These posters of well known scifi shows (and a few purely geeky shows) like The X-Files, True Blood, and MacGyver were envisioned by Austrian designer Exergian, and are sold as archival giclee prints via Blanka for £50.00 or $80.

By Exergian

By Exergian

By Exergian

By Exergian

By Exergian

By Exergian

By Exergian

By Exergian

By Exergian

By Exergian

After compiling 43 clips of science-fiction dream sequences, we started to wonder exactly why we invade people's dreams so often in SF stories. What purpose does this unreality serve?

We all want to venture past our own limited little reality fields and pop our limiting bubbles of experience — and sometimes aliens, spaceships, time-machines and weird mutations just aren't enough to make that possible. Sometimes we have to get all the way liminal. Stand in the doorway for a bit.

But more specifically, here are some reasons why science fiction gets so dream-happy:

1) The cheap foreshadowing

So we haven't thought about the Borg in months, and they haven't flashed so much as a single implant around these parts. But they're never far from our thoughts — or our dreams, for that matter. And it's just a nifty coincidence — and by "nifty," we mean "ominous and horrifying" — that our hero has a terrible dream about the Borg right before they pop up again. Such a dream does double duty: it reminds us of exactly what the Borg are about and why they're so fearsome. And it sets the mood for another round of Borgian devilry.

2) The prophetic dream

This is similar to the use of dreams as foreshadowing, but usually the foreshadowing dream also includes some actual useful information that our heroes can decipher and use against the monster/villain later. The prophetic dream is a plot device as well as (or sometimes instead of) a grace note. It's not just thrown in for effect, it's actually providing useful info, or at least clues to future developments. The frequent dream sequences in Buffy The Vampire Slayer often set up developments years down the road, like the coming of Dawn. A cruder version is the Doctor's dream at the start of the Doctor Who story "The Time Monster," which gives him tons 'o' clues.

3) Escaping the straitjacket of realism

Science fiction often works really hard to establish a mood of complete realism, paradoxically because it features so many elements that don't, and maybe couldn't, exist in our world. And sometimes, the only excuse for letting go of that need for realism is to stick in a dream sequence, where everything goes loopy.

4) Heightened realism

On the other hand, if people really did meet aliens or their own grandparents, or whatever, people would probably have severe, bizarre mental reactions as a result. Reactions that, honestly, would seem over the top or crazy if you tried to depict them normally. So sometimes the only way to convey a realistic sense of humans coming face-to-face with the unreal is by representing their terror and confusion in the form of an alarming dream. It's actually a form of added realism.

5) Thematic gracenotes

This is something that seemed to leap out from many of the dream sequences we looked over. Like Fahrenheit 451, for example — the hero is facing a conflict, or a mind-blowing decision, and we see that mental anguish amplified in a dream sequence. Preferably full of whirling shapes, and faces going around in a circle. Whoosh.

6) The easy scare that doesn't break any toys

Oh no, Ripley has an alien in her stomach, and it just burst out! Oh, except she doesn't, and it didn't. False alarm, folks.

7) Padding the running length.

What do you mean, we still have another ten minutes left? Do we have any explosives we haven't set off? No? Can we afford another monster costume or some extra CG? No? Okay, how about a long, trippy dream sequence where people stand around and recite e.e. cummings. It's puddlewonderful — in space! The fans will be debating what it means for decades...

8) Up the surrealism ante.

Imagine you're David Lynch. Okay, that may be asking too much. But pretend for a moment that you're impersonating a guy (or Laura Dern) and who has weird hair. And the person you're impersonating has done a lot of drugs, and it's making him or her have loopy visions of worm babies. What can you possibly do to make this guy (or Laura) have more weirdness on top of that? How about a totally batfreak dreamsequence, preferably featuring David Bowie? Or maybe a tiny radiator lady with facial hair?

9) Meeting the alien

Sometimes alien creatures (and gods, and demons) are so alien that no real-life encounter will work. The only way we can talk to them, or have any kind of meaningful communication, is in a dream, or a dreamlike world, where everything is semi-nonsensical and there's a bit of vaseline on the lens... because we're meeting a consciousness that's totally unlike our own.

10) Extra sexiness without consequences

And most importantly, we want to see Mulder shirtless and handcuffed. We want to see Sookie and Eric doing the wild thing. We crave random titillation, and we don't care if it makes sense in the context of the story. In fact, the less sense it makes, or the more it hints at undercurrents of sexitude under the surface, the more exciting it is. So it's almost mandatory for dream sequences to include "I can't believe they went there" friskiness.

The truth is, we want to be smacked in the face with strangeness. Our desire for the bizarre and ridiculous is so much greater than our pitiful suspension of disbelief that you need to short-circuit the whole "is this really happening" question.

Syfy is trying to impress us with its new look and new shows, like a small-town girl who moves to the big city to be an "actress", bleaches her hair platinum blonde and changes her name. And while we remain skeptical of clichéd reinvention, we have to admit – it worked for Norma Jeane.

Warehouse 13 premiered this week on Syfy, and many viewers were filled with a strong sense of Déjà vu. A pair of odd-couple government agents are sent to investigate paranormal activity, blatantly setting the characters up as replicas of Mulder and Scully. Couldn't Syfy at least have mixed things up a bit by making Pete being the by-the-book skeptic and Myka being the intuitive true-believer? But it's not just the agents themselves that are borrowed directly from the archives:

The name of show, and its very concept, evokes another direct influence: the quirky Canadian series Friday the 13th that aired in 1987, about a pair of cousins who inherit an antique shop that turns out to be filled with supernatural artifacts. They too are aided by an eccentric middle-aged man with a vast knowledge of the supernatural. In Friday, the female lead is named Micki, and Warehouse's tight-laced female agent is Myka – here again, Syfy strives to make things new and shiny by swapping "y"s for "i"s.

