Childhood is weird, isn't it? Weird in a good way: weird in that the world is more full of wonder than at any other time in our life. As we age, depending on our cast of mind, we view this openness as something silly, and rightly confined to the past, or else envy young children … Continue reading First Frights: Ghosts, ghosts, and ghosts
Around the same time I was watching Close Encounters for the first time, BBC2 were showing, in a weekday tea-time slot, a series of 1950s science fiction classics. This was my first exposure to older sci-fi, i.e. things that pre-dated 1977. I'm sure if I dug around the internet the evidence would contradict me, but … Continue reading First Frights: 50s Sci-Fi!
TV shows had scared me before. But nothing had ever given me the true sense of awe that Close Encounters did (and, largely, still does) the first time I saw it. That's awe in the Romantic sense of the sublime, in which it borders on terror. Every time I watch the film, there's some new … Continue reading First Frights: ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977)
Into the Gyre 