Tomorrow's Worlds: The Unearthly History Of Science Fiction (2014) s01e02 Episode Script
Invasion
RADAR BEEPS During the dark days of the Cold War, top-secret facilities like this protected Britain from a possible Soviet invasion.
Here, rows of air force personnel studied their radar consoles, monitoring every move of the Russians' reconnaissance planes and nuclear bombers, so that if the worst came to the worst, our fighter pilots would be ready to intercept the enemy.
But what if, one day, somebody spotted a blip on one of these screens - an incoming object that wasn't from the Soviet Union - that wasn't even from this planet? What if Britain were attacked by an enemy beyond our imagination - by minds immeasurably superior to ours, that had long regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drawn their plans against us? OMINOUS MUSIC Throughout its history, science fiction has preyed on our fear of invasion - from massive alien assault to the enemy within.
- WOMAN: - The great thing about an invasion film is that it creates the ultimate life-or-death risks.
They've landed here and they're up to no good.
So, it's up to us to stop them and fight for our humanity.
Pack up! Get out all of you! Do you hear?! Get out! Over time, the threat has evolved to reflect the anxieties of the day EXPLOSION ECHOES .
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from monsters awakened by atomic weapons .
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to paranoid nightmares about our own authorities.
Who knows what could be heading for us next? This is the ground zero of the alien invasion story - Horsell Common, just outside Woking, in Surrey.
It's here that, in 1897, a giant metal cylinder falls from space, and so begins HG Wells's great novel, The War Of The Worlds.
Wells's terrifying tale about a Martian invasion of Earth confronted us with an alien enemy, trampling everything in their path beneath their gigantic tripods.
There's this malevolent race of beings, intent on our destruction.
For no reason, by the way.
No reason's ever given.
But what seemed like an outlandish work of the imagination was deeply rooted in the insecurities of the day.
Although the British Empire was at its peak, European rivals were now challenging our supremacy.
An entire genre of late Victorian fiction now imagined Britain at bay, helpless before the jackbooted invaders from France or Germany.
The subtext was clear.
Britain must stand ready to defend our empire and our island.
By casting his invaders as monsters from Mars, Wells had created something that went far beyond his competitors' cheap jingoism.
Here was an enemy so frightening, so powerful, that not even mighty Victorian Britain could stand up to it.
I think what he was trying to do was actually shake us up.
You know, he portrayed a stuffy Britain and then sent in the Martians.
Wells's book turns Britain's imperial mastery on its head.
And what better setting than Victorian Britain's conservative heartland - the suburbs of Surrey? The incongruity of a malevolent alien force in a cosily familiar context has become one of science fiction's great staples.
It was used to sensational effect by the young prodigy, Orson Welles, when he adapted The War Of The Worlds for American radio in 1938.
He moved the story to New Jersey and presented it as a live news bulletin.
- WELLES: - I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror.
- BUZZING - What's that? There's a jet of flame springing from the mirror and it leaps right at the advancing men.
It strikes them head-on! Good Lord, they're turning into flames! MAN SCREAMS For American listeners already alarmed by the rise of fascism, Orson Welles's broadcast was all too convincing.
Afterwards, the press accused him of deliberately spreading panic.
Were you aware of terror at the time you were giving this role? Were you aware that terror was going on throughout the nation? Oh, no.
Of course not.
I was, uhfrankly terribly shocked to learn that, uh .
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it did.
No science-fiction work had ever had this kind of impact.
And the affair showed how easily HG Wells's original story could be updated for a new generation.
In the 1950s, Wells's novel acquired a terrifying new dimension.
This was the era of the Cold War, the nuclear age, in which nowhere on this planet was safe from total annihilation.
So, when the first cinematic adaptation of The War Of The Worlds showed Los Angeles being razed to the ground by Martian invaders, audiences felt a chilling shudder of plausibility.
DRAMATIC MUSIC This could be the beginning of the end for the human race, for what men first thought were meteors or the often ridiculed flying saucers are, in reality, the flaming vanguard of the invasion from Mars.
Looks like they're gonna come out of that gully pretty soon.
We'll have to rush our defences to be ready when they do.
- We're going to need plenty of reinforcements.
- We'll get 'em.
- Lieutenant? - Look! At a cool 2 million, The War Of The Worlds was one of Hollywood's most expensive forays into science fiction.
Alas, the technical challenges of building Wells's tripods proved too great.
So, the film put the Martians in these sleek, sinister ships, unwittingly firing the imaginations of a generation of budding filmmakers.
These were really sculpted and almost .
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naturalistic-looking manta-ray type .
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hovering, gravitationally levitated .
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beings or vehicles of some kind.
And I thought it was really terrifically well done.
Even though you could see the wires, I said, "OK, I don't mind.
"I don't mind seeing the wires.
" - CARPENTER: - It had things that we hadn't seen before in films.
It was profoundly influential to me when I was little.
Um, 'cause I was into science fiction, big-time, and just everything about it - the way the creatures looked and acted, and the ray gun And it was a big success.
In its final moments, the 1953 film remains remarkably faithful to Wells's book.
It isn't human courage that defeats the invaders, but the intervention of Mother Nature.
As these Oscar-winning special effects show, the Martians' immune system simply can't cope with Earth's viruses and bacteria.
The innovation in War Of The Worlds is probably thethe way they die, the way we win.
That was the real new piece of War Of The Worlds, that they're killed by human bacteria, by germs.
There's something very sweet about the way the War Of The Worlds is resolved, by what Wells calls, you know, "the humblest creatures that God, in his wisdom," you know, put on the face of the Earth, and for which the Martians had nodefence.
And that's cool 'cause you didn't see it coming.
The War Of The Worlds has proved a remarkably enduring model - its influence undimmed despite the march of time.
By the 1990s, the superpower arms race was over and facilities like this one were decommissioned.
With the Soviet Union consigned to the dustbin, and the Cold War to the history books, the Western World felt more secure than at any time in the 20th century.
But then, in 1996, Hollywood reinvented HG Wells's original novel for an entirely new generation.
When the German director Roland Emmerich was looking for inspiration for his next big-budget blockbuster, he locked himself away with a copy of The War Of The Worlds.
So, I kind of put a sticker on my office and said, "Don't disturb," and I read it cover to cover.
And I realised, you know, yeah, the concept was great but it was totally old-fashioned.
"We have to come up with something new.
" And I said, like, "Why are they always so small, these things? "Why are there always these flying saucers?" You know, if you want to kind of take over planets, and a big planet like Earth, you know, you come with the big ships, you know? In Independence Day, Emmerich's "big ships" unleash a shattering assault on Earth's most celebrated landmarks.
SCREAMING When we were came to Washington, they said, like, so "So, what does blow up first - the White House or the Capitol?" And I said, "The White House," because the White House is this, like, shining symbol.
And I remember, we were quite giddy, when, uh, we wrote that scene, you know, because we said, "They will, like, so freak out "when they see that.
" I always, like, said to everybody, "Look, if this thing blows up in the middle of the movie, "everything is possible in this film.
" Emmerich was determined to make Independence Day more spectacular than any invasion film before it.
But for me, this big-budget demolition of America's favourite landmarks rather lacked a psychological punch.
Independence Day showed that if you take the alien invasion out of the suburban setting, then you lose that lovely tension between the extraordinary and the everyday that made HG Wells's vision so disturbing.
Independence Day was a big, glossy, audience-friendly blowout.
But when Emmerich wanted to show how his heroes, with their limited firepower, could take down a vast alien armada, he dug out his battered copy of The War Of The Worlds.
It was the conclusion of Wells's original story, in which the Martians are brought down by germs, that provided the inspiration for Independence Day's climax.
War Of The Worlds is just a cold virus and then everybody dies.
And we said, like, "That cannot do.
"But it would be great to have a nod to War Of The Worlds.
" In Roland Emmerich's blockbuster, HG Wells's biological virus becomes a cleverly targeted computer virus.
So, this time, it's human ingenuity, rather than impersonal natural forces, that brings the invaders to their knees.
The virus is in.
All we can do now ispray.
Like HG Wells's original, Independence Day was steeped in the political atmosphere of its own era.
