scop (noun): Old English – bard, minstrel, storyteller
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The Virtual Real
Bending reality. I am inspired by the curvature of space. Not necessarily by the physics that Einstein postulated early in the 20th century, but in a more personal way. There is something in each of us that allows (and sometimes forces) us to bend the hard-edged realities that make up our daily lives. Surely you’ve…
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Out of the Past
Since this blog site underwent a redesign last summer, I’ve meant to go back through its 1000+ entries to check for broken links and configuration errors. I finally got around to it this week, working chronologically through a decade of past entries in a process akin to time travel. Turns out, things are in pretty…
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Mystery Theatre has Moved
Find PSMT at its new domain. Launched during the height of the first COVID wave, Prime Stage Mystery Theatre was initially designed to fill a gap left by live theatre performances during those dark months of social distancing. Thus, the theatre company known for “bringing theatre to life” took on the new mission of “bringing…
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Origins of Body Horror
Did it begin in the 1980s? In the decade before computer-generated animation gave us morphing faces in Michael Jackson’s Black or White and the fluid flesh of James Cameron’s Terminator 2, cinema’s masters of practical effects were busily corrupting the human form. Dick Smith gave us rippling flesh in Altered States (1980); Tom Sullivan, the…
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Obscure SF Films: Part 2
The lightning round. In my previous post, I reported on the first round of The Obscure Science Fiction Movie Game. Held on the first day of this year’s North American Science Fiction Convention, the game asked panelists to identify great-but-forgotten films. Points were awarded based on how many in the audience had seen and liked…
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Obscure SF Films
… the search continues. The hunt for overlooked genre films (see my previous post) resumed in Buffalo, NY, when Hugo Award Winning artist Frank Wu hosted a panel on forgotten science fiction films. Held on the first day of the 16th North American Science Fiction Convention (NASFiC), the panel gave me the chance to join…