Horror offers the unique opportunity to experience and feel, in a controlled setting, all the things you would definitely want to avoid in real life — fear, violence, and death. It is like a simulation. It allows us to take a deep plunge into the darkest depths of our existence, while being assured that no real harm can come of it.

If sci-fi’s influence was simply on product design, it wouldn’t be a problem. If Zuckerberg wants to burn his own cash in pursuit of a personal fantasy, or Musk wants to build hideous cars, that’s their call. It may even inspire something genuinely useful from time to time.

​The real issue is that sci-fi hasn’t just infused the tech moguls’ commercial ideas but also their warped understanding of society and politics. The dominant genre of sci-fi in the 80s and 90s, when today’s Silicon Valley overlords were growing up, was Cyberpunk – as exemplified in the novels of William Gibson (who invented the term “cyberspace”) and Stephenson, as well as any number of films and video games. The grandfather of the genre was Philip K Dick, whose novels and short stories spawned films including Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report.

With ‘Boys’ by Derek Austin Johnson, we enter a creepy and bloody world which definitely has potential to leave the reader disturbed. There’s no happy ending here in a generational saga of monsters hiding inside the members of a cursed family, and the ever-present ‘boys’ who help carry out the dirty (and gory) work. Horror fans will love this one.

Desire and its erasure, past and present, the living and the dead (the two camps into which the final voice-over narration, spoken by an unidentified Black Christian priest, separates the characters), embraced as a flow of fragmentary and dematerialized appearances: this is all that remains of the narrative of I Walked with a Zombie after the scene of Mrs. Rand’s rejected confession. This disintegration hints (and The Leopard Man, especially, will confirm) that, for Tourneur, the main theme of a film is nothing but its style—another reason, no doubt, why he found it fruitful not to specialize in any particular genre. The world of Tourneur is a collection of scattered fragments, seen from the point of view of a compassionate outsider who finds the pattern that preserves their secretiveness and their discontinuity.

In the ’80s, modernity began to seem unnerving enough on its own. The anxious focus and expressive politics of Japanese horror changed with the toggle to what became world-famous as “J-horror” (after a good deal of horror-adjacent punkish experimentation, as with Nobuhiko Obayashi’s hilariously goofy House, from 1977, and Shinya Tsukamoto’s suppurating Tetsuo: The Iron Man, from 1989). The historical moment was ripe, and uncertainty took hold: 1989 was both the end of Emperor Hirohito’s seemingly infinite reign, and the popping of the country’s huge economic bubble, sending the Japan of the ’90s into a deflationary spiral. Abandoning the fabled past, filmmakers leaned into the anxieties of late-twentieth-century life–including, prominently and presciently, the ghostliness of digital technology.

Believe it or not, The Entity can be understood as a feminist parable. A showcase for Hershey’s fearless and committed performance (Jane Fonda, Sally Field, and Jill Clayburgh reportedly gave hard passes before it came to Hershey), it gives us something that used to be rare in the horror genre—a living, breathing, intelligent, three-dimensional woman. The film foregrounds the skepticism that rape victims often face. Carla’s credibility is even undermined by her son, who begins to equivocate about what he’s witnessed and experienced, and it’s only when Cindy confirms what she’s seen that Carla begins to find hope. If the entity is misogyny incarnate, the film finds in Carla a formidable and sympathetic heroine, one who ultimately emerges intact from the trauma of her harrowing ordeal, the damage to her self-esteem that Sneiderman’s well-meaning treatment has inflicted on her, and her reduction to a hapless test subject in the parapsychologist’s foolhardy experiment. Finally standing up for herself, she defies her unseen tormentor, declaring, “You can’t have me.” (But in the film’s chilling final scene, the entity speaks for the first time, gutturally uttering three words and effectively getting the obscene final say.)