Now, in Wells's book, his Martians are overcome down by the blind intervention of Mother Nature.
But I think it's a reflection of the triumphalism, even the hubris, of the 1990s that Independence Day's aliens are beaten by all-American heroism.
Science fiction's alien invaders haven't always made their presence so obvious.
'50s America - a land of plenty .
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and paranoia, haunted by fears of Communist infiltrators and Reds under the beds.
I have never sullied the honour of the American people.
This climate of pervasive mistrust inspired some writers to imagine a very different kind of invasion, in which the outsiders were already here.
You could do a big Independence Day sort of approach.
But it's scarier if everything is being done under the cover of secrecy.
There's no defence and there's no warning, and you can't prepare for it 'cause you don't know about it.
The dread of a secret alien invasion was best captured in the story Who Goes There? by the American writer John W.
Campbell.
On a remote Antarctic research base, a team of scientists discover the frozen body of a creature that can steal your shape.
- VOICEOVER: - This is the spot where it was first seen, and these are the first people who saw the Thing.
How did it get here? Where did it come from? In 1951, Campbell's supremely paranoid little tale was adapted for the cinema.
The Thing From Another World was one of the most frightening movies I had seen, but I was really young then.
And that was a "stand up in the theatre and scream" movie.
John Carpenter understood that what made the story so terrifying was the idea of an alien who looked just like one of us.
And when he remade the film in 1982, he was keen to play up his characters' fears of the outsider hiding in plain sight.
The blood test scene was my favourite scene.
Nobody trusts anybody.
There's only one way to find out who is who, and that's to go down to basic biology.
And it separates the creature from human.
This is pure nonsense.
It doesn't prove a thing.
I thought you'd feel that way, Gary.
You were the only one that could have got to that blood.
We'll do you last.
SQUEALING - GARY: - Get it away from me! MEN SHOUT INDISTINCTLY That's a wonderful movie, 'cause it deals with paranoia.
Who's the monster? Very much like Who Goes There? Who's the monster? It's all about your identity.
I know I'm not the monster.
But I don't know if you're not the monster.
DRAMATIC MUSIC It's one thing for an alien to take over a faraway Antarctic research station.
But what if the invaders were next door, right under your nose? You live your life and you think things are a certain way and you wake up one morning and discover they're not.
And you discover that your wife is not your wife, that your husband is not your husband, your child not your child.
Uh, whatever the reason for that is, whatever the explanation is, it'smaddening-making.
I mean, people could lose their sanity over a situation like that.
In 1955, Jack Finney's novel, The Body Snatchers, imagined alien seed pods landing in a small California town and duplicating the residents.
A year later, it was filmed as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
- VOICEOVER: - They come from another world - spawned in the light years of space, unleashed to take over the bodies and souls of the people of our planet, bringing a new dimension in terror to the giant Superscope screen.
SHE SCREAMS DRAMATIC MUSIC The film owed much of its power to its extensive location footage, grounding us in the humdrum ordinariness of the fictional town of Santa Mira.
The banality, the believability of the setting is as crucial to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers as it was to The War Of The Worlds.
But there is an unsettling difference.
While HG Wells's Surrey is trampled underfoot by giant Martian tripods, the Body Snatchers' invasion of Santa Mira leaves barely a trace.
In the suburbs of California, these most house-trained of invaders fit in rather well.
Suddenly, while you're asleep, they'll absorb your minds, your memories.
I don't want any part of it.
, - You're forgetting something, Miles.
- What's that? You have no choice.
- VOICEOVER: - From city to city, an incredible, hysterical The makers of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers always denied that it had a simple political subtext.
And as with so many great stories, you can probably read into it whatever you like.
The film's clearly a satire of blind conformity.
But is that the conformity of communism or of '50s America? Or is the heart of the film something more primal - your fear of losing your loved ones or, more terrifyingly, your fear of losing your own identity.
- LANDIS: - They're taking YOU.
They're not just blowing up your house.
They're taking you and your children and they'rethey're TAKING you.
Like, it's religious.
It's like Satan is taking you.
I mean, something other is taking YOU.
Please, everyone! They're here already! You're next! DRAMATIC MUSIC GENTLE MUSIC Meanwhile, more aliens were on their way, to the heart of middle England.
In 1957, John Wyndham, perhaps the best known British science fiction writer since HG Wells, published The Midwich Cuckoos - the story of an English village hiding a terrible secret.
Midwich is the target of an alien invasion unlike any other - an invasion it's impossible to see, and one that it seems impossible to stop.
It all begins one ordinary morning, when everybody in the village - every man, woman and child - suddenly loses consciousness.
When the villagers recover, they find that every woman of child-bearing age has become pregnant.
And nine months later, they give birth to a sinister brood of strangely precocious children - children with a mysterious purpose of their own.
SIREN WAILS In 1960, Wyndham's story was adaptad for the cinema as Village Of The Damned.
The director, Wolf Rilla, chose Letchmore Heath, near Watford, as the suitably quaint setting.
But the otherness of the alien children is emphasised in almost every detail - from their their unnaturally blonde hair to their blank, staring eyes.
For readers in the late 1950s, Wyndham's children struck a very particular chord.
This was the era of rock'n'roll, jukeboxes and juvenile delinquents, and in 1956, when Wyndham was writing the book, the headlines were full of a looming generation gap.
Here, Village Of The Damned chillingly captures the tension between adults and adolescents - as the alien children use their powers to make the grown-ups do their bidding.
You have to be taught to leave us alone.
Leaveusalone.
And thanks to the ingenuity of the special effects team, it's the stare that stays with you.
Now, the children might not look like marauding teddy boys, But I think John Wyndham's book captured a very potent sense that traditional British authority, both at home and abroad, was rapidly slipping away.
And the fear and confusion that stalk the streets of Midwich weren't so different from the real anxieties that were haunting middle England.
DRAMATIC MUSIC By now, these anxieties were finding their way onto the small screen too.
British television's love affair with science fiction had begun in 1953, with the live broadcast of The Quatermass Experiment.
Just over one hour ago, a British-made rocket vehicle - the first ever to have succeeded in reaching outer space, made a safe crash-landing in the area of Wimbledon Common.
Nigel Kneale's tale of an alien infestation aboard Britain's first manned space flight inspired a host of sequels featuring the no-nonsense rocket scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass.
My name is Quatermass.
And if that means anything to you, take my advice.
Leave this place now.
I think there may be grave danger.
The most effective and ambitious was Quatermass And The Pit which aired in 1958.
This time, the professor investigates a Martian spacecraft buried beneath London.
Look 'ere! Look what's 'ere! My earliest sci-fi memory is hiding behind the settee at home, watching Quatermass And The Pit.
Oh, that was scary.
There was this big pod that landed in London - it was discovered in a hole in the ground in London.
Scientists went in, and inside were these sort of praying mantis things.
It's alright, they're dead.
SHE SCREAMS But when Quatermass opens the capsule, he unwittingly triggers a shocking outbreak of rioting in London And thenthey got away! They were coming! .
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a scene that, as the writer, Nigel Kneale, explained, had been influenced by the Notting Hill race riots in the summer of 1958.
Pack up! Get out, all of you! You hear?! Get out! At first, Quatermass And The Pit plays on our fear of the unknown and the unseen.
But then comes the twist.
It turns out that the Martians came to Earth millennia ago and their unholy bond with our ancestors left an extraordinary legacy.
What Professor Quatermass discovers is one of the great revelations in all science fiction, because it turns out that mankind itself has effectively been engineered by our Martian visitors.
They came here not as invaders, but as our creators.
Every war crisis, witch-hunt, race riot and purge, is a reminder and a warning.
We are the Martians.
If we cannot control the inheritance within us, this will be their second dead planet.
By any standards, this was all quite high-concept - a buried alien spaceship awakening long-dormant powers, a mass psychosis triggering the slaughter of people without Martian DNA.
Now, when you think all this was going out at eight o'clock in the evening over Christmas 1958, it feels like pretty strong stuff.
Today, we remember the Quatermass serials as among the great classics of British television.