This isn't a new approach by any means. When Syfy's old staple show, Eureka, first premiered in 2006, its premise was equally familiar; government official gets sent to a small town in the Pacific Northwest to investigate a strange occurrence, teams up with local law enforcement and becomes deeply embroiled in the wacky little town and all its colorful characters. Sheriff Carter is no Agent Cooper, but the sense of odd familiarity about the show was undeniable. Eureka appeared to be a candy-coated kid's coloring-book version of Twin Peaks.

The question remains, why isn't Syfy trying harder to hide its repackaging of television we already know and love? Do they hope that by transparently recycling these well-worn television tropes they can take a direct route to high ratings and fan admiration? Certainly the ever-increasing number of movie sequels indicates "more of the same" is a safe bet. Syfy already seems to be engaged in rebooting even more 80's television, including Quantum Leap and Alien Nation. It is remarkable how much attention all these "new" shows have gotten on blogs, message boards and by word of mouth. Perhaps the network executives at Syfy know the game better than we imagine, and are inviting us to play along as we watch them pressing our buttons. But don't they also know that "familiarity breeds contempt"?

You have our attention, Syfy – now can you show us something new?

Deadgirl is such a striking entry in the zombie feminism genre because it's just so damn literal. You've got a naked girl, strapped to a bed in a mental institution, being raped by a bunch of teenaged guys. Clearly a situation in need of a feminist zombie intervention if I ever saw one. If you were to boil the message of this film down to one basic point (which you probably shouldn't), it would be that men shouldn't rape women because those women might turn out to be superpowered zombies who want to eat your you-know-what.

As you can see from this tiny piece of the teaser, the movie is an emo arthouse take on your standard "how do you contain a zombie" plot. Filmmakers Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel did not accidentally create a movie that dabbles in questions of how women are degraded by men. That's basically the point of the story: Our vengeful zombie's refusal to be raped and ruined is symbolic enough to provide social commentary, but grody enough to keep you entertained.

Still, it wasn't that long ago that raped women in movies just stayed dead.

What struck me immediately on seeing the trailer for Deadgirl was that Sarmiento and Harel were clearly referencing another dead, raped girl wrapped in plastic. Laura Palmer, the girl whose murder rips apart the tiny town of Twin Peaks in the eponymous cult TV series, is also found "dead, wrapped in plastic," as one character puts it. You can see her glamor shot above, an image that was used to advertise the haunting David Lynch series starring Kyle McLaughlin as FBI agent Dale Cooper, come to investigate the former prom queen's murder.

Investigating the horrifying events that led to Laura's murder takes Cooper into a supernatural world of ghosts and the undead. But Laura never avenges herself. Her spirit lingers, as does the evil BOB spirit who has helped perpetrate the crime, but Laura herself never has a chance to fight back zombie-style. Maybe she's the pre-feminist zombie, the modest and lady-like creature who lets men solve the mystery of her death for her.

The message of Twin Peaks, at least in terms of its dead girl protagonist, is that men won't get away with rape — but they'll be brought to justice by other men, not the women they've victimized.

Similarly, the cult 1980s film River's Edge features a very Deadgirl-esque plot. A teen rapes and murders his girlfriend, then leaves her body out for all his friends to see. They decide to cover up the murder, visiting the dead girl's body every day until a few of them realize what they've done is wrong and turn in the perpetrator. That haunting image of the dead girl, unable to fight back, is partly what fuels the bizarre rage at the heart of zombie feminism. Watching that pretty, dead face, you want her to get up and scream: You want her to bite that raping bastard's scalp off and drool his brains all over the place.

And that was precisely the pleasure in watching this year's other great zombie feminist masterpiece, Zombie Strippers. This flick features porn star Jenna Jameson as a stripper bitten by a zombie infected by a government drug to keep soldiers fighting after they die. The more zombie-fied she gets, the more the clientele goes crazy for her. Even when she drags men into the back room and rips their throats out and bites their dicks off. Soon, the other strippers are begging to be infected too, so they can make more in tips.

Before long, nearly all the strippers are infected, and they've got a giant basement room full of all the reanimated, mutilated men they've been gnawing on. None of these strippers are being raped or murdered by men — they're just dealing with standard-issue stuff like objectification and the dangers of working in the sex industry. And yet it's hard not to see their undeaths as a kind of revenge on men who treat women like objects. These guys come to the strip club to "get some meat," and then they're turned into meat themselves.

The problem here is that the men actually like it. Their favorite strippers are the zombies, and the women have gained "power" only by becoming monsters. Just as our girl in Deadgirl can only fight back because she's a monster. So is the message of zombie feminism that a strong women is always a monster? That she must die and return as a ghoul in order to fight back against rape and less violent forms of sexism?

Or is the message that men must die and become zombies themselves before women will ever be happy? Two years ago, a brilliant Canadian comedy called Fido posed that very question. A traditional housewife played by Carrie Ann "Matrix" Moss falls in love with the zombie servant her husband brings home from the zombie control factory (after people start rising from their graves, his employer invents a "control collar" that makes them docile). Why is the zombie man better than her husband? He cooks, he cleans, he takes care of their son and pays attention to her. An object himself, he's able to see the humanity in a woman who is treated like an object by all the living men in her life.

Ever since Dr. Frankenstein reanimated a woman to serve as his monster's bride and she said no, the zombie woman has been a weird figure for female resistance to control. Zombie feminism is an uneasy subgenre, daring to use freakish gore and death slapstick to pose questions about what it might take for women to become unrapeable. Or for men to see women the way women see themselves.

The question is, why do we have to imagine ourselves as monsters in order to tell stories about what it would be like to become fully human?