June 14, 2026
Jerry Goldsmith and the Broken Ear of Planet of the Apes
An anthropological reading of Jerry Goldsmith's score for Planet of the Apes, an impure, modern and displaced music for a civilization after man.
Editorial archive
Articles
Essays, excerpts and close readings on cinema, otherness, audiovisual memory and the collective rituals of the screen.
May 20, 2026
2001, Solaris and the Cinema of Impossible Contact
Two films suggest that extraterrestrial contact is not chiefly a technical problem but a philosophical one: how do we speak to what resists understanding?
May 4, 2026
Why Do We Still Need Extraterrestrials?
The alien as a cultural figure in a polarized world where denialism and the far right coexist with cinematic narratives of progress.
April 13, 2026
Star Trek: Humanism for the Galaxy
How Star Trek reshaped the screen alien through humanism, diplomacy and a utopian idea of the future.
March 16, 2026
Invasion as Global Spectacle
Independence Day and Mars Attacks! approach the same subgenre from opposite positions: nationalist grandeur in one case, corrosive satire in the other.
February 9, 2026
The Messianic Extraterrestrial
The extraterrestrial as messiah is one of science-fiction cinema's persistent motifs: an outside agent who arrives to redeem us from ourselves.
January 12, 2026
The Other Has Always Been Here
Long before cinema imagined alien life, our species lived alongside beings not entirely like us: Neanderthals, Denisovans and other hominins.
December 5, 2025
Soviet Science-Fiction Cinema: Tarkovsky's Answer to Kubrick
How Andrei Tarkovsky shaped a poetic, metaphysical alternative to Western science fiction in Solaris and Stalker.
November 1, 2025
The Alien as a Mirror of Ourselves
Why do extraterrestrials fascinate us? The answer has less to do with outer space than with what we hesitate to say about ourselves.
October 15, 2025
Nuclear Paranoia and Extraterrestrials in the 1950s
In the 1950s, Hollywood produced more than a hundred science-fiction films. Behind many of them stood the bomb, the infiltrated communist and the imagined end of the world.
September 15, 2025
Anatomy of Cosmic Horror
Alien and The Thing pushed cosmic horror into the body, presenting creatures that unsettle the very notion of identity.
August 15, 2025
Cosmic Horror: When the Alien Cannot Be Understood
Some extraterrestrials do not negotiate, invade with armies or fire laser beams. They are something else: a presence the human mind cannot contain.
July 18, 2025
Abjection in Alien: The Eighth Passenger
Giger's Xenomorph read through abjection: how Alien turns bodily invasion, birth and disgust into a grammar of horror.
June 12, 2025
The Two Versions of The Thing
Hawks's 1951 version as an allegory of McCarthyism, Carpenter's 1982 film as a study of paranoia.
May 5, 2025
Between Endless Banality and Unthinkable Terror
Susan Sontag's The Imagination of Disaster as a lens for 1950s science-fiction cinema.
April 10, 2025
Fantastic Planet: The Extraterrestrial in Oneiric Animation
Fantastic Planet as surreal animation about oppression, power and coexistence between species.
March 21, 2025
Alien Expressionism: The Man from Planet X
Edgar G. Ulmer's The Man from Planet X read through alien expressionism and the shadow of Nosferatu.
March 6, 2025
The Extraterrestrial in the Soviet Cold War Context: Ikarie X-B 1
Soviet science-fiction cinema during the Cold War, centred on Jindrich Polak's Ikarie X-B 1.