“Perhaps searching for a Ballardian cinema in ordinary terms is obtuse: we should be looking instead at CCTV footage taken from any shopping-mall security camera, or the Big Brother daytime live feed, or one of the direct-impact 9/11 World Trade Centre plane-crash shots – avidly consumed on YouTube, but now considered too brutal for television. Ballard was a poet of the occult fear, the subliminal horror.” And his influence spread far beyond literature.