At the time, they had more than 10 million people glued to their sets - the BBC's biggest audience for years.
Science fiction had invaded the British living room, and it was here to stay.
MUSIC: "Dr Who theme" In November 1963, the most successful science-fiction series in history made its grainy black-and-white debut.
And the success of Doctor Who was due, in no small part, to British television's most famous aliens of all.
Today, the Daleks have become such a fixture of our popular culture that you have to do a bit of mental time travelling yourself just to imagine the sheer impact they had on British audiences in the early 1960s.
Remember that it was only 20 years since the Second World War - since the Blitz and the Battle of Britain - and fears of Nazi invasion were still very vivid in people's minds.
Doctor Who took that fear and it projected it into the 22nd century and it asked what would have happened if the Nazis - or, rather, the Daleks - had won.
This isn't just an alien invasion.
It's an alien occupation.
We are the masters of Earth.
We are the masters of Earth.
We are the masters of Earth.
The Dalek Invasion Of Earth was one of the first Doctor Who stories to use extensive location filming, and its shots of Daleks gliding around London echoed old newsreel footage of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Indeed, the Daleks' creator, Terry Nation, was very keen to play up the parallels between the Nazis and a Dalek army bent on enslaving, even exterminating, its British subjects.
Help me! Kill him! WEAPONS FIRE But, of course, the really remarkable thing is how successfully the Daleks have endured.
They might have begun life as glorified Nazis, but now they've acquired a satanic appeal all their own.
And that, I think, is a tribute to something that has barely changed since the 1960s - their brilliant and unforgettable design.
The fundamental problem of every alien design, how do you breaking up the human form? How is it obviously not a man in a suit? I think this problem has been solved exactly once - once - with the Daleks.
It's the only alien life form that doesn't look like a person.
Exterminate him! Exterminate him! - MOFFAT: - It's a beautiful design, it's an unimprovable design, the original design they came up with.
We may tweak it, we may make it large or small, change the colours, You never really interfere with the details.
It's a brilliant design.
And then it's got that wonderful voice.
Whoareyou? It's a tank that rants.
It's a robot with anger problems.
It's unique.
It squawks away and it's venomous and vile.
Um, these arethese are, without doubt, the finest, most exciting alien life forms ever devised.
They haven't been bettered yet.
Don't be a fool! You can't help him now.
Who knows why the Daleks caught on like they did? I mean, it's a sink plunger and a whisk, butbut you overlook that almost immediately.
Um, it's just Raymond Cusick, who designed it, I think just had a bit of genius on him that day.
You can go up to anyone in the UK and do that, and they'd know that it's a Dalek.
It's like they're so iconic, they're part of British culture.
TENNANT: There's no CGI or anything involved in the Daleks.
They're there.
So, you can play a scene with a Dalek.
You can, you know Unlike somesome monsters that are created on a computer afterwards, and that you're acting against a tennis ball and a stick, well, the Dalek is there.
You can run long scenes of dialgoue and you can get very involved and very engaged.
They're very easy to play opposite.
Where's it going? The Crucible has a heart of Z-neutrino energy.
The TARDIS will be deposited into the core.
It'll be torn apart! We usually picture alien invaders arriving from another planet, bristling with futuristic weapons and advanced technology.
But science fiction has also presented us with a parallel threat - invaders that we've inadvertently created ourselves.
In 1945, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world had entered the nuclear age.
And in the decade that followed, the sheer potential of nuclear power both fascinated and terrified writers and filmmakers across the world.
This was a power without precedent in human history and one with almost unimaginable consequences.
What horrors, what monsters, might we unleash? - VOICEOVER: - The BeastThe Beast The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.
Monstrosities were always created and they were always monstrosities that were caused by either the misuse of science or, uh, the curse of radioactivity.
- VOICEOVER: - Buried somewhere under the polar ice cap, in a state of suspended animation, are the awesome creatures - the leviathans that roamed the earth at the dawn of time.
And under certain conditions, a nuclear explosion could free one from his icy tomb.
IT ROARS These monstrous visions only became possible thanks to the pioneering work of special effects artists like Ray Harryhausen, who brought the beast to life with an inspired combination of animated models and clever cinematography.
When you say "a Ray Harryhausen movie," you know exactly what it is, whether it's Jason And The Argonauts or First Men In The Moon or Mysterious Island or Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.
- VOICEOVER: - An armoured giant, wreaking his prehistoric fury on modern man.
What's wonderful in that is Ray invented .
.
I think he calls it a "rhedosaurus" or something.
I don't know.
He invented a dinosaur.
And it really does move in asympathetic way.
Um, you have great empathy for his creatures.
- VOICEOVER: - Cities would be terrorised by the cruel intruder from the past, populations crazed and panicked with fear by its destructive force.
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms had an enormous international impact.
A year later, in 1954, a Japanese studio, Toho, created a cut-price creature of its own, by putting a man in a monster suit.
- VOICEOVER: - Godzilla - king of the monsters! IT ROARS Today, it's hard not to laugh at the spectacle of a man in a rubber suit stamping on a model of Tokyo.
But for Japanese audiences at the time, there could hardly have been a more visceral symbol of the ravages of nuclear weapons.
Indeed, only a few months before the film's release, a Japanese fishing boat had accidentally been overwhelmed with radiation from an American H-bomb test, with terrible consequences for its unfortunate crew.
And in the film, that dreadful accident was the inspiration for the monster's first explosive attack.
LOUD EXPLOSION SHOUTING - ALL: - Aaaagh! The only country to ever have actually had atomic weapons dropped onto it makes a movie about this radioactive beast, you know, that that destroys cities.
All monsters are metaphors.
Godzilla is probably the most obvious one.
As the threat of nuclear war has faded, so Godzilla has been reinvented.
But the idea that our scientific hubris might bring forth monsters has proved remarkably persistent.
Even now, some 66 million years after they died out, these genuine Godzillas can still send a shiver down your spine.
At the very least, they're a humbling reminder that this planet hasn't always belonged to us.
And perhaps that explains our enduring fascination with their rise and fall.
In 1912, the writer Arthur Conan Doyle had imagined a lost world in South America, where the dinosaurs might still live on.
And almost 80 years later, another writer, the American Michael Crichton, speculated that through the power of genetic engineering, we might bring the dinosaurs back to life - not in some lost kingdom, but in a theme park.
Crichton's idea became the genesis of his 1990 bestseller Jurassic Park.
Steven Spielberg was so taken with the concept that he snapped up the film rights before the book had even hit the shelves.
What's so clever about Jurassic Park is the way that it plays with our expectations because, to begin with, it feels less like a monster movie and more like a natural history documentary.
THEY BELLOW They're moving in herds.
Jurassic Park was a little bit different from the classic monster movie, even though it was that.
But, again, Steven didn't want to play the dinosaurs as monsters.
He wanted them to be portrayed as animals.
And I remember when I was initially doing some tests on Jurassic Park, I gave the raptors a lizard tongue.
You know, 'cause I waslike, as a .
.
looking for something that they could do that would be cool.
So, as they're looking around, their tongues, sort of like lizards, go, "Ffft-ffft! Ffft-ffft!" But they brought Jack Horner in, the palaeontologist, as a consultant, and he saw that, and he just wentlivid.
You know, he was just like, "Dinosaurs don't do that.
"Dinosaurs are birds.
They're not lizards.
They don't do that.
" I was like .
.
"OK, we'll take the tongue out.
" You know, I was just I mean, it's pretend, right? But Spielberg's ambition to create the most realistic dinosaurs ever seen on screen prompted him to abandon Phil Tippett's animated models in favour of a new, computer-generated approach.
The results are most spectacular when the story takes a frightening turn.
IT ROARS Steven asked me, you know, like, "So, how does this make you feel?" And I was like, "I feel extinct.
" And he goes, "That's a good line.
"I'm gonna put it in the movie.
" And I was like, "Well, thanks for your sympathy.
" The film's most memorable scene stars two computer-generated velociraptors, who proved a lot scarier than the lone, marauding giants of the 1950s.
