Sexuality as the mediated, oppressive, conscious contagion attacking personal agency, biology and ontology. Subject to deception, technology, ideology and social stratification (The Law being as un/dead as Bela Lugosi). Subcultural neuroses that would eventually become common parlance, and then repackaged accordingly. AIDS was beginning to be diagnosed around the same time, but wasn't a mainstream panic until the middle of the decade. If sci-fi/horror's nightmares don't exist at its time of writing, it may be necessary to invent them shortly after.
All the above are cult classics, highly influential in their respective (sub)genres. 'Sleeper' hits that took years to grow an audience (or canonization for Blade Runner), their motifs moving across fashion, adverts, pop videos, and product design, ie. everywhere. A virus of the pleasure principle. Away from the peer pressures of cinema viewing, the lonely - guilty? - space of home video gave these films room to gestate. The lifestyles, behaviour and economic conditions of their characters now appear far less alien than they did in 1982/83. We may be more alienated than these doom-mongers could forecast. Consider the shape Cafe Videodrome has taken since, and your statistical likelihood of surveying either (a) a corporate-led social network, or (b) pornography shortly after looking at this blog. All those immaterial encounters... like tears in the rain...
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