On July 8, 1947, officials at the Roswell Army Air Field issued an official press release indicating that they had recovered a "flying disc." The Army immediately retracted the statement. What they had actually recovered, they now insisted, was simply a weather balloon.
That did not stop headlines. "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region," trumpeted the Roswell Daily Record. The flying saucer had entered popular culture and Roswell, New Mexico, became the unofficial capital of all things extraterrestrial.
Hollywood didn't wait long to jump onto the UFO bandwagon. Where Destination Moon (1950), Rocketship X-M (1950) and When Worlds Collide (1951) (not to mention the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials) gave us the triumph of mankind's flight into space, a new kind of science fiction movie took on fears of alien invasions and threats from outer space. "We found one! We found a flying saucer!," exclaims a reporter at an Arctic research station in The Thing from Another World (1951), but his excitement turns to caution after surviving the savage alien of a UFO crash landing. “Watch the skies,” is the warning he gives the audience at the end of the film. And sure enough, Hollywood did.
Alien visitations continued in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the most thoughtful first contact film of its day, and in Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space (1953), where the visitors are neither marauding killers nor diplomatic emissaries, merely travelers from outer space taking a brief pit stop. But benevolence was the exception rather than the rule in alien arrival movies. In The War of the Worlds (1953), the George Pal produced adaptation of H.G. Wells’ legendary novel, a fleet of sleek, sinister looking jet-like spaceships (in place of the spider-like walkers of the novel) swarm the planet. It was just the beginning of an invasion that included Invaders from Mars (1953), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) and of course the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), just to name a few.
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) wasn't the first film to put the phrase in the title of a movie—that would be the B-movie cheapie The Flying Saucer (1950)—but it embraced the concept of the alien "flying disc" that took hold in the public's imagination. The film cites the nonfiction tome "Flying Saucers from Outer Space" by US Marine Air Corps Major Donald E. Keyhoe in the credits as “support,” as if staking a claim for respectability, but the screen story is from genre legend Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man, 1941; Donovan's Brain, 1962) and the script is pure pulp fiction. It's directed by Fred F. Sears, a journeyman filmmaker who cranked out fifty films in the 1950s, but its true creator is special effects master Ray Harryhausen, who was essentially an uncredited producer on the film with his production partner Charles H. Schneer and helped develop and shape the project from its inception. He fills the skies with hordes of spinning saucers and gives them death rays that obliterate missile launchers, tanks, buildings, even entire battleships.
Harryhausen set his saucers spinning by moving their pieces one frame at a time. He ingeniously transformed stock footage of military aircraft crashes and ship explosions into dramatic backdrops, over which he animated the attacking saucers and their ray guns. And he repurposed brief clips of destruction from earlier invasion movies like The Day Earth Stood Still and The War of the Worlds, but that was just for punctuation. The climax sends the alien ships attacking Washington, D.C. and the spectacle demanded more than just generic mayhem. Usually, such effects are created with large scale miniatures spanning a few feet across, which are blown up with small explosives and shot with high speed cameras to create the illusion of weight and scope. The low budget production didn't have the money to build models of that size so Harryhausen created much smaller miniatures and animated the destruction frame by frame, not just ships but every chunk of falling masonry in the collapse of the Capitol Dome, the Treasury Building and the Washington Monument.
The early alien invasion films imagined the attempts to conquer Earth in purely military terms: fleets of ships in sky, ray guns and cannons blasting, beings from other planets landing on Earth and interacting directly with mankind and in a few instances strange creatures or rampaging robots on the loose. The paranoid science fiction classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, however, confronted audiences with a more insidious assault. There were no ray guns or spaceships or weird creatures. It was an invasion from within, taking over the world by replacing the human race with an alien duplicate one person at a time, and it begins in small town America, a place where neighbors know and trust one another, which made it all the more unnerving. It made for a potent metaphor for both Red Scare paranoia and fears of McCarthyism and blind conformity. You can thank the film for inspiring the phrase "pod people."
Philip Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) updates it from the homespun innocence of small town America in the fifties to the busy urban modernity of San Francisco of the seventies and gives the metaphor a new context. The cold-war conformity of the 1956 original becomes urban alienation by the late 1970s, and the film uses the impersonal interactions with bureaucracy and authority to enhance the paranoia.