IT GROWLS THEY ROAR AND HISS I thought what was interesting about Jurassic Park is it had its cake and ate it too, which is it gave us the sense of wonder, but "You shouldn't be doing this!" You know? "Man should not mess with this stuff! This is God's work!" Jurassic Park was a warning about the dangers of creating new life.
But the urge to find new life beyond our planet has endured, having gained real momentum in the 1970s.
Scientists were now making serious efforts to make contact with creatures up there.
And, so, instead of preying on our fears of the other, science fiction began to explore the idea of a peaceful encounter with alien life.
- MAN: - We have ignition.
And we have lift-off.
By now, NASA were sending out probes with messages about life on earth, from human anatomy to our taste in music, prompted by respected astronomers such as Carl Sagan.
- SAGAN: - But it's beginning to look as if there may be an enormous number of advanced technical civilisations out there, in the universe.
And the question is can we somehow find out about them? - MAN: - Houston, this is Apollo.
All this cosmological optimism coincided with a brief thaw in the Cold War, symbolised by an extraordinary coming together of American and Soviet astronauts in 1975.
Two years later, that same desire to reach out and extend the hand of friendship, found its science fiction equivalent in Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, starring Richard Dreyfuss.
It was the first time an artist said, "You have nothing to fear "by looking up and seeing what's out there.
" Dreyfuss plays a suburban electrician called Roy Neary, a regular guy whose life is transformed after a close encounter with a UFO.
Neary's story draws on innumerable real-life reports of people who claim to have seen mysterious lights or flying saucers, or even to have been abducted by aliens.
But it's also pure HG Wells - the truly extraordinary invading the world of the everyday.
- WOMAN ON RADIO: - 10.
47.
WHISPERS INDISTINCTLY OK.
Come on.
Alright.
"Stoppage in the single circuits will lead you right to nowhere.
" HE SIGHS Mary 10 The power of Close Encounters is that it's about just a normal guy, who gets caught up in this thing accidentally.
It's very Hitchcockian on that level.
What works so well there is that he IS the audience.
He asks the questions that the audience is trying to ask.
He spells out what the audience is thinking.
And that's why the movie works so well.
BELL DINGS LOUDLY NEARBY Oh, shit! Neary's close encounter triggers a growing obsession with UFOs.
And the role was harder than it looked.
It needed an actor who could express an almost ageless wonder at that moment of alien contact.
Steven and I were pretty good friends and I wanted in on that project.
And I said, "Steven, you need a child.
" And he looked up and said, "You got the part.
" Andand I had actually figured it out.
He did need a child.
A man-child.
In those days, that's basically one of the two reasons I was hired.
And II could go MUSIC: "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind Theme" .
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and make a lot of money.
The job of designing an alien mothership that would make Richard Dreyfuss's jaw drop in amazement fell to the visual effects artist Douglas Trumbull.
Spielberg wanted this big, black object that'd just block out the stars and that was gonna be the mothership.
And I said, "Well, what if it looked like a city in the sky? "A combination of oil refineries "in San Pedro "and skyscrapers in Manhattan?" And I had been developing this idea of a smoke room, which was to use aan atmosphere to photograph the mothership in, so that it would be such a dense atmosphere that even if these skyscrapers, which would only be, you know, a foot tall an an inch in diameter with thousands of little holes in them, would be lit up and create a kind of a glow in the atmosphere, which turned out to be really quite beautiful.
It was a spooky way to shoot, but it was the magic that made it all happen.
Only when Trumbull's gigantic mothership opens its doors do we get a brief glimpse of the aliens who have come in peace.
What was wonderful about it, was that Steven had this optimistic idea that when the aliens would get here, they would be friendly.
They would not be here to invade us, they would not to be here to kill us.
I don't know that that had ever been ever done before.
In Close Encounters, the aliens make only a fleeting appearance before flying back into space.
But this gave Spielberg an idea.
What if one of them had been left behind? This was the premise of his next venture into science fiction - E.
T.
Set in a California suburb, E.
T.
is the story of a young boy, Elliott, struggling in the aftermath of his parents' divorce.
But one night, he finds a kindred spirit - a lost, lonely extraterrestrial.
E.
T.
was like a child himself.
And he was a little, naked creature an impossibly long distance from home.
He could not have been more vulnerable and helpless.
Wow.
Steven Spielberg once said that E.
T.
was inspired by his own experience of his parents' divorce, as well as his sense of isolation as the only Jewish boy in his neighbourhood.
And it plays on a very common anxiety.
Suburbia might look like the ideal American community, but it could also be the loneliest place on earth.
Like the children in the story, we come to care passionately about the fate of this wrinkly brown alien - thanks, in no small part, to his wonderfully endearing design.
It might have taken 12 people to operate the E.
T.
puppet, but to the young Drew Barrymore, who played Elliott's sister, he seemed very real.
- COYOTE: - I don't think she paid any attention to the fact that there was a cable coming out of his belly.
I think when she looked in his eyes, and he went .
.
and looked at her and tipped his head and extended his neck, I think that was aa miraculous creature in front of her, and we could see the wonder growing on her face.
E.
T.
may have come from space, but who are the real aliens in the film? For Elliot, and I think for much of the audience, they're the adults.
Because it's no accident that Spielberg places his camera at Elliot's eye level.
With the obvious exception of his mother, almost all of the grown-ups in the story are remote and anonymous.
Here, the government agents hunting for E.
T.
are lit so as to be literally faceless - and most intimidating of all is a figure identified only by his jangling keys.
I've been presented as a scary figure.
I've been shown from the waist down, uh, these keys at my belt.
And it's all the awe and power and danger of the grown-up world on the world of children.
But I said to Steven, "It's very important "that we don't make either adults or science the enemy.
"So, let's craft of my character, someone who is like Elliot, "all grown-up.
" And nothing better captures his childlike enthusiasm than this exchange between an ailing Elliott and his awestruck visitor.
- ELLIOTT: - He came to me.
He came to me.
Elliott .
.
he came to me too.
I've been wishing for this since I was 10 years old.
I don't want him to die.
E.
T.
was phenomenally successful, eventually overtaking Star Wars as the biggest box office hit ever made.
You know, when I first saw it, as an 8-year-old, at Christmas 1982, I was in floods of tears.
And even now, I think that if you don't watch E.
T.
with a lump in your throat, well, what ever happened to your soul?! E.
T.
had overturned the classic invasion story.
This time, the aliens were the good guys.
So, who were the bad guys now? In 1993, an enormously popular TV series offered a disturbing answer.
In this invasion story, the enemy aren't outside, trying to get in.
They're the people in the bunker, the people in charge - the government, the security services, the military industrial complex.
After all, why ARE they so secretive? To protect us or to cover up something altogether more sinister? MUSIC: "The X-Files theme music" The series was The X-Files, and it captured something paranoid in the air.
- CARTER: - This show was relevant in the early '90s, politically, socially, because we were still, you know, experiencing the hangover from Watergate and Iran-Contra.
There was a general distrust of government and authority.
Chris Carter didn't have to make that up.
He just kinda looked out the window and went, "Oh, there it is.
"We gotta put that in the show and scare the hell out of people.
" PHONE RINGS - MULDER: - That was fast.
- MAN: - Terry, is that you? Yeah.
Who's this? The X-Files follows FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder whose job it is to investigate unexplained phenomena.
And as the series unfolds, they uncover a high-level conspiracy to promote an alien takeover of Earth.
That bacteria I had analysed .
.
they're saying that it doesn't exist in nature.
They're saying that it could be extraterrestrial.
- CARTER: - There's been a belief, for a lot of folk, I've come to find out, that the government is hiding evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials and spaceships and aliens.
And all we did was, I think, take advantage of a fact - that people believed the government is hiding things from them.
And through the contrasting attitudes of Mulder and Scully themselves, the X-Files cleverly played on the audience's own mixture of credulity and scepticism about the possibility of alien visitors.
The joy of Scully and of Mulder with their two competing and opposing world views - one always going off in an explanation that wasalways tended to be rooted in science fiction and fantasy, and one absolutely pragmatic, medical They were a glorious team.
Much of the appeal of the X-Files lay in its heady atmosphere of anti-government paranoia.
