Embrace your inner 'weird': we rank the most bizarre and dark pop culture of 2016

The latest big and small screen hits are focusing on the weird and wonderful

Blame dark forces or a conjunction of the spheres, but the zeitgeist has turned rather occult of late. Netflix’s gloriously nostalgic Stranger Things was only the beginning – pop culture is about to get 
even more arcane: dimension bending! Dark magic! Scientologists! Here’s WIRED’s guide. (Or is it?)

1. Westworld

Jonathan Nolan gives Michael Crichton’s 1973 Wild West theme-park robots an existential angst upgrade. Sky Atlantic

2. Black Mirror

Charlie Brooker's cult techno-dystopian series moves to Netflix with 12 newly unsettling episodes. Netflix

3. Doctor Strange

By the crimson bands of Cyttorak! Marvel movies are getting magical (and we don’t mean Benedict Cumberbatch’s eerily high cheekbones).

4. Trolls

A movie based on the latest iteration of the 60s toy? This must have been the influence of a curse…

5. My Scientology Movie

Louis Theroux takes on the celebrity “church”. E-meters, Thetans and Xenu? Now that is crazy.

6. Class

The Doctor Who spin-off is set in the school that featured way back in Who’s first episode. Think Buffy, with added space-time weirdness. BBC Three

This article was originally published by WIRED UK