Tonight’s double feature delivers two flavors of dystopian horror—one soaked in blood, the other crackling with telepathic tension. Thirst (1979) and Crosstalk (1982) take you deep into the eerie underbelly of Australian sci-fi horror, where sinister organizations pull the strings and the mind is just another thing to be controlled.
THIRST (1979): BLOOD BANKS & BRAINWASHING
Vampires run the world, but they’ve traded crypts for corporate boardrooms. Meet "The Brotherhood," an elite blood cult running a high-tech farm where human captives—"blood cows"—are kept for routine draining. Enter Kate, a woman who may or may not be a descendant of Elizabeth Báthory, and the next unwilling recruit into their nightmare. Drugged, kidnapped, and mentally shattered, she’s trapped in a reality where shadowy figures dictate her fate. Thirst ditches gothic tropes for cold clinical terror—hypnotic dream sequences, sterile white labs, and psychological warfare that makes you question what’s real. It’s a slow-burn paranoia piece wrapped in sci-fi dread, proving that the scariest thing about vampires isn’t their fangs—it’s their power.
CROSSTALK (1982): THE MIND IS A PRISON
Corporate espionage, artificial intelligence, and a man trapped inside his own mind—welcome to Crosstalk, Australia’s answer to Brainstorm and Ghost in the Machine. When a paralyzed computer engineer gets a neural link to a sentient AI, things spiral into tech-fueled terror. The machine learns too much, takes too much, and soon, reality itself starts breaking down. Surveillance paranoia meets telepathic horror as our protagonist fights to escape both the system and his own hijacked consciousness. The aesthetic? 80s computer madness—green text on black screens, bulky keyboards clacking ominously, and that creeping fear that machines might not just think, but think for themselves.
Both films tap into the primal fear of control—whether by bloodthirsty elites or rogue AIs. Thirst drinks deep from the well of corporate horror, while Crosstalk drowns in the existential terror of lost autonomy. Together, they paint a bleak, unsettling picture of a world where your mind is never your own.
OZPLOITATION THURSDAY—Where the real horror isn’t what’s outside. It’s what’s inside.
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