1974)
I don’t know what I expected when I started this project – I don’t know if I was doing anything as vulgar as expecting something – but probably the last thing I was expecting was having my childhood love for the Third Doctor comprehensively reignited. And yet, despite a rocky final season, […]