But not all science fiction was quite so distrustful.
Maybe the authorities are only trying to protect us from ourselves? How would you react if, one day, you woke up and heard that aliens really had landed? Would we all welcome them with open arms and ask them if they'd been enjoying all those Beatles songs we've been beaming into space? Or would our reaction be more guarded, more suspicious, even more aggressive? And that question lies at the heart of a number of films that have used the issue of alien invasion as a metaphor for our contemporary anxieties about race relations, multiculturalism and immigration.
In Barry Sonnenfeld's film Men in Black, aliens have been secretly living among us for years, doing their best to blend in.
I think when Barry Sonnenfeld decided to set the movie in New York, it had a lot to do with him thinking, "Where could aliens live that people would basically not even bat an eye "if they happened to see one?" And Manhattan made the most sense for that.
Now, that's the worst disguise ever.
That guy's definitely an alien.
You don't like it, you can kiss my furry little butt.
I remember some of the first images I had for Men in Black.
They werelike, a little tail visible through someone's trenchcoat ordoing a double-take and thinking you see a strange thing, you know, behind aa newspaper stand or something.
And then I started thinking, "Well, wait - what if they're not, like, aliens "that are trying to come down and attack us? "But what if they're aliens "that just are trying to either eke out their own living "or they're stuck here for some reason? "Or what if all this is going on at the same time and we had no idea?" And that was what led me to, "Well, then, what if there's this police force that has to deal with them? Men in Black was based on a comic book series about government agents who, to avoid public panic, have to cover up all manner of alien activities.
I don't know if you've forgotten, but there's an alien battle cruiser about There's always an alien battle cruiser, a Corellian death ray or intergalactic plague about to wipe out life on this miserable little planet.
The only way these people get on with their happy lives is they do not know about it.
In effect, the Men in Black were science fiction's version of the American Immigration Service, the INS, whose role policing the Mexican border was now attracting increasing attention.
One early scene plays on the audience's expectations of a routine check for illegal immigrants.
- Who the hell are you? - INS, Division 6.
Division 6? I never heard of Division 6.
Really? Who you got your money on, D? Tough call, Hank.
- SOLOMON: - To me, the immigration stuff at the beginning was just, "What would be a cool way "to illustrate that they're like INS guys, but with aliens? "What if you think it's an INS bust "and then it turns out to be something entirely different?" Men in Black was playing the idea of alien immigrants for laughs.
But what if the newcomers were living among us in plain sight? In the 1988 film Alien Nation, some 300,000 stranded aliens settle in Los Angeles.
It is really an analogy for racism against immigrants.
But you can tell that kind of story in speculative fiction, in science fiction, in a way that even people who are racist can relate to it, and maybe, somehow, you can change their mind.
In these night-time drive-by shots, the film gives us a relatively convincing vision of aliens adapting to ordinary Los Angeles life.
I swear to God, I hate this place.
Sadly, all this multiculturalism only fuels the prejudices of James Caan's bigoted policeman.
But when fate pairs him up with an alien partner, he has to change his tune.
I loved the idea of teaming up the racist human cop with the far more relatable, interestingly, um, alien cop.
In essence, Alien Nation is a classic mismatched buddy movie.
HE HONKS HORN And this tender domestic scene hammers home the point that despite their cranial differences, these extraterrestrials, at least, aren't so different from the rest of us.
Humans, aliens - we're all brothers under the skin.
Why can't we all get along? But the 2009 film District 9 offers a rather bleaker picture of unwanted alien settlers, corralled into a government-run ghetto just outside Johannesburg.
SHOUTING Just staystay low! Where's he going? What is he? OK, let's move away here.
- REPORTER: - It's clear the security is very high.
LANDIS: What District 9 did so brilliantly was it made that world real, and not just the alien insect people, but everything about it.
You know, you could smell the stench.
It was like Slumdog Millionaire.
Open up! Open - HURD: - The sense of you are there, this is really happening, but with that sort of news journalism, you know, hand-held camera sense, it puts you right in the middle of the danger.
We sent you an eviction notice.
You just put your scrawl there.
Come on! You know, it immediately creates a very disturbing sense that anything could happen.
District 9 was inspired by a real incident from the apartheid era, when the South African Government forcibly cleared a multi-racial area known as District 6, and resettled its black residents in a poverty-stricken township.
As this scene shows, District 9's great technical achievement was to create aliens that are both realistic and repulsive.
The film forces us to confront our own prejudices.
After all, would we really want these less than cuddly E.
T.
s moving in to the house next door? For all District 9's extraordinary effects, at its heart are two very simple questions.
What does it mean to be human? And how do we treat those whom we judge to be less than human? And that brings us all the way back to Horsell Common, and to HG Wells.
"Before we judge the Martians too harshly," says the narrator in The War Of The Worlds, "we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction "our own species has wrought, "not only on animals but upon its own inferior races.
"Are we such apostles of mercy "as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" Those words were written more than a century ago, and they're as true today as ever.
- VOICEOVER: - When this dead hand moves Next time It's alive It's alive! It's alive! From Frankenstein's monster to Blade Runner's replicants - what happens when artificial life turns against its creators? How Cybermen and cyborgs blur the line between man and machine.
Prepare for the rise of the robots.
Here, rows of air force personnel studied their radar consoles, monitoring every move of the Russians' reconnaissance planes and nuclear bombers, so that if the worst came to the worst, our fighter pilots would be ready to intercept the enemy.
But what if, one day, somebody spotted a blip on one of these screens - an incoming object that wasn't from the Soviet Union - that wasn't even from this planet? What if Britain were attacked by an enemy beyond our imagination - by minds immeasurably superior to ours, that had long regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drawn their plans against us? OMINOUS MUSIC Throughout its history, science fiction has preyed on our fear of invasion - from massive alien assault to the enemy within.
- WOMAN: - The great thing about an invasion film is that it creates the ultimate life-or-death risks.
They've landed here and they're up to no good.
So, it's up to us to stop them and fight for our humanity.
Pack up! Get out all of you! Do you hear?! Get out! Over time, the threat has evolved to reflect the anxieties of the day EXPLOSION ECHOES .
.
from monsters awakened by atomic weapons .
.
to paranoid nightmares about our own authorities.
Who knows what could be heading for us next? This is the ground zero of the alien invasion story - Horsell Common, just outside Woking, in Surrey.
It's here that, in 1897, a giant metal cylinder falls from space, and so begins HG Wells's great novel, The War Of The Worlds.
Wells's terrifying tale about a Martian invasion of Earth confronted us with an alien enemy, trampling everything in their path beneath their gigantic tripods.
There's this malevolent race of beings, intent on our destruction.
For no reason, by the way.
No reason's ever given.
But what seemed like an outlandish work of the imagination was deeply rooted in the insecurities of the day.
Although the British Empire was at its peak, European rivals were now challenging our supremacy.
An entire genre of late Victorian fiction now imagined Britain at bay, helpless before the jackbooted invaders from France or Germany.
The subtext was clear.
Britain must stand ready to defend our empire and our island.
By casting his invaders as monsters from Mars, Wells had created something that went far beyond his competitors' cheap jingoism.
Here was an enemy so frightening, so powerful, that not even mighty Victorian Britain could stand up to it.
I think what he was trying to do was actually shake us up.
You know, he portrayed a stuffy Britain and then sent in the Martians.
Wells's book turns Britain's imperial mastery on its head.
And what better setting than Victorian Britain's conservative heartland - the suburbs of Surrey? The incongruity of a malevolent alien force in a cosily familiar context has become one of science fiction's great staples.
It was used to sensational effect by the young prodigy, Orson Welles, when he adapted The War Of The Worlds for American radio in 1938.
He moved the story to New Jersey and presented it as a live news bulletin.
- WELLES: - I can make out a small beam of light against a mirror.
- BUZZING - What's that? There's a jet of flame springing from the mirror and it leaps right at the advancing men.
It strikes them head-on! Good Lord, they're turning into flames! MAN SCREAMS For American listeners already alarmed by the rise of fascism, Orson Welles's broadcast was all too convincing.
