Through the analysis of two works and two filmmakers as distant from each other as Trash Humpers, a 2009 work by director Armony Corine, and They Live, a 1988 film written and directed by John Carpenter, the author of the book organises a traverse of both filmmakers’ cinematic works as much as of an extreme territory of cinema and narrative, a landscape in which to glimpse the signs of a fierce social critique that does not exhaust its narrative capacity in film production but finds echoes outside in the events, narratives, and aesthetics that characterise the contemporary. The texts, originally published on the visual culture research platform Phroom Platform between 2019 and 2022, have been collected, expanded and reworked here in collaboration with the platform.