Who Goes There?: The Thing, AI, and Isolation in the Digital Age

|Riccardo Williams| John Carpenter’s The Thing, released in 1982, has since achieved the status of horror legend, in many ways eclipsing the book it’s based on, Who Goes There written by John W. Campbell Jr. There’s a strong argument to be made that it overtakes the previous adaptation… Continue reading

They Live in the Twin Cities

John Nada (Roddy Piper), a white adult man with a dark blonde mullet hair cut, wearing a plaid short, is looking up from his dark sunglasses. He is standing in front of a news stand.

|Lucas Vonasek| John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) begins bleakly. Train horns moan as they clatter along the rails, surveillance helicopters chop through the air above in staccato, and smog drapes a city dominated by monolithic buildings clad with corporate logos. These structures… Continue reading

Shout Out to Ellen Ripley: How Regular Heroes Inspire Us in Our Darkest Times

Ellen Ripley stands holding Jones the cat against the backdrop of spaceship mechanicals.

|Allison Vincent| When I initially pitched this idea for Alien to Perisphere, I intended to write a snarky, humor-laden essay about the trope of smart women who are ignored in horror/sci-fi films until the very loud, usually mustachioed men who did the ignoring succumb to their dumb, … Continue reading