As in the original, there's no spaceship in Kaufman's film. In fact, it opens on a truly alien vision of life on the starving planet with a dying sun, a life far from anything the screen had imagined before. Amorphous balloons that look like enormous microbes appear to bubble up from dying plants, like intergalactic spores spreading alien pollen, carried by solar winds across the galaxy to a hospitable new home where it can plant it roots and take over to native life forms. This organic yet unearthly imagery was created with something that Kaufman described as "gelatinous goo" that he found at an art store. When dropped in water, it became a gossamer film that resembles microbial life, and when filmed backwards it appears to rise and float into space. Simple special effects show the life form spreading its roots, forming pods and flowering, the ultimate invasive species overwriting the native ecosystem.
The organic quality of the infestation is enhanced by sound effects by Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt. He creates an eerie, otherworldly aural world for the interstellar life forms as they take root and reproduce, and his weird soundscape underscores other scenes to suggest the alien presence all around. Among the sounds Burtt created is a throbbing pulse of the birth of a pod person as the alien flora recreates itself as a human copy in flesh and blood. That alien heartbeat originated as an ultrasound recording of his pregnant wife, which he enhanced for the film.
John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), a remake of another groundbreaking classic, takes the fear of alien invasion to another level. Carpenter revered Howard Hawks—Carpenter’s early film Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) is an unofficial remake of Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959)—but The Thing is less a remake of the 1951 film than a reimagining of the original short story by John W. Campbell Jr. In it, a creature from outer space mimics its prey, becoming an exact physical duplicate. The dozen men at an isolated Antarctic research station become genetic fodder for an alien creature that fits in by becoming its prey. Carpenter pays tribute to the original film in the credits sequence, which recreates the jagged lettering of the title burning its way into the screen, and the discovery of the alien space craft—yes, once again it's a flying saucer—frozen in the Antarctic ice. In other ways it has more in common with Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with an alien life form that absorbs and simulates human life and the paranoia that follows as the humans defends themselves from this attack from within. Where Hawks found strength in the group of professionals pulling together in common cause, Carpenter explores the suspicion and mistrust. But in most ways, Carpenter's The Thing was unique.
Ridley Scott had set a high bar for science fiction horror in Alien (1979) and his nightmare creature, an unholy mix of lizard, insect and machine. The thing of The Thing is a very different kind of alien, a shapeshifter that doesn't just mimic its target, it draws from the DNA of past incarnations in its drive to survive. It's like monsters out of H.P. Lovecraft erupt out of the film, something that would have been impossible to create with the technology available in 1951.
Like Kaufman, Carpenter wanted an organic creation, but also something truly weird and not of this earth, so he turned to Rob Bottin, a young make-up artist who apprenticed under Rick Baker and had created the make-up effects for Carpenter's The Fog (1980). Bottin took on the challenge to push the mix of make-up, mechanical effects, puppetry and animation to its limits and put no limit on his imagination. The results are like nothing audiences had seen before. We watch the creature absorb, replicate and morph in front of our eyes, as if it's evolving in real time. The freaky horror of the gooey, grotesque transformations is both nightmarish and the surreal and gives the tension of the human drama startling punctuation.
Some of the effects are simple, like the tendrils that shoot out like sinewy vines that whip out to grab and absorb its prey. Bottin's crew simply began with is alien stalks wrapped around the target and pulled them rapidly back into the creature, then ran the footage backwards. Others were more complex, such as a human head stretching out and disconnecting from a transforming body, a sequence that depended on multiple crew members working in tandem. A simple rod pushed the dummy head away (hidden by make-up viscera), an assistant pumped fake blood and a series of dummy heads were swapped out as the head separated and became its own, self-contained creature. The expressions were manipulated with radio-controlled puppetry and a radio-controlled toy car hidden under the head helped it move. One of the most important elements to Bottin's transformation effects was Bubble Yum bubble gum, which was heated and applied to suggest stretching flesh.
It was like nothing anyone had ever seen in the movies in 1982, something that wasn't fully appreciated until years later. The Thing had the unfortunate luck of arriving in theaters two weeks after the release of E.T. (1982), which had become a blockbuster with its charming fairy tale of a benevolent alien stranded on Earth. The Thing’s effects were deemed gratuitously gory and grotesque by many film critics and some audiences, and the ambiguity that Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster created so effectively disappointed viewers who wanted clear answers. It took years for the film's reputation to transform from disappointing flop to visionary science fiction classic, and for critics and audiences alike to embrace the chilling vision as one of Carpenter's greatest films.