Afterwards, the press accused him of deliberately spreading panic.
Were you aware of terror at the time you were giving this role? Were you aware that terror was going on throughout the nation? Oh, no.
Of course not.
I was, uhfrankly terribly shocked to learn that, uh .
.
it did.
No science-fiction work had ever had this kind of impact.
And the affair showed how easily HG Wells's original story could be updated for a new generation.
In the 1950s, Wells's novel acquired a terrifying new dimension.
This was the era of the Cold War, the nuclear age, in which nowhere on this planet was safe from total annihilation.
So, when the first cinematic adaptation of The War Of The Worlds showed Los Angeles being razed to the ground by Martian invaders, audiences felt a chilling shudder of plausibility.
DRAMATIC MUSIC This could be the beginning of the end for the human race, for what men first thought were meteors or the often ridiculed flying saucers are, in reality, the flaming vanguard of the invasion from Mars.
Looks like they're gonna come out of that gully pretty soon.
We'll have to rush our defences to be ready when they do.
- We're going to need plenty of reinforcements.
- We'll get 'em.
- Lieutenant? - Look! At a cool 2 million, The War Of The Worlds was one of Hollywood's most expensive forays into science fiction.
Alas, the technical challenges of building Wells's tripods proved too great.
So, the film put the Martians in these sleek, sinister ships, unwittingly firing the imaginations of a generation of budding filmmakers.
These were really sculpted and almost .
.
naturalistic-looking manta-ray type .
.
hovering, gravitationally levitated .
.
beings or vehicles of some kind.
And I thought it was really terrifically well done.
Even though you could see the wires, I said, "OK, I don't mind.
"I don't mind seeing the wires.
" - CARPENTER: - It had things that we hadn't seen before in films.
It was profoundly influential to me when I was little.
Um, 'cause I was into science fiction, big-time, and just everything about it - the way the creatures looked and acted, and the ray gun And it was a big success.
In its final moments, the 1953 film remains remarkably faithful to Wells's book.
It isn't human courage that defeats the invaders, but the intervention of Mother Nature.
As these Oscar-winning special effects show, the Martians' immune system simply can't cope with Earth's viruses and bacteria.
The innovation in War Of The Worlds is probably thethe way they die, the way we win.
That was the real new piece of War Of The Worlds, that they're killed by human bacteria, by germs.
There's something very sweet about the way the War Of The Worlds is resolved, by what Wells calls, you know, "the humblest creatures that God, in his wisdom," you know, put on the face of the Earth, and for which the Martians had nodefence.
And that's cool 'cause you didn't see it coming.
The War Of The Worlds has proved a remarkably enduring model - its influence undimmed despite the march of time.
By the 1990s, the superpower arms race was over and facilities like this one were decommissioned.
With the Soviet Union consigned to the dustbin, and the Cold War to the history books, the Western World felt more secure than at any time in the 20th century.
But then, in 1996, Hollywood reinvented HG Wells's original novel for an entirely new generation.
When the German director Roland Emmerich was looking for inspiration for his next big-budget blockbuster, he locked himself away with a copy of The War Of The Worlds.
So, I kind of put a sticker on my office and said, "Don't disturb," and I read it cover to cover.
And I realised, you know, yeah, the concept was great but it was totally old-fashioned.
"We have to come up with something new.
" And I said, like, "Why are they always so small, these things? "Why are there always these flying saucers?" You know, if you want to kind of take over planets, and a big planet like Earth, you know, you come with the big ships, you know? In Independence Day, Emmerich's "big ships" unleash a shattering assault on Earth's most celebrated landmarks.
SCREAMING When we were came to Washington, they said, like, so "So, what does blow up first - the White House or the Capitol?" And I said, "The White House," because the White House is this, like, shining symbol.
And I remember, we were quite giddy, when, uh, we wrote that scene, you know, because we said, "They will, like, so freak out "when they see that.
" I always, like, said to everybody, "Look, if this thing blows up in the middle of the movie, "everything is possible in this film.
" Emmerich was determined to make Independence Day more spectacular than any invasion film before it.
But for me, this big-budget demolition of America's favourite landmarks rather lacked a psychological punch.
Independence Day showed that if you take the alien invasion out of the suburban setting, then you lose that lovely tension between the extraordinary and the everyday that made HG Wells's vision so disturbing.
Independence Day was a big, glossy, audience-friendly blowout.
But when Emmerich wanted to show how his heroes, with their limited firepower, could take down a vast alien armada, he dug out his battered copy of The War Of The Worlds.
It was the conclusion of Wells's original story, in which the Martians are brought down by germs, that provided the inspiration for Independence Day's climax.
War Of The Worlds is just a cold virus and then everybody dies.
And we said, like, "That cannot do.
"But it would be great to have a nod to War Of The Worlds.
" In Roland Emmerich's blockbuster, HG Wells's biological virus becomes a cleverly targeted computer virus.
So, this time, it's human ingenuity, rather than impersonal natural forces, that brings the invaders to their knees.
The virus is in.
All we can do now ispray.
Like HG Wells's original, Independence Day was steeped in the political atmosphere of its own era.
Now, in Wells's book, his Martians are overcome down by the blind intervention of Mother Nature.
But I think it's a reflection of the triumphalism, even the hubris, of the 1990s that Independence Day's aliens are beaten by all-American heroism.
Science fiction's alien invaders haven't always made their presence so obvious.
'50s America - a land of plenty .
.
and paranoia, haunted by fears of Communist infiltrators and Reds under the beds.
I have never sullied the honour of the American people.
This climate of pervasive mistrust inspired some writers to imagine a very different kind of invasion, in which the outsiders were already here.
You could do a big Independence Day sort of approach.
But it's scarier if everything is being done under the cover of secrecy.
There's no defence and there's no warning, and you can't prepare for it 'cause you don't know about it.
The dread of a secret alien invasion was best captured in the story Who Goes There? by the American writer John W.
Campbell.
On a remote Antarctic research base, a team of scientists discover the frozen body of a creature that can steal your shape.
- VOICEOVER: - This is the spot where it was first seen, and these are the first people who saw the Thing.
How did it get here? Where did it come from? In 1951, Campbell's supremely paranoid little tale was adapted for the cinema.
The Thing From Another World was one of the most frightening movies I had seen, but I was really young then.
And that was a "stand up in the theatre and scream" movie.
John Carpenter understood that what made the story so terrifying was the idea of an alien who looked just like one of us.
And when he remade the film in 1982, he was keen to play up his characters' fears of the outsider hiding in plain sight.
The blood test scene was my favourite scene.
Nobody trusts anybody.
There's only one way to find out who is who, and that's to go down to basic biology.
And it separates the creature from human.
This is pure nonsense.
It doesn't prove a thing.
I thought you'd feel that way, Gary.
You were the only one that could have got to that blood.
We'll do you last.
SQUEALING - GARY: - Get it away from me! MEN SHOUT INDISTINCTLY That's a wonderful movie, 'cause it deals with paranoia.
Who's the monster? Very much like Who Goes There? Who's the monster? It's all about your identity.
I know I'm not the monster.
But I don't know if you're not the monster.
DRAMATIC MUSIC It's one thing for an alien to take over a faraway Antarctic research station.
But what if the invaders were next door, right under your nose? You live your life and you think things are a certain way and you wake up one morning and discover they're not.
And you discover that your wife is not your wife, that your husband is not your husband, your child not your child.
Uh, whatever the reason for that is, whatever the explanation is, it'smaddening-making.
I mean, people could lose their sanity over a situation like that.
In 1955, Jack Finney's novel, The Body Snatchers, imagined alien seed pods landing in a small California town and duplicating the residents.
A year later, it was filmed as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
- VOICEOVER: - They come from another world - spawned in the light years of space, unleashed to take over the bodies and souls of the people of our planet, bringing a new dimension in terror to the giant Superscope screen.
SHE SCREAMS DRAMATIC MUSIC The film owed much of its power to its extensive location footage, grounding us in the humdrum ordinariness of the fictional town of Santa Mira.
The banality, the believability of the setting is as crucial to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers as it was to The War Of The Worlds.
But there is an unsettling difference.
