Theme: Alien Invasion

Alien invasion refers to stories about Earth being invaded by beings from elsewhere in the universe. Alien invasion can be in vast and overwhelming force that rains down mass destruction, or else it can be a small beachhead in an isolated locale, an insidious infiltration of the corridors of power, or psychological in nature. Aliens themselves can range from all manner of forms from humanoid to non-human, from Monsters and Robots to biological threats.

The genre began on the literary page with H.G. Wells’ classic The War of the Worlds (1898), which defined the essential tropes of humanity being crushed by an overwhelming force majeure from space, the struggle for survival and attempts to fight back.

The first screen alien invaders appeared in Serials of the 1940s but these were little more than mundane gangsters. The great alien invader era of the 1950s began with The Thing from Another World (1951), which offered a sole alien monster amok in an Arctic base. The genre was kicked into high gear with George Pal’s modernised adaptation of The War of the Worlds (1953). This was followed by a deluge of alien invasion films, which became one of the predominant themes of the 1950s Golden Age of Science-Fiction in Hollywood and to a lesser extent the UK.

Some of the best alien invader films of the era were various Body Snatchers films beginning with It Came from Outer Space (1953) and including the classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) wherein aliens came to steal human bodies or control minds, representing a paranoid, insidious threat that came from within, stealing all semblance of humanity but for the emotions.

The alien invader was always a stand in for anxiety about the unknown, in some cases the aliens standing in for fears of the existential threat offered by the Soviet Union and Communism. This began to change in the 1960s with tv shows like The Twilight Zone (1959-63) and Star Trek (1966-9) showing that things were sometimes more subtle and ambiguous than we thought at first glance. By the 1980s with the success of films like Star Wars (1977) and E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the alien was cute, cuddly or just an ugly mug in a bar.

The popularity of the alien invader fad died away by the end of the 1950s, although still produced copies for many years after. The genre underwent a revival in the 1970s/80s SF boom, which saw remakes of a number of 1950s works as well as a series of Deliberately Bad Films and Films With Deliberately Ridiculous Titles that spoofed the titles, cheesiness and technical shortcomings of the earlier films.

In the 1990s, Independence Day (1996), brought a revival of the alien invasion genre conducted with big budget displays of Mass Destruction. TV’s The X Files (1996-2002) bought a revival of paranoia themes and fear of infiltration by body snatchers and others.

The alien invasion film of the 2000s onwards has seen new directions in terms of the Found Footage Film or Young Adult works. The greater ease and availability of CGI effects has produced a number of low and medium budget works. These tend to be low-key in scale and/or focused on survival during an invasion.