BTTM FDRS

The 2019 graphic novel BTTM FDRS finds its monster in the legacy of gentrification and exploitation, with beautiful ideas twisted and then abandoned, and the people on the lower rungs of society left to deal with the resulting mess. Writer Ezra Claytan Daniels (author of 2018’s Upgrade Soul) and artist Ben Passmore (creator of numerous comics across mediums including the completely unsparing Sports Is Hell) make no bones about the racial make-up of both sides of that equation, showing its black protagonists putting up with the indifference and hostility of white people in positions of relative power, something used as both a source of horror and of comedy. This is a story that reflects a wider recognition of social stratification, a heady mix of self-consciousness, guilt and anger, and that complexity puts it well beyond just a simple vehicle for social critique and a side of the grotesque—although it is also both of those things, rather pointedly.

Brain Damage (1988)

For our third and final Shudder selection, I thought I’d go into something that seemed to more accurately represent the kind of movie that makes most of the service’s offerings—or so I thought. Yes, Brain Damage is a gory horror comedy complete with an ethereal synth soundtrack, but it’s also so odd as to defy any attempt to give it a high concept label—it simply wouldn’t accurately describe the experience here. This is a movie that starts at an eleven and just keeps going from there. It is to eighties horror comedy what Super Inframan is to whatever genre Super Inframan is supposed to be.

Monster Multimedia: Needle/7 Billion Needles

At some point, Science Fiction writers probably got tired of the standard assortment of Bug Eyed Monsters that had populated the pages of the pulps since back when they called the genre “scientifiction”, and wanted to get at something a bit more conceptual, like the aliens dreamt up by H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and First Men in the Moon. This was especially the case during much of the “Golden Age” in the forties and fifties, where scientific rigour was emphasized over expediency-for-the-purposes-of-plot (and sometimes over plot itself), so writers began looking at biology to inspire new kinds of extraterrestrial life forms and make more interesting and “accurate” stories (and also so we could get some intelligent aliens with character, rather than just slavering beasts to be raygunned.) Among the more notable examples can be found in Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle, which probably introduced a lot of SF-reading kids to the idea of symbiosis.