Chapter 1

’50s-’60s AGE OF ANXIETY

JERRY TAVIN/EVERETT

HAS A MAN in a rubber monster suit ever been so menacing? Godzilla lays waste to postwar Tokyo.

In 1957, a 10-year-old boy sat watching Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in a Stratford, Connecticut, movie theater when the film abruptly stopped, the lights went on, and the rattled manager stepped onstage. “I want to tell you,” he announced to the audience of kids, “that the Russians have put a space satellite into orbit around the earth. They call it . . . Spootnik.”

“This piece of intelligence was greeted by absolute, tomblike silence,” the boy—Stephen King—wrote nearly 20 years later. “I remember this very clearly: Cutting through that awful dead silence came one shrill voice . . . that was near tears but that was also full of a frightening anger: ‘Oh, go show the movie, you liar!’”

The idea that the hated Soviets had beaten the heroic United States into space was literally unbelievable for kids growing up in the Eisenhower era’s “strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris,” King continued. Against this backdrop—a superficial sense of security and prosperity undermined by fears of Communist infiltration and nuclear war—science fiction increasingly added the resonance of metaphor to its pulp roots, examining social issues and the human (not to mention inhuman) condition in both complex and entertaining ways.

In the early 1950s, films such as Destination Moon and The Day the Earth Stood Still appealed to audiences and critics. A corresponding renaissance in print was driven by such writers as Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Isaac Asimov, who brought a more personal, idiosyncratic approach to the genre than their predecessors had. In the process, SF became increasingly a part of the mainstream. The rise of post-pulp magazines that were open to edgy material led to the publication of such classics as Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, which later became the Academy Award–winning 1968 film Charly.

Of course, the genre had its critics. “Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction?” the detective novelist Raymond Chandler wrote. “It’s a scream. It is written like this: ‘I checked out with K19 on Adabaran III, and stepped out through the crummaliote hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels.” He went on, finally adding: “They pay brisk money for this crap?”

To be fair, publishers paid brisk money for crap detective stories, too. But science fiction has always involved a significant schlock factor. For every The Day the Earth Stood Still, there were a hundred Radar Men from the Moon and Them! The latter film, about giant radioactive ants taking over Los Angeles, was an example of the “nuclear monster movies” that became popular in the wake of 1954’s original Godzilla—without, of course, the examination of social issues that underlay actors marauding in rubber monster suits.

After the early-’50s boom, the genre entered a kind of latency period—until the rise of literary SF’s so-called new wave. “The ’60s in science fiction were an exciting period for both established and new writers and readers,” the SF writer Ursula K. Le Guin wrote. “All the doors seemed to be opening.” And cinema followed. In 1968, a pair of wildly disparate masterpieces were released: Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One year later, the United States—not Russia—landed on the moon.

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A 1951 EDUCATIONAL FILM called Duck and Cover taught schoolchildren this questionable technique for responding to a nuclear attack. Director George Lucas was among the kids exposed to the film. “We were always hearing about . . . the end of the world,” he later said.

1951 THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL

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GORT THE ROBOT, Helen Benson (Patricia Neal), and Klaatu (Michael Rennie) on the flying saucer in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

After a flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C., an alien named Klaatu emerges, announcing that he has come to Earth in peace. But when he produces a small cylinder—later revealed to be a gift for the President—he is shot by an Army soldier. That incident kicks off The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by the protean Robert Wise, who had edited Citizen Kane and later went on to helm such masterpieces as The Haunting and The Sound of Music. (He also directed the disappointing first Star Trek film.) But Day was arguably his first stone-cold classic—and a breakthrough for SF in general.

“Throughout the ’40s, science fiction was considered sort of déclassé—fine for horror movies and maybe some Flash Gordon, but it was marooned in a B-movie ghetto,” David Koepp, Jurassic Park’s screenwriter and the director of such films as Stir of Echoes, tells LIFE. “The Day the Earth Stood Still was the first time that SF got a true A-list director and the major-studio, big-budget treatment that it deserved.” Indeed, there wouldn’t be a comparatively thoughtful on-screen treatment of alien invasion until Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 26 years later.

