Around the same time I was watching Close Encounters for the first time, BBC2 were showing, in a weekday tea-time slot, a series of 1950s science fiction classics. This was my first exposure to older sci-fi, i.e. things that pre-dated 1977. I’m sure if I dug around the internet the evidence would contradict me, but the films I remember seeing then are: This Island Earth, When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds, Invaders From Mars, The Day The Earth Stood Still and – incongruously – The Legend of Boggy Creek. One film conspicuous by its absence – or maybe it was on and I missed it – is arguably the finest of all 1950s sci-fi, Forbidden Planet, which I didn’t see until I was much older.
I still love those first five films, to a greater or lesser degree. Each of them I think has at least a moment or two that would have chilled – and certainly thrilled – me as a boy. This Island Earth of course is “sampled” in E.T., which I watched on a very shonky pirate Betamax tape around this time. The scene where the plane is abducted by the UFO is on TV in the background in Spielberg’s film. That’s a creepy moment: the absence of all noise other than the ear-splitting whine is still quite startling. There’s little else about the film that the young me would have been scared by, because the air of paranoia among the scientists would probably have gone right over my head. The bug-eyed, mega-brained monster with its casual trousers might have been scary, but I suspect what I loved about this film were the matte paintings of the doomed planet Metaluna, which our heroic Earth scientists have been kidnapped in order to help save.
Matte paintings were the highlight – and the literal climax – of When Worlds Collide. There’s even less ‘science’ here than in This Island Earth but it’s still lots of fun (especially if you’re only eight). The doomed planet this time is Earth: heavenly bodies Bellus and Zyra are on a direct collision course with us. Unlike (say) War of the Worlds, there’ll be no saving the planet: the key is to make sure some people – preferably the ‘right sort’, of course – escape. And of course we see the best and worst of humanity as a raffle takes place to determine who gets to escape on the superbly 50s rocket ship, whose destination is one of the pesky planets that’s going to destroy us!
When the refugees step onto the surface of Zyra, the background mattes were a thing of Technicolour wonder:
Isn’t that lovely? So far though, so few scares: except, of course, the prospect of global annihilation, which leads me nicely on to the next film. I admit a slight disappointment with War of the Worlds the first time I saw it, because the action had been transplanted to California from England. I knew the story from Jeff Lynne’s brilliant/naff pop-opera ‘Musical Version’ (1978) and there was plenty in that which had terrified me as a four-year-old.
The film’s flying machines, however – although not the creepy, insectile tripods of the book (I know, I know, insects have six legs but you know what I mean) – were terrifying. Again, there’s a great use of sound as they spit their (frankly messy) death ray left, right and centre. The scene where three men waving a white flag advance on the invading Martians, only to be vaporized, terrified me. It seemed so real. And, of course, I’d have known that a similar fate befell the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: their shadows were burned onto the ground.
The Martian death ray scenes were loud and scary and the prospect of yet another one was awful, so when our heroes are hiding out in a collapsed farmhouse – the quietest scene in the movie – and the Martians send their little probe in to hunt them out, the tension is unbearable. And then we see one! An actual Martian! Now, I remember that there was some Making of E.T. programme I’d seen where Steven Spielberg showed the influence of this alien on the character design for E.T., so the effect was less shocking to me than it might have been, but this was an alien that wasn’t so obviously someone in a suit, and which looked truly Other.
Because we have an innate tendency to anthropomorphise, it’s tempting to see the blue and green shapes as rather sad eyes, and the red as a mouth. But that would be wrong, because the whole thing is evidently a single eye. And that makes the creature’s shape truly unsettling.
Invaders From Mars, though, was the real deal and the scariest of them all. In some ways it’s the simplest, and certainly the cheapest-looking, but it delivers far more chills than almost anything I’d ever seen. The world being destroyed by rogue planets was one thing; the world being dominated by our celestial neighbours was another; but having all the familiar, comforting faces of your childhood turn into something different – something unknown and hostile – was surely, for a child, the most terrifying prospect of all. Forget the subtext of Communist infiltration: the text was enough.
You can’t help feel for young David MacLean as his father, then his mother, then his friend all take a little trip over the hill to investigate whatever may have landed there one evening, and come back irrevocably changed: short-tempered, creepy, and bearing a small scar on the back of their neck. Who can he turn to for help? A teacher? The police?
The little knoll beyond which the UFO lands is another set, clearly shot in a studio, and all the eerier for it (see image above). The grain renders it just unclear enough, and the distance is bewildering: people take a long time to walk what looks a very short distance, before the ground beneath their feet opens up and they end up in the belly of the alien craft. Although the ‘mutants‘ which staff it are clearly tall, lumbering men in rubber suits, their alien leader is something truly bizarre, even by 50s sci-fi standards, and (although again clearly an actor in a suit) probably freaked the hell out of me as a kid:
The Day The Earth Stood Still is probably, nowadays, my favourite of these films though I’ll happily down tools to watch any of them. Partly this is thanks to Michael Rennie’s wonderfully sympathetic portrayal of the noble alien visitor Klaatu; partly it’s the message of peace and restraint, so different from these other films where the subtext was “root out the Commies!”; and partly it’s the haunting atmosphere, helped along by the eerie sounds of the Theremin. Did it frighten me as an eight year old? The curiously flexible metallic giant Gort bearing down, wordlessly as ever, on Patricia Neal’s Helen Benson, is a truly terrifying moment, brilliantly lit and filmed.
Atmosphere goes a long way in this film: there are fewer special effects than in those above. It’s also the only one of them in black & white. But like the rest it was made under the shadow of the Bomb. Thirty years later, that shadow was just as dark and even as a child I was aware of the threat – the possibility – of nuclear holocaust. The films scared me, certainly, but I was surely too young to put 2 & 2 together and see the underlying allegory. The distance between what was being shown and what was implied was too great for me to bridge at such a young age.
That wasn’t the case with the final film in the list, which in every respect is the outlier: The Legend of Boggy Creek. This is a later film (1972) and in a completely different category from the others. It’s a docudrama – although the “drama” part (implying fiction) was entirely lost on the eight-year-old me, who assumed it to be pure documentary. I knew nothing about this film for decades – other than the sheer terror it filled me with – until I found its Wikipedia article. It’s the story of a humanoid ‘bigfoot’ in the backwoods of Arkansas. The production values are what you’d expect – none of the Hollywood glitz or matte paintings on show here, just workaday American communities being terrorized in a low-budget fashion by what we only glimpse as a blurrily-shot figure in the distance.
I haven’t seen the film since (other than clips) and what I remember (which is, of course, no guarantee that it would exist were I to re-watch it) is a scene in which someone’s pet rabbit is found mutilated after the creature breaks into their back garden. The other films I’ve looked at here delivered their thrills through narrative and spectacle, and I watched them knowing that what they presented was fiction. Also, they provided a sense of awe and scale. But this was – or seemed – fundamentally different. What scared me most about The Legend of Boggy Creek is that it was presented as factual: this happened; or, more precisely, such things were capable of happening. And that’s far more terrifying than rubber aliens.
Into the Gyre 