Mutants and Monsters

Abstract

Science fiction films of the 50s, the period when nuke-awareness was at its height, are full of monsters. And the monsters tend to be radioactive. Peter Biskind, quoted above, tries to reduce the monster movies of the 50s to expressions of the oldest theme in the horror cannon, nature run amok, but monsters are rarely as simple as they at first seem. The Thing From Another World (1951), the first monster of the 50s, is a vegetable vampire from outer space who looks like Boris Karloff in a boiler suit. As played by James Amess, the Thing is Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Enemy Invader and Nature Run Amok in one catch-all package. The Bomb is never actually mentioned in the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby film, but there is a possibly significant moment when an explosive intended to free a flying saucer from the arctic ice proves much more destructive than the soldiers who set it off expect it to be. With its means of getting back to Another World blown to bits, the Thing might reasonably see itself as the victim of a pre-emptive first strike from the human race, and thus be rather more justified in killing everyone it runs into than the film suggests.KeywordsGeiger CounterSonic BoomSumo WrestlerNuclear HolocaustAtomic AngleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.