While HG Wells's Surrey is trampled underfoot by giant Martian tripods, the Body Snatchers' invasion of Santa Mira leaves barely a trace.
In the suburbs of California, these most house-trained of invaders fit in rather well.
Suddenly, while you're asleep, they'll absorb your minds, your memories.
I don't want any part of it.
, - You're forgetting something, Miles.
- What's that? You have no choice.
- VOICEOVER: - From city to city, an incredible, hysterical The makers of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers always denied that it had a simple political subtext.
And as with so many great stories, you can probably read into it whatever you like.
The film's clearly a satire of blind conformity.
But is that the conformity of communism or of '50s America? Or is the heart of the film something more primal - your fear of losing your loved ones or, more terrifyingly, your fear of losing your own identity.
- LANDIS: - They're taking YOU.
They're not just blowing up your house.
They're taking you and your children and they'rethey're TAKING you.
Like, it's religious.
It's like Satan is taking you.
I mean, something other is taking YOU.
Please, everyone! They're here already! You're next! DRAMATIC MUSIC GENTLE MUSIC Meanwhile, more aliens were on their way, to the heart of middle England.
In 1957, John Wyndham, perhaps the best known British science fiction writer since HG Wells, published The Midwich Cuckoos - the story of an English village hiding a terrible secret.
Midwich is the target of an alien invasion unlike any other - an invasion it's impossible to see, and one that it seems impossible to stop.
It all begins one ordinary morning, when everybody in the village - every man, woman and child - suddenly loses consciousness.
When the villagers recover, they find that every woman of child-bearing age has become pregnant.
And nine months later, they give birth to a sinister brood of strangely precocious children - children with a mysterious purpose of their own.
SIREN WAILS In 1960, Wyndham's story was adaptad for the cinema as Village Of The Damned.
The director, Wolf Rilla, chose Letchmore Heath, near Watford, as the suitably quaint setting.
But the otherness of the alien children is emphasised in almost every detail - from their their unnaturally blonde hair to their blank, staring eyes.
For readers in the late 1950s, Wyndham's children struck a very particular chord.
This was the era of rock'n'roll, jukeboxes and juvenile delinquents, and in 1956, when Wyndham was writing the book, the headlines were full of a looming generation gap.
Here, Village Of The Damned chillingly captures the tension between adults and adolescents - as the alien children use their powers to make the grown-ups do their bidding.
You have to be taught to leave us alone.
Leaveusalone.
And thanks to the ingenuity of the special effects team, it's the stare that stays with you.
Now, the children might not look like marauding teddy boys, But I think John Wyndham's book captured a very potent sense that traditional British authority, both at home and abroad, was rapidly slipping away.
And the fear and confusion that stalk the streets of Midwich weren't so different from the real anxieties that were haunting middle England.
DRAMATIC MUSIC By now, these anxieties were finding their way onto the small screen too.
British television's love affair with science fiction had begun in 1953, with the live broadcast of The Quatermass Experiment.
Just over one hour ago, a British-made rocket vehicle - the first ever to have succeeded in reaching outer space, made a safe crash-landing in the area of Wimbledon Common.
Nigel Kneale's tale of an alien infestation aboard Britain's first manned space flight inspired a host of sequels featuring the no-nonsense rocket scientist Professor Bernard Quatermass.
My name is Quatermass.
And if that means anything to you, take my advice.
Leave this place now.
I think there may be grave danger.
The most effective and ambitious was Quatermass And The Pit which aired in 1958.
This time, the professor investigates a Martian spacecraft buried beneath London.
Look 'ere! Look what's 'ere! My earliest sci-fi memory is hiding behind the settee at home, watching Quatermass And The Pit.
Oh, that was scary.
There was this big pod that landed in London - it was discovered in a hole in the ground in London.
Scientists went in, and inside were these sort of praying mantis things.
It's alright, they're dead.
SHE SCREAMS But when Quatermass opens the capsule, he unwittingly triggers a shocking outbreak of rioting in London And thenthey got away! They were coming! .
.
a scene that, as the writer, Nigel Kneale, explained, had been influenced by the Notting Hill race riots in the summer of 1958.
Pack up! Get out, all of you! You hear?! Get out! At first, Quatermass And The Pit plays on our fear of the unknown and the unseen.
But then comes the twist.
It turns out that the Martians came to Earth millennia ago and their unholy bond with our ancestors left an extraordinary legacy.
What Professor Quatermass discovers is one of the great revelations in all science fiction, because it turns out that mankind itself has effectively been engineered by our Martian visitors.
They came here not as invaders, but as our creators.
Every war crisis, witch-hunt, race riot and purge, is a reminder and a warning.
We are the Martians.
If we cannot control the inheritance within us, this will be their second dead planet.
By any standards, this was all quite high-concept - a buried alien spaceship awakening long-dormant powers, a mass psychosis triggering the slaughter of people without Martian DNA.
Now, when you think all this was going out at eight o'clock in the evening over Christmas 1958, it feels like pretty strong stuff.
Today, we remember the Quatermass serials as among the great classics of British television.
At the time, they had more than 10 million people glued to their sets - the BBC's biggest audience for years.
Science fiction had invaded the British living room, and it was here to stay.
MUSIC: "Dr Who theme" In November 1963, the most successful science-fiction series in history made its grainy black-and-white debut.
And the success of Doctor Who was due, in no small part, to British television's most famous aliens of all.
Today, the Daleks have become such a fixture of our popular culture that you have to do a bit of mental time travelling yourself just to imagine the sheer impact they had on British audiences in the early 1960s.
Remember that it was only 20 years since the Second World War - since the Blitz and the Battle of Britain - and fears of Nazi invasion were still very vivid in people's minds.
Doctor Who took that fear and it projected it into the 22nd century and it asked what would have happened if the Nazis - or, rather, the Daleks - had won.
This isn't just an alien invasion.
It's an alien occupation.
We are the masters of Earth.
We are the masters of Earth.
We are the masters of Earth.
The Dalek Invasion Of Earth was one of the first Doctor Who stories to use extensive location filming, and its shots of Daleks gliding around London echoed old newsreel footage of Nazi-occupied Europe.
Indeed, the Daleks' creator, Terry Nation, was very keen to play up the parallels between the Nazis and a Dalek army bent on enslaving, even exterminating, its British subjects.
Help me! Kill him! WEAPONS FIRE But, of course, the really remarkable thing is how successfully the Daleks have endured.
They might have begun life as glorified Nazis, but now they've acquired a satanic appeal all their own.
And that, I think, is a tribute to something that has barely changed since the 1960s - their brilliant and unforgettable design.
The fundamental problem of every alien design, how do you breaking up the human form? How is it obviously not a man in a suit? I think this problem has been solved exactly once - once - with the Daleks.
It's the only alien life form that doesn't look like a person.
Exterminate him! Exterminate him! - MOFFAT: - It's a beautiful design, it's an unimprovable design, the original design they came up with.
We may tweak it, we may make it large or small, change the colours, You never really interfere with the details.
It's a brilliant design.
And then it's got that wonderful voice.
Whoareyou? It's a tank that rants.
It's a robot with anger problems.
It's unique.
It squawks away and it's venomous and vile.
Um, these arethese are, without doubt, the finest, most exciting alien life forms ever devised.
They haven't been bettered yet.
Don't be a fool! You can't help him now.
Who knows why the Daleks caught on like they did? I mean, it's a sink plunger and a whisk, butbut you overlook that almost immediately.
Um, it's just Raymond Cusick, who designed it, I think just had a bit of genius on him that day.
You can go up to anyone in the UK and do that, and they'd know that it's a Dalek.
It's like they're so iconic, they're part of British culture.
TENNANT: There's no CGI or anything involved in the Daleks.
They're there.
So, you can play a scene with a Dalek.
You can, you know Unlike somesome monsters that are created on a computer afterwards, and that you're acting against a tennis ball and a stick, well, the Dalek is there.
You can run long scenes of dialgoue and you can get very involved and very engaged.
They're very easy to play opposite.
Where's it going? The Crucible has a heart of Z-neutrino energy.
