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Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019) and AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021).

Monday, October 05, 2009

Talking about horror in Montreal


This video - the Alien one on the site - is from my last trip to North America, a couple of months ago, when I visited Montreal for the annual World Science Fiction Convention.

I was nabbed for the interview immediately after I spoke on a panel about the movie Alien and its sequels, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the original movie. I was geared up for this because I was also on a separate panel about the horror genre, and had been thinking about what separates it from, say fanatasy narratives or action thrillerss.

On the Alien anniverary panel, I made the case that Alien is a quintessential horror movie despite (or in addition to) its science fiction elements. If I may say so, I was pretty pleased with my performance on the panel ... but less so with my interview performance (partly because I was getting pretty tired - at this stage I was just getting over a fairly serious illness and my voice was still croaky).

But I think it's come out pretty well, the way my interview is intercut with scenes from the movie itself. Go and have a look - it's only a few minutes. I really like some of the juxtapositions of my descriptions of specific elements of the movie with scary scenes from Alien.

More generally, I hadn't previously heard of this media site, The Electric Playground ... but it sure seems cool.

2 comments:

Russell Blackford said...

What, no one's going to comment on my performance?

Unknown said...

Alien was an excellent horror movie with Sci Fi theming, Aliens was an excellent action movie with Sci Fi theming, if only they'd continued this in the other sequels. The idea of an Alien rom com is perversely attractive.