Blue Sunshine (1977), written and directed by Jeff Lieberman, occupies a strange and unforgettable corner of 1970s horror cinema. Neither a conventional slasher nor a supernatural shocker, it is a paranoid conspiracy thriller disguised as a grindhouse exploitation film. Its central image—otherwise ordinary people suddenly going violently insane and losing their hair in clumps, might sound absurd on paper. Yet the film transforms that pulpy premise into something genuinely unsettling and, at times, eerily plausible. At first glance, Blue Sunshine seems to fit right in with the low-budget horror of its era, coming out around the same time as heavy hitters like Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. But Lieberman’s film actually predates the slasher boom. It feels closer in spirit to paranoid thrillers like the '78 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the political distrust found in The Parallax View. Rather than centering on a masked killer, the movie builds dread around ...