The film heralded the beginning of the 1950s’ SF boom and paved the way for such humanistic genre films as Forbidden Planet (an extraterrestrial retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and It Came from Outer Space (which Steven Spielberg has cited as an influence on Close Encounters). Sure, studios kept turning out the underwhelming likes of Zombies of the Stratosphere and The Magnetic Monster, but the genre was clearly coming into its own. The early 1950s also saw the publication of such classic SF novels as Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

In fact, the era was “the genre’s equivalent of Hollywood’s classical period,” according to novelist Jonathan Lethem. The energy and creativity of this work would eventually help inspire the likes of writer Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow) and filmmakers Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey), François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville).

Like many other SF films of the ’50s (particularly Invasion of the Body Snatchers), The Day the Earth Stood Still reflected the cold war zeitgeist. “We were terrified of the Russians then, afraid of invasion and infiltration and ideas that conflicted with our own, and this movie just begged everybody to calm down and be reasonable,” says Koepp. “Plus, it had an awesome flying saucer.”

The film reportedly inspired President Ronald Reagan to tell the United Nations in 1987, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.”

KLAATU (Michael Rennie) is shot by a nervous soldier as he leaves his flying saucer in The Day the Earth Stood Still—a groundbreaking film, not least because its soundtrack featured the theremin, an eerie-sounding instrument that came to dominate the genre in the ’50s.

1953 THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

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Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, and Les Tremayne confront aliens in the first film adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds.

In the late 1800s, the amateur astronomer Percival Lowell claimed to have discovered canals on the surface of Mars. Believing they were signs of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, Lowell built his famous observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to study the planet’s water sources that ran, he believed, “for thousands of miles in an unswerving direction . . . as from Boston to San Francisco.”

Long before David Bowie got all Ziggy with it, the concept of life on Mars thrilled the public and inspired the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Princess of Mars, a 1912 serial, was a pioneering pulp romp that influenced George Lucas’s Star Wars. But the English novelist H.G. Wells took a far darker approach. In his 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, Victorian Britain—then the world’s greatest superpower—fell under attack by Martian tripods. “With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter,” Wells wrote. Little more than a decade later, World War I would destroy that assurance without any extraterrestrial help.

The first film version of the novel was 1953’s The War of the Worlds, which transplanted the setting to California. The movie cost $2 million, and its $1.4 million worth of special effects remains, despite visible wires, impressive even in the age of computer-generated imagery (CGI). “The manta-shaped vehicles gliding down the [L.A.] streets with their snake-like heat-ray projector blasting the surrounding buildings into rubble are among the great icons of SF cinema,” wrote Peter Nicholls in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

If Wells’s novel reflected a great empire’s fears of invasion, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film version reflected recent memories of one—namely the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “People talk about the moment when Tom Cruise’s character shakes the dust from his hair from the corpses of people who have been vaporized by the invaders,” David Koepp, who co-wrote the screenplay, tells LIFE. “But to me the movie was really much more about the 2004 American invasion of Iraq. That was a metaphor best left far beneath the surface, but science fiction is unique in its ability to let you make contemporary commentary rather quietly, within the confines of genre storytelling.”

Though Wells ended his career penning forgettable comedies of English country life, his early works—including The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau—remain science fiction cornerstones. And though the existence of Martian canals was conclusively disproved by NASA in the 1960s, the evidence that water once flowed there was discovered on the planet in 2011—and Percival Lowell’s enduring obsessions led to the 1930 discovery of an entirely new planet: Pluto.

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The War of the Worlds

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One of the movie’s one-eyed Martians.

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UFOS INVADE Los Angeles

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A Martian makes contact in an image that Steven Spielberg visually quoted nearly 30 years later in E.T.

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Spielberg’s 2005 take on the classic novel. “One of the first things Steven and I did was to make a list of the things we did not want to see in an alien-invasion movie,” screenwriter David Koepp tells LIFE. “We were on very familiar ground, so differentiation was the key. We decided we didn’t want to see anything that our main character couldn’t see. So the movie immediately became much more personal and intimate and, to our minds, terrifying in its plausibility.”

