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Martin Scorsese - IMDb. Documentary) (assistant director). Himself - Nominee: Best Picture & Best Director. TV Short documentary). Himself - Director. TV Movie documentary). TV Series documentary). Ten Essential Alien Invasion Movies. Extraterrestrials seek to conquer our planet and claim it as their own. Whatever their justification for invasion, the aliens regard humanity as an obstruction to be smashed, or as a pest to be squashed. This is a generic silver screen scenario. Overwhelmingly, Hollywood’s aliens have been malevolent creatures – sometimes monstrous, sometimes invisible and parasitic, but almost always invasive. To mark the release of The 5th Wave on January 2. Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World saw a US Air Force crew and a journalist dispatched to a scientific outpost at the North Pole to investigate the wreckage of a crashed flying saucer. During their investigation, the Americans discover an alien body frozen in the ice, which is then hauled back to their base. Inevitably, the extraterrestrial Popsicle soon thaws- out and begins terrorizing its human captors. The parallels between The Thing from Another World and the Roswell incident have not gone unnoticed in the UFO community, or in Hollywood. Filmmaker Paul Davids, who wrote and produced the popular TV movie Roswell (1. Kyle Mac. Lachlan and Martin Sheen, notes: The Thing was the story of a flying saucer crash. The military covered it up. A newsman pleaded for disclosure. There was buried saucer wreckage. There was an alien body (that turned out to be still alive). There was secrecy. And, in the movie, there was danger. Davids wonders if the purpose of The Thing may have been to take a factual and highly sensitive event and to couch it in fiction, the goal being to ridicule the idea of saucer crashes by associating them with superficially outlandish sci- fi cinema, and/or to subtly drip- feed these realities into the popular consciousness. Hawks’ movie was based on a science- fiction story called Who Goes There? Campbell Jr., “But there are thousands of science- fiction stories,” says Davids, “and only a small fraction of them are produced as films. Was it a coincidence that a great producer put this tale to film just three years after . Such influence could, for example, have been exerted through Howard Hughes, the billionaire industrialist and defense contractor who, at the time of The Thing’s production, owned the movie’s distributor, RKO, and had an intimate working relationship with the US Department of Defense. Indulging the conspiratorial reading of The Thing, perhaps in return for business favors down the line, Hollywood/defense mogul Howard Hughes allowed his lofty contacts at the Pentagon to tweak his movie’s script in accordance with their own UFO- related goals (“I’ll scratch your back, if you scratch mine.”) In any case, and for whatever reason, the parallels between Roswell and The Thing are plain to see. Invaders from Mars (1. A fascinating addition to the burgeoning UFO subgenre, Invaders from Mars opens with young David Mac. Lean (Jimmy Hunt) witnessing a classic flying saucer from his bedroom window – the vanguard of a looming Martian invasion force. Soon the Pentagon is involved and the Army uncovers an alien plot to use mind- controlled human slaves to sabotage an atomic rocket project at a nearby government research plant. Invasion through infiltration. The Martian leader is a diminutive being with a distinctly oversized cranium and powers of telepathy and mind- control – classic characteristics of alien Grays as described by experiencers. Even the Grays’ hypnotic black eyes are present in the movie’s alien drone soldiers, who wear tight- fitting one- piece suits (also a typical detail in abduction reports). Alien implants serve as a major plot device. Following his sighting of a flying saucer the night before, our child protagonist, David, notices a red puncture mark at the base of his father’s skull. We later learn that the big- eyed drone soldiers have been implanting townsfolk with these devices in order to control them from afar in much the same manner as modern experiencers report. After the Martians are finally defeated with the help of the US military, the movie ends bizarrely with David suddenly back in his bed, as in the opening sequence. He then runs into his parents’ bedroom, confused and frightened. They reassure him he was merely suffering night terrors. David looks through his window once again and witnesses the very same flying saucer of his dream, descending slowly, exactly as it had in his sleep- state. The film ends here. Is the child still unconscious, trapped in a recurring nightmare, or was his bad dream a premonition of this now real event? This . Film critics have since interpreted Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as well as many other sci- fi movies of the Cold War era, as political allegory. Discussing