We Are the Mutants

Sorry No Gas: Photos from Documerica, 1972 – 1975 At the dawning of the 1970s, Americans were more aware than ever of the great damage more than a century of unrestricted industry had done to their country. With the passing of Richard Nixon’…

Reposting this one for no reason at all

Theory and Conjecture: ‘In Search of…’ and the Golden Age of Paranormal TV Last week, a story came across the We Are The Mutants news desk that inspired equal parts hope and dread: a reboot of the classic paranormal documentary series In Search of… is in the works, …

Extraterrestrials. Magic & Witchcraft. Missing Persons. Myths & Monsters. Lost Civilizations. Special Phenomena.

All Graphite and Glitter: ‘Down the Rhodes: The Fender Rhodes Story’ Earlier this year, while on a YouTube nostalgia tear through NBA highlights from the late '70s and early '80s, I made the following observation on Twitter after watching a live performance of Grover W...

"The Rhodes floated me through my latch key/TV childhood... the sonorous enchantress within the soundtrack of my life."

“The Devil Had Worshipers Long Before Lenin”: The Occult Spy Novels of E. Howard Hunt As the perceived Communist threat to the West came much closer to home in the wake of student unrest and leftist resistance to the Vietnam War, Hunt's antagonists suddenly metamorphosed from standard ...

“In the British Isles there are said to be fifty thousand devil cultists, and in America at least half a million.“

The New Age Will Be Televised: Harmonic Convergence at Mount Shasta, 1987 In August of 1987, thousands of New Age believers, curious skeptics, and others in search of a weekend road trip gathered at dozens of famous destinations across the globe to celebrate the combinat…

“I shall be appearing in many third dimensional guises. Look for me on your computer screens, your television sets, and beaming down from your satellites.”

“Stoned at Shadow Lake”: The Journals of Heron Stone, 1977 Shrunk now to an almost infinitesimally small dot in the rear-view mirror, 1977 continues to cast a strange shadow over our times. Perhaps one of what my colleague Mike has adroitly termed “h…

The @archive.org is an amazing place.

“An Enthusiastic Corporate Citizen”: David Cronenberg and the Dawn of Neoliberalism The cinematic corpus of David Cronenberg is probably best known for its expertly uncanny use of body horror, but looming almost as large in the writer-director's various universes is the presence of f...

"[Videodrome] has something that you don't have, Max. It has a philosophy. And that is what makes it dangerous."

It's a sad, sad tale: the wanton destruction of prime mid-century American kitsch. Mutants was on it back in 2017:

The Illustrated Rapture: ‘There’s a New World Coming’, 1974 Hal Lindsey's bestselling The Late, Great Planet Earth, originally published by the Zondervan Corporation in 1970, revolutionized the Christian publishing industry and introduced the mainstream to rap...

Hope all our readers are still present and accounted for

Yours Apefully: The ‘Planet of the Apes’ Live Arena Show, 1976 By the summer of 1976, I was a child steeped in animal terror. Well, steeped in loads of types of terror, really, seeing as I lived in mortal fear of UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts with tricorn hats, the Wirrn...

"A Live Arena Show needs action and dynamics—it needs conflict—and so the real protagonists turned out to be militaristic, powerful, confident, aggressive (and clad in fucking amazing clothes): the gorillas."

“I’m Sellin’ Folks A Dream”: Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s ‘Brought To Light’ In 1989, at the very end of the Cold War, a group of four prominent mainstream and alternative comic book writers and artists created a double volume graphic novel exposing the rampant injustices, …

"The foghorn mourns. The black wharfs are approaching."

"This is not a dream."

Gaming the Post-Apocalypse: ‘Gamma World’ and ‘Paranoia’ I wanted to talk about two tabletop roleplaying games that explored the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. At first I was going to venture the thesis that <i>Gamma World</i>, which TSR released in 1978,...

"You could say that Gamma World is a game in which silly things are taken overly seriously, and Paranoia is a game about deadly serious things played for laughs."

Squaring the Circle: An American Becomes One of the ‘Children of the Stones’ I didn't grow up in the UK and I didn't see Children of the Stones when it first aired in 1977 on ITV. I'm a product of the American suburbs who, just like a generation of slightly-older Britons, has ...

"Wasn’t the future—that gleaming hypergrid of every TV commercial’s dreams—supposed to banish ghosts and hauntings and old things from my life forever?"

ICYMI: We court collective controversy with our cinematic desert island discs.

You Can Only Watch 20 Films for the Rest of Your Life Think about the list strategically. It’s for the rest of your life! What will you watch when you’re sad? When you’re high? When the holidays roll around? When you’ve got the flu? When you need to beli...

We're back! Yeah, we finally did it. A list. 🎥

We're posting bonus ufology-related posts all day! #WorldUFODay

Happy World UFO Day! If you're so inclined, give us a follow. #WorldUFODay

Mil, my friendly neighbor, is a white witch in her late forties, a former National Security Agency employee. Instead of computer reference manuals and compiler printouts her office is filled with astrology books and dissertations on the Kabala. (9 Aug 1972)

One-pager for @wearethemutants.com.
A4, 250g paper, pencil, ink.
650 Polish Zlotys + shipping.

happy birthday Philip David Charles Collins

Threnody in Black and Gold: ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ as Cold War Historiography By Michael Grasso David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return arrived on television screens in the summer of 2017, promising to take fans of the original 1990-1991 ABC series back to …

Drink full, American, and descend.

Farewell to David Lynch.

“A Most Congenial Group”: Miller Lite TV Ads, 1974 – 1991 The development of “light” beer came with a commensurate marketing challenge: how to persuade the traditionally masculine beer-drinking audience to try a lower-calorie version of their …

RIP Bob Uecker.

“It’s All Right To Cry”: The Liberatory Potential of ‘Free to Be… You and Me’ By Michael Grasso In 1972, actress Marlo Thomas, who’d made her name on the hit ’60s TV series That Girl, along with a team of entertainers and the support of the newly-founded Ms. Foun…

Raindrops from your eyes
Washing all the mad out of you
Raindrops from your eyes
It's gonna make you feel better

Pot, Pyramids, and Politics: ‘High Times’ Magazine, 1976 – 1977 High Times arrived on newsstands in 1974, initially intended to be a single-issue lark by founder Tom Forçade. But the magazine ended up becoming an underground institution, a harbinger of increasi…

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