Digital love: why cinema can't get enough of cyberpunk

Ghost in the Shell is part of a cult subgenre whose lineage stretches back to the 1920s - and whose visions have never seemed so prescient

Code streams across a computer screen; hackers bark at each other in techno-jargon and hammer at keyboards; the real world seamlessly shifts into the virtual, and back again. This is the sort of scene that is instantly recognisable as a cyberpunk film, the subgenre of sci-fi that meshes together technology and counterculture - of which Ghost in the Shell, the live-action remake of the Japanese anime classic, is the latest high-profile example.

It is little surprise that cyberpunk has proved irresistible for many film-makers over the decades since the term was coined, by the author Bruce Bethke, in the early 1980s. With its visions of postapocalyptic futures, advanced technologies and virtual realms, they get to pack their films with visual effects to sweeten the (red) pill, while wrestling with weighty existential themes.