What happened to the old site?!
Well, it is quite embarrassing as a matter of fact. I had reviewed myself all the way from 1902 to 1956 at my old Scifist blog when I took a hiatus because of the stress of my day job. When I tried to log on again, I seemed to have lost all my login info and hadn’t really bothered to set up any recovery safeguards, and despite much effort wasn’t able to convince WordPress to let me reset my password. The only solution was to set up a new blog. But the bright side is that I was able to improve on the old texts, many of which were really sub-par.

What happened to the new site?!
Ah. Here’s what happened: WordPress discontinued supporting my old/new theme template, which resulted in what appeared to be a bug in my block editor. Put simply: I wasn’t able to add new posts or edit text. So I had to switch to a new theme template. Surprisingly, WordPress offers a rather small library of templates, and none of them really suited my needs. I chose one that met most of my criteria, and will work on tweaking it as I go along.

Are you actually going to review ALL sci-fi films in history?
The short answer is: Yes. The long answer: Well, there are a few caveats. For more on that, see the What is Scifist page.

Won’t that take, like, forever?
Yes.

Why do you do this?
Because it’s fun! I love research and I like to have long-term projects. And basically because I once looked for a site just like this when trying to research an article, and found that it didn’t exist.

Why science fiction films? 
I actually wasn’t that big of a sci-fi nerd when I started this in my very late twenties (or was it early thirties?) I was, however, a big fan of The Rocky Horror Picture show, and was sent to review a stage production of Rocky Horror at the Turku City Theatre in Finland. I wanted to do a thorough job, and set about watching all the films that the show references. But then it hit me that many of the films are either based on books or themselves based on even older films. And to put the films into perspective, I had to watch other films that they drew inspiration from. And then the whole thing just snowballed and I found myself checking sci-fi references in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Arabian Nights. And then it was all downhill from there.

Where do you find all the films you review?
Well, let’s put it like this: the internet is full of movies, and I try the best I can to watch them as legally as possible. In many cases I buy a DVD or stream-on-demand.

What reference material do you use to find out about obscure films?
IMDb actually has a superb search function, which lets you search all films by genre and release date. I also use Wikipedia’s list as a second source to catch things that may not have been tagged as sci-fi in IMDb. Furthermore, I have dug up a few obscurities through Phil Hardy’s book The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, as well as a publication of all of Variety’s SF movie reviews collected between two covers. Google is great, and I’ve collected a small digital library on books about SF movies. Film historians Tom Weaver and Bill Warren are my household gods. I also try to search digital newspaper and magazine archives for old reviews.

I spotted a Yugoslavian science fiction movie from 1927 that you have missed. Can you review it?
Of course! Please drop me a line through the Contact page, and if I can find it, I will certainly review it!

Are you on social media? 
Yes! Please like Scifist on Facebook! I also have an Instagram account where I do capsule reviews on SF books, very much in the same vein as I do film reviews.

And who are you, again?

My name is Janne Wass, and I’m a forty-something Finland-Swedish journalist residing in Helsinki, Finland. When I’m not writing about sci-fi films I work as the editor for a monthly magazine called Ny Tid. In 2024 I received the “journalist of the year” award for Fenno-Swedish journalists, the Topelius Award. I have a background in news and culture journalism and I have studied journalism and American studies at the University of Helsinki. I am a film geek, and also love theatre, photography, rock music, cabaret, squirrels, gardening, archives, politics and my partner. I am in the process of collecting a rather ambitious library of SF books and have in later years picked up book binding and book repair as a result of this. People often mistake me for a drummer in a metal band or the poet Ralf Andtbacka, and can usually never guess that I dabbled in folk dancing as a teen. I belong to Finland’s 6 percent minority of Swedish speakers. Swedish is an official language in Finland, and Swedish has been spoken here for at least a thousand years.