Every decade has their cinematic science fiction obsessions which speak to its concerns of the age; in the 1950s films such as Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and Them! capitalised on fears of alien invasion and nuclear proliferation. In the 1960s films like Barbarella and Ikarie XB-1 captured the hopes and dangers of space exploration …
In that filled-to-bursting canon of 1950s science fiction cinema, movies range from true film classics – like the Hawksian The Thing from Another World (1951), and that alarm bell about human desensitization, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – to cheapie craptasmagoriums like Beginning of the End (1957 – giant grasshoppers crawling over photographs of downtown Chicago), and It Conquered the World (1956 – “It” being an alien that looks like a devil-faced carrot with lobster claws). I
Ils (Them) Written by David Moreau & Xavier Palud Directed by David Moreau & Xavier Palud France/Romania, 2006 The unknown has been a common theme in horror since the very first horror movies. It used to be possibly the most common theme in the entire horror genre. Somewhere along the way the various studios, directors, …
We know the greats; movies like Metropolis (1927), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977). And there are those films which maybe didn’t achieve cinematic greatness, but through their inexhaustible watchability became genre touchstones, lesser classics but classics nonetheless, like The War of the Worlds (1953), Godzilla (1954), …
To investigate the origins of the horror film, it is necessary to discuss the German expressionism movement of the 1920s in films such as Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Der Golem. This time around a genre whose peak was the 1950s and 60s is up for discussion in the creature feature. There is …
Science fiction, horror, monsters on the loose – they’ve been a part of the movies almost since the beginning of the medium. Georges Melies famously turned out a vaudeville-flavored adaptation of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon in 1904, the Edison company produced the first of a nearly century-long parade of film (and later …