event The Watching Hour: Lifeforce

Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce is a sci-fi movie mash-up involving vampiric aliens in a 1980s London terrorizing and zombifying the local population. Based on the novel The Space Vampires—the title of which is telling in itself—Lifeforce wasn’t exactly a box-office hit when it was released in 1985. (Ron Howard’s Cocoon opened the same weekend and, incidentally, ended up being the infinitely more popular life-force-centered-alien flick.) But the strange mélange of psychic, outer-space vampires and re-imagined monster lore is certainly the stuff of cult fandom, and Hooper—a well-seasoned horror director—couldn’t really ask for anything more satisfying than that. 

Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce is a sci-fi movie mash-up involving vampiric aliens in a 1980s London terrorizing and zombifying the local population. Based on the novel The Space Vampires—the title of which is telling in itself—Lifeforce wasn’t exactly a box-office hit when it was released in 1985. (Ron Howard’s Cocoon opened the same weekend and, incidentally, ended up being the infinitely more popular life-force-centered-alien flick.) But the strange mélange of psychic, outer-space vampires and re-imagined monster lore is certainly the stuff of cult fandom, and Hooper—a well-seasoned horror director—couldn’t really ask for anything more satisfying than that.