1954 GODZILLA

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THOUGH IT WAS originally nothing more than an attempt to ape (no pun intended) American monster movies, 1954’s Godzilla became something far more profound.

In March 1954, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon No. 5), a Japanese tuna trawler, cruised within 85 miles of Bikini Atoll, where American H-bombs had just been tested. Showered with fallout, the ship’s crew soon developed radiation sickness. This event—not, as many assume, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—inspired Godzilla, with the added influence of 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. (That film was based on Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Fog Horn.” His work also informed Close Encounters.)

Released less than a year after the Lucky Dragon tragedy, Godzilla begins with a scene inspired by the incident: A fishing boat explodes after being exposed to light from an atom bomb test, which in turn awakens the prehistoric creature Godzilla from his undersea home. (The saurian’s name is an Americanization of Gojira, an amalgam of the Japanese word for “whale” and the English word “gorilla.”) After laying waste to Tokyo, the monster is destroyed—only to be resurrected by a force greater than radiation: money from lucrative sequels.

Though in the U.S. Godzilla featured awkwardly spliced-in footage of actor Raymond Burr, it proved so popular that a Burr version was re-released in Japan. But the film meant very different things to the respective countries. While stateside audiences probably saw the movie’s bowdlerized cut as a lark along the lines of Creature from the Black Lagoon, the film’s antinuclear, antiwar message had a sobering influence in Japan. Still reeling from the devastation of World War II, some audiences reportedly watched the film in stricken silence—when they weren’t actually weeping.

Sure, Godzilla may be deathless—he’s one of the great movie monsters of the postwar period and has been called Japan’s greatest film star—but his relevance as a cultural touchstone has clearly diminished. This is particularly true in Japan, where the cautionary tale ultimately went unheard. One third of the small nation’s energy now comes from nuclear power, and the multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima power plant after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami have led to an infestation of radioactive wild boars. Though the first new Japanese Godzilla movie in 12 years is slated to be released this summer, there’s no word as to whether or not swine are involved.

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Akira Takarada (left), Takashi Shimura, and Akihiko Hirata in 1954’s Godzilla.

Godzilla returns in 1998’s disastrous (in more ways than one) Hollywood remake, which was so widely reviled it was called GINO (Godzilla in Name Only).

What, again? The monster reemerges—with more firepower this time—in 2014.

1956 INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

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A SWARM OF POD PEOPLE pursue the last two humans in town as director Don Siegel’s lean, mean, noir-inflected classic nears its end. The film has “a crazily convincing documentary feel,” Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, his 1981 survey of the horror genre. Without question, Body Snatchers straddles both sci-fi and horror.

The story of extraterrestrial life forms that fall on a small California town and grow into pods that replicate—and ultimately replace—humans, Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers “the neatest, cleanest, boldest use of metaphor in any science fiction or horror story I can remember,” Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp tells LIFE. “From time to time, we all feel alone, separate, apart—like we are living with strangers. This story literalizes that. The 1956 original plays on our fears of Communist infiltration, but it’s also commenting on a 1950s sense of industrial sameness.”

For his part, Jack Finney, author of the 1955 novel on which the Don Siegel film was based, insisted that Body Snatchers wasn’t “a metaphor for anything. I wrote it to entertain its readers, nothing more.” It certainly did that. It also helped revolutionize the genre. Along with writer Richard Matheson, Finney found that horror need not be confined to eerie European castles but could also be found among suburban American tract houses—and, in the process, he exerted an enduring influence on a young writer named Stephen King.

In 1978, Philip Kaufman’s remake of the film, set in San Francisco, was, in very different ways, every bit the equal of its predecessor. (A 1993 version, called simply Body Snatchers, received mixed reviews; and you can pretty much forget 2007’s The Invasion, starring Nicole Kidman.) Though filmed in color, it offered an ominous chiaroscuro effect, with light and shade used in hugely effective, if subtle, ways to differentiate the “pod people” from the “real” ones. (And is there any cinematic moment more chilling than Donald Sutherland’s character calling the police—only to realize that the operator knows his name?)

