At the beginning of the decade, war and holocaust have dulled our taste for horror, but we recover it quickly. We fear the unknown future, science, the consequences of our own actions, and most of all the guy next door who seems  normal, but has a pod in his closet.

We watch the stars and see terror and we look into the shadows and find new goblins, born of bombs, not sorcery. As the decade blooms, monsters abound, some of them teenaged, though teenage vitality is also our salvation in films like Invasion of the Saucer Men, where hot rod headlights kill the monsters, and The Blob, where the teens triumph simply by keeping cool. The iconic moment of the decade may be in Bert Gordon’s Earth vs. the Spider, where a high school dance is held in the same school gym with the not-quite-dead corpse of a giant arachnid.

Ishiro Honda makes Gojira. Terrence Fisher makes Dracula with Christopher Lee. Georges Franju makes Les Yeux sans visage. Roger Corman makes Bucket of Blood. Canny American producers pick up US rights to foreign films and a new international drive-in movie pop culture is born.

In a decade of conformity, the monsters give us hope for a more daring future.

Angela's Pick - I Married a Monster from Outer Space ( 1958)

For me, some of the most enduring images of the 50’s era are contained in the great “B” horror/sci-fi movies of the decade.  Cheap costumes and sets, special effects in the toddler stage, over the top acting, scientific explanations that sprinkle 50’s era knowledge on a mound of wild impossibility, and women running in pencilskirts and high heels from alien monsters – some of which are their husbands!

All of these elements are in my pick for the 50’s, a film with a title that pretty much says it all – I Married a Monster from Outer Space.

This movie jumps right into the plot without pretense – and rightly so.  The story doesn’t need any.  The groom is taken by space aliens before the wedding, and an alien that looks just like him, mostly acts like him, is put in his place.  It marries a pretty, virginal young woman, and the baffling yet necessary task of trying to breed in a bedroom with twin beds ensues! Of course, the newly married husband is not acting quite right and the wife begins to suspect something is afoul. Lucky for her, it’s only an alien invasion.

This movie has some great moments, and is a showcase of 50’s mores, culture and tradition, and thoroughly conveys the undercurrents of paranoia that flow beneath all things of the Eisenhower era. 

The movie plays with fears of sexuality, anxiety about the love-hate relationship that sometimes exists between men and women, and uncertainty over the real selves that hide behind everyday masks. All of these elements of American culture were explored in many other films and the literature of the era, though rarely as goofily entertaining as in this movie.

Light and fun, this is one monster flick that is a true time capsule.

Among the nuclear mutants and the outer space terrors, ancient fears lurk nervously, uncertain of their place in this scary new world.

In Britain,Hammer is mining the old Universal lode with colorful, increasingly grisly versions of the classics, Dracula, The Curse of Frankenstein, and The Mummy, as well as riding the rocket train with the Quatermass films, Enemy from Space and The Creeping Unknown. Following the trend, a small British production company, Sabre Films, employs Lewton director Jacques Tourneur to make a film based on “Casting the Runes,” by England’s greatest ghost story writer, M.R. James, and produces a masterpiece of dark cinema.

Night of the Demon (Curse of the Demon in its trimmed US release) stands at the juncture between the old horrors and the new and the story is, at its heart, about the failure of a modern, materialistic world view to encompass the reality of evil.

The film tells a simple story of a researcher, Dr. John Holden, played by Dana Andrews, in England to address a symposium on superstition, who becomes involved with the daughter of a man murdered by a demon. The movie is amazingly smart and, at its best moments, subtle. Tourneur allegedly fought to keep the actual demon off camera but lost the struggle and the ultimate appearance of the demon remains controversial to this day as to whether it enhances the film or detracts from it.

But even a pantomime demon and cheap special effects cannot diminish the real creepiness of the story and elements that span the pantheon of occult fear, from the Crowleyesque villain to Victorian séances to Stonehenge and demonic music that echoes in the roots of our consciousness. The story is told in Wellesian  cinematography, with claustrophobic corridor shots, great use of sound, and a relentless sense of menace.

Stunningly made and, in many ways, the last shadow of the Lewton legacy of intelligent supernatural drama, Night of the Demon is not only my favorite horror film of the 50s but probably of all time.

(Note from Angela:  This is a GREAT movie! It’s in my top 10 all time horror movies as well!)