the idea of allegory in alien invasion movies of the 1. Peter Biskind notes that “critics of popular culture have always been quick to point out that the Other is always other than itself, which is to say, the pods and blobs are “symbols” standing for something else.” Because the Other in films of this period frequently was linked to radiation (as in Them! But Biskind argues that critics often give Cold War sci- fi movies too much credit and that many of them were not political allegories at all, but literal reflections of cultural preoccupations. For the preferred reading of many of these films, says Biskind, “all we have to do is look at what’s before our very eyes.” When asked how to account for the tremendous appeal in the 1. UFO movie), actor Billy Gray (who played the character of Bobby Benson in the original The Day the Earth Stood Still) was unequivocal: “It correlated with reports of UFOs. At the time it was just rampant – every other person had seen something mysterious in the sky. I think that’s what made science fiction popular at this time.”Invasion of the Body Snatchers would be memorably remade in 1. Philip Kaufman with Donald Sutherland in the lead role, before being lamentably . The movie is gleefully outlandish, especially when a dead alien’s hand detaches itself, grows an eye, and runs amok. But, as with other invasion movies of the 1. UFO encounter reports is evident. The movie drew considerable inspiration from the famous Hopkinsville Kentucky case of 1. In Invasion of the Saucer Men the aliens are aggressive little creatures with green skin who get their kicks by violently harassing the residents of a rural American town. In one scene, the heroine of the piece (played by Gloria Castillo) even refers to one of the aliens as “a little green man,” just as the press had (erroneously) used the “little green men” term when reporting on the Hopkinsville case. The movie is also notable for dialogue alluding to real- world government secrecy surrounding the UFO phenomenon. When the eponymous saucer men begin their small- town siege, military personnel show up to investigate, remarking at the sight of a grounded saucer, “Amazing! One of them actually landed intact!” The implication is that saucer wrecks have been recovered by authorities in the past. Observing the saucer, one of the military men states, “Only us and the President will know,” which suggests that his unit is tasked specifically to UFO- related matters. There is even an allusion to compartmentalization of classified information in dialogue referring to “other secret units covering- up other secret things.”The Andromeda Strain (1. Adapted from Michael Crichton’s novel, The Andromeda Strain relied upon methodical procedure and clinical detail as opposed to more traditional, action- based thrills to engage audiences, and its portrayal of an uncontrollable extraterrestrial virus was inspired by serious scientific debate of the time. It had been two years since Neil Armstrong had taken his giant leap for mankind, and the Apollo program was now well under way. Within this new astronomical context, genuine public fears existed concerning the possibility of an ET virus accidentally finding its way to earth via a lunar module. In 1. 96. 7, four years prior to the release of The Andromeda Strain, the United States, Britain, and Russia had signed an agreement covering “outer- space activities,” which took into consideration concerns regarding “harmful contamination” and “adverse changes” to “the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter.” The Andromeda Strain tapped these concerns to great effect, and the film proved top draw for terrified audiences everywhere. The Thing (1. 98. The 1. 98. 0s saw an influx of heart- warming UFO movies in which aliens arrived as saviors. This new genre trend prompted cinema theorist Vivian Sobchack to observe that aliens had become “our friends, playmates, brothers, and lovers.” This was true enough, although . None were more terrifying than the shapeshifting (or, rather, shape- hijacking) alien of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1. Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World. Despite being perhaps the best movie of Carpenter’s career, it tanked at the box- office. Released hot on the heels of the warm and fuzzy E. T., audiences were repelled by the horrific imagery of Carpenter’s ice cold creation, and its failure was regarded within the industry as a death knell for the . In Hollywood, hostile aliens took a back seat to the benevolent variety for the remainder of the decade. They Live (1. 98. Though not directly inspired by any particular UFOlogical event, John Carpenter’s They Live captured lightning in a bottle for the increasingly paranoid UFO- conspiracy community as it tapped into, and arguably helped shape, prevailing ideas about extraterrestrials colluding with human elites. Based on Ray Nelson’s 1.
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