Just as the original film reflected the underlying paranoia of the 1950s, so the remake was steeped in post-Watergate mistrust of authority, wrapped up in the phony feel-good pop mantras of the so-called Me Decade. “It’s still a horror-SF film, first and foremost,” Koepp adds, “but the rightness of its central metaphor is probably why it keeps getting remade again and again.”

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DIRECTOR PHILIP KAUFMAN’S 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was downright gruesome, though never gratuitous. In this scene, body snatchers emerge from their pods to take over the bodies of Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams) and Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland).

1958 THE FLY

VINCENT PRICE and Charles Herbert stare at the half-human, half-insect of the title in The Fly. Herbert has said he was “petrified” and “physically sick” when he first saw the fly-human’s head. Even today, the shot of the mutant creature saying “Help me!” while being attacked by a spider is chilling.

Both Separate Tables and The Defiant Ones were nominated for the 1958 Best Picture Oscar. On the other end of the cinematic spectrum, The Fly and The Blob, also released that year, were dismissed—when they were noticed at all—as pulp trash. Fair enough. But these B pictures continue to grip our imagination, while Separate Tables—a middlebrow movie about people staying at an English seaside resort—has mostly been cleared away. No less than John Updike once said, “To create a coarse universal figure like Tarzan is in some way more of an accomplishment than the novels of Henry James.”

So many genre works create universal images and figures, even when the methods are coarse. No one is going to call 1958’s The Fly a truly great film, but in some respects it’s more resonant than, say, the films of Ingmar Bergman—or Updike’s work, for that matter. The story of a scientist who uses himself as a guinea pig in teleportation experiments, The Fly shows what happens when the titular insect gets trapped in the man’s machine—and their genes are spliced together. (Where’s the Raid when you need it?)

In 1986, David Cronenberg helmed a remarkable remake, very much part of what has been called “the Cronenberg Experiment.” The Canadian auteur’s sui generis films—an amalgam of science fiction and what has been called “body horror”—often focus on the disastrous merging of man and machine. Consider 1983’s Videodrome, in which people are turned into assassins by mind-altering videocassettes inserted in their stomachs. Or 1977’s Rabid, in which radical skin-graft technology turns patients into sexual vampire-zombies.

While these plots may sound like drive-in trash (they certainly aren’t Separate Tables), Cronenberg’s films are in fact profound, artistic amplifications of pioneering work by genre-bending literary/SF novelists J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs. (Not surprising, Cronenberg eventually adapted books by both writers, Crash and Naked Lunch respectively.)

In the end, The Fly is “a profound parable on love and loss,” Time magazine’s film critic Richard Corliss wrote. “[The scientist] might be the victim of any degenerative disease—cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s—who struggles to retain his humanity even as he decays into something . . . monstrous . . . Mixing self-aware wit with gross-out special effects, Cronenberg elicits a creepy unease, at least for those of us who think of middle age as the dress rehearsal for senility, or worse.”

1968 PLANET OF THE APES

THE STATUE OF LIBERTY, half-buried in the sand, is revealed during the ending of Planet of the Apes.

Back when George Lucas was a lowly film student shadowing director Francis Ford Coppola on the set of 1968’s ill-advised musical Finian’s Rainbow, Planet of the Apes—the movie that would launch the most successful pre–Star Wars SF franchise—was ramping up.

Based on the satirical French novel by Pierre Boulle (he also wrote Bridge over the River Kwai), Planet of the Apes tells the story of astronaut George Taylor, who crash-lands on a planet where civilized simians rule over humans who are, well, subhuman. (They also don’t speak; Taylor doesn’t either, having lost his voice following the crash.)

The premise initially met with considerable skepticism in Hollywood, but all that changed when Fantastic Voyage became a hit in 1966, leading 20th Century Fox to believe there was an audience for an oddball SF film. Starring Charlton Heston in a loincloth, Planet of the Apes was a big-budget box office smash that fueled a TV series and a barrelful of monkey sequels.

Released in a year of intensifying race riots, the My Lai massacre, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy—the film was, like much enduring SF, an elaborate metaphor in addition to a ripping yarn. In this case, it arguably reflected a fear that the established order would be upended by civil unrest. “There is a long-standing fear among whites in the United States of . . . a loss of racial dominance,” wrote Eric Greene in Planet of the Apes as American Myth. “Those fears were aggravated during the sixties by the war in Vietnam and by the black liberation struggle at home. The sense that . . . racial violence . . . was beyond control . . . led to a self examination by whites of which the Apes films were a part.”

Yes, and they were also a hell of a lot of fun. Is there any line of dialogue more satisfying than Heston’s in the first film? (“Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” he shouts, his voice finally restored.) Or any final image more surprising than the shot of the Statue of Liberty, partly buried in the sand?

A 21st-century reboot initially attracted the likes of Oliver Stone (JFK), James Cameron (The Terminator), Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings), and Michael Bay (Transformers). But 2001’s Planet of the Apes was eventually directed by Tim Burton, who—following on-set monkey business—said he would “rather jump out a window” than work on a another sequel. The most recent installment, War for the Planet of the Apes, is scheduled to be released next year.

ACTRESS KIM HUNTER (the sympathetic Dr. Zira) gets a monkey makeover for the first installment of the enduring franchise. The actors playing apes had to drink through straws because of their prosthetic masks.

1968 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

ASTRONAUT DAVID BOWMAN (Keir Dullea) ages during 2001’s Star Gate sequence, in which he is led “beyond the infinite.”

On the heels of 1964’s groundbreaking comedy Dr. Strangelove, director Stanley Kubrick decided to make what he called “the proverbial good science fiction movie.” Seeking a collaborator, he was put in touch with Arthur C. Clarke, a science fiction writer chiefly known for his 1953 novel Childhood’s End. Kubrick was, in Clarke’s words, “determined to create a work of art which would arouse the emotions of wonder, awe . . . even, if appropriate, terror.”

Using a few of Clarke’s short stories as source material, the two sat down to simultaneously work on a novel and a screenplay. Beginning with the discovery of tools by protohuman apes, the story they devised deals with the discovery of a smooth black monolith buried on the moon—and ultimately leads, in the finished film, to the celebrated Star Gate sequence, a special effects tour de force that was marketed as “the ultimate trip.” (It was the ’60s, remember.)

Though one of the project’s initial titles was Tunnel to the Stars, privately Kubrick and Clarke called it How the Solar System Was Won, riffing on the 1962 MGM film How the West Was Won. Of course, it ultimately became 2001: A Space Odyssey. “It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation,” Kubrick said, referring to Homer’s the Odyssey.

Throughout the film’s development, the perfectionist director was working against time. NASA was shooting for the moon—literally—and Kubrick didn’t want an Apollo mission to render his vision out of date or, worse, wrong. So, instead of relying on recycled Hollywood visions of space, Kubrick solicited help from the likes of aeronautics specialists and aerospace engineers.

The result: a film that looked and felt utterly different from anything that had come before. Kubrick and Clarke created, in fact, a cinematic concept of space that has been imitated ever since. In the process, they were also prescient. Yes, in the year 2001 we dealt with terrorist attacks—not colonies on the moon—but consider the film’s executive briefcase with its phone handset and dial. “Look closely, and all the elements of the laptop or smartphone are there, half a century ahead of time,” said writer Piers Bizony, author of The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Little more than a year after 2001 was released, man finally set foot on the moon. Kubrick fans were not disappointed.

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After astronaut Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) has been killed by the ship’s HAL 9000 computer during a space walk, Bowman, in the EVA pod, tries to retrieve his body but is thwarted by HAL.

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2001’s Dawn of Man sequence, in which prehistoric hominids discover a mysterious monolith that influences the species’ evolution and is later found buried on the moon. The sequence ends with one creature throwing a bone into the air; rising in slow motion, it is suddenly replaced with the shot of a spaceship cruising to Johann Strauss’s “The Blue Danube” waltz.

The ominous eye of the computer HAL, who sings “Bicycle Built for Two” as he is shut down by astronaut Bowman.

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Bowman becomes the Star Child at the film’s end.

Director Stanley Kubrick with Gary Lockwood (Dr. Frank Poole) on the set.