The TARDIS will be deposited into the core.
It'll be torn apart! We usually picture alien invaders arriving from another planet, bristling with futuristic weapons and advanced technology.
But science fiction has also presented us with a parallel threat - invaders that we've inadvertently created ourselves.
In 1945, with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world had entered the nuclear age.
And in the decade that followed, the sheer potential of nuclear power both fascinated and terrified writers and filmmakers across the world.
This was a power without precedent in human history and one with almost unimaginable consequences.
What horrors, what monsters, might we unleash? - VOICEOVER: - The BeastThe Beast The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.
Monstrosities were always created and they were always monstrosities that were caused by either the misuse of science or, uh, the curse of radioactivity.
- VOICEOVER: - Buried somewhere under the polar ice cap, in a state of suspended animation, are the awesome creatures - the leviathans that roamed the earth at the dawn of time.
And under certain conditions, a nuclear explosion could free one from his icy tomb.
IT ROARS These monstrous visions only became possible thanks to the pioneering work of special effects artists like Ray Harryhausen, who brought the beast to life with an inspired combination of animated models and clever cinematography.
When you say "a Ray Harryhausen movie," you know exactly what it is, whether it's Jason And The Argonauts or First Men In The Moon or Mysterious Island or Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.
- VOICEOVER: - An armoured giant, wreaking his prehistoric fury on modern man.
What's wonderful in that is Ray invented .
.
I think he calls it a "rhedosaurus" or something.
I don't know.
He invented a dinosaur.
And it really does move in asympathetic way.
Um, you have great empathy for his creatures.
- VOICEOVER: - Cities would be terrorised by the cruel intruder from the past, populations crazed and panicked with fear by its destructive force.
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms had an enormous international impact.
A year later, in 1954, a Japanese studio, Toho, created a cut-price creature of its own, by putting a man in a monster suit.
- VOICEOVER: - Godzilla - king of the monsters! IT ROARS Today, it's hard not to laugh at the spectacle of a man in a rubber suit stamping on a model of Tokyo.
But for Japanese audiences at the time, there could hardly have been a more visceral symbol of the ravages of nuclear weapons.
Indeed, only a few months before the film's release, a Japanese fishing boat had accidentally been overwhelmed with radiation from an American H-bomb test, with terrible consequences for its unfortunate crew.
And in the film, that dreadful accident was the inspiration for the monster's first explosive attack.
LOUD EXPLOSION SHOUTING - ALL: - Aaaagh! The only country to ever have actually had atomic weapons dropped onto it makes a movie about this radioactive beast, you know, that that destroys cities.
All monsters are metaphors.
Godzilla is probably the most obvious one.
As the threat of nuclear war has faded, so Godzilla has been reinvented.
But the idea that our scientific hubris might bring forth monsters has proved remarkably persistent.
Even now, some 66 million years after they died out, these genuine Godzillas can still send a shiver down your spine.
At the very least, they're a humbling reminder that this planet hasn't always belonged to us.
And perhaps that explains our enduring fascination with their rise and fall.
In 1912, the writer Arthur Conan Doyle had imagined a lost world in South America, where the dinosaurs might still live on.
And almost 80 years later, another writer, the American Michael Crichton, speculated that through the power of genetic engineering, we might bring the dinosaurs back to life - not in some lost kingdom, but in a theme park.
Crichton's idea became the genesis of his 1990 bestseller Jurassic Park.
Steven Spielberg was so taken with the concept that he snapped up the film rights before the book had even hit the shelves.
What's so clever about Jurassic Park is the way that it plays with our expectations because, to begin with, it feels less like a monster movie and more like a natural history documentary.
THEY BELLOW They're moving in herds.
Jurassic Park was a little bit different from the classic monster movie, even though it was that.
But, again, Steven didn't want to play the dinosaurs as monsters.
He wanted them to be portrayed as animals.
And I remember when I was initially doing some tests on Jurassic Park, I gave the raptors a lizard tongue.
You know, 'cause I waslike, as a .
.
looking for something that they could do that would be cool.
So, as they're looking around, their tongues, sort of like lizards, go, "Ffft-ffft! Ffft-ffft!" But they brought Jack Horner in, the palaeontologist, as a consultant, and he saw that, and he just wentlivid.
You know, he was just like, "Dinosaurs don't do that.
"Dinosaurs are birds.
They're not lizards.
They don't do that.
" I was like .
.
"OK, we'll take the tongue out.
" You know, I was just I mean, it's pretend, right? But Spielberg's ambition to create the most realistic dinosaurs ever seen on screen prompted him to abandon Phil Tippett's animated models in favour of a new, computer-generated approach.
The results are most spectacular when the story takes a frightening turn.
IT ROARS Steven asked me, you know, like, "So, how does this make you feel?" And I was like, "I feel extinct.
" And he goes, "That's a good line.
"I'm gonna put it in the movie.
" And I was like, "Well, thanks for your sympathy.
" The film's most memorable scene stars two computer-generated velociraptors, who proved a lot scarier than the lone, marauding giants of the 1950s.
IT GROWLS THEY ROAR AND HISS I thought what was interesting about Jurassic Park is it had its cake and ate it too, which is it gave us the sense of wonder, but "You shouldn't be doing this!" You know? "Man should not mess with this stuff! This is God's work!" Jurassic Park was a warning about the dangers of creating new life.
But the urge to find new life beyond our planet has endured, having gained real momentum in the 1970s.
Scientists were now making serious efforts to make contact with creatures up there.
And, so, instead of preying on our fears of the other, science fiction began to explore the idea of a peaceful encounter with alien life.
- MAN: - We have ignition.
And we have lift-off.
By now, NASA were sending out probes with messages about life on earth, from human anatomy to our taste in music, prompted by respected astronomers such as Carl Sagan.
- SAGAN: - But it's beginning to look as if there may be an enormous number of advanced technical civilisations out there, in the universe.
And the question is can we somehow find out about them? - MAN: - Houston, this is Apollo.
All this cosmological optimism coincided with a brief thaw in the Cold War, symbolised by an extraordinary coming together of American and Soviet astronauts in 1975.
Two years later, that same desire to reach out and extend the hand of friendship, found its science fiction equivalent in Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, starring Richard Dreyfuss.
It was the first time an artist said, "You have nothing to fear "by looking up and seeing what's out there.
" Dreyfuss plays a suburban electrician called Roy Neary, a regular guy whose life is transformed after a close encounter with a UFO.
Neary's story draws on innumerable real-life reports of people who claim to have seen mysterious lights or flying saucers, or even to have been abducted by aliens.
But it's also pure HG Wells - the truly extraordinary invading the world of the everyday.
- WOMAN ON RADIO: - 10.
47.
WHISPERS INDISTINCTLY OK.
Come on.
Alright.
"Stoppage in the single circuits will lead you right to nowhere.
" HE SIGHS Mary 10 The power of Close Encounters is that it's about just a normal guy, who gets caught up in this thing accidentally.
It's very Hitchcockian on that level.
What works so well there is that he IS the audience.
He asks the questions that the audience is trying to ask.
He spells out what the audience is thinking.
And that's why the movie works so well.
BELL DINGS LOUDLY NEARBY Oh, shit! Neary's close encounter triggers a growing obsession with UFOs.
And the role was harder than it looked.
It needed an actor who could express an almost ageless wonder at that moment of alien contact.
Steven and I were pretty good friends and I wanted in on that project.
And I said, "Steven, you need a child.
" And he looked up and said, "You got the part.
" Andand I had actually figured it out.
He did need a child.
A man-child.
In those days, that's basically one of the two reasons I was hired.
And II could go MUSIC: "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind Theme" .
.
and make a lot of money.
The job of designing an alien mothership that would make Richard Dreyfuss's jaw drop in amazement fell to the visual effects artist Douglas Trumbull.
Spielberg wanted this big, black object that'd just block out the stars and that was gonna be the mothership.
And I said, "Well, what if it looked like a city in the sky? "A combination of oil refineries "in San Pedro "and skyscrapers in Manhattan?" And I had been developing this idea of a smoke room, which was to use aan atmosphere to photograph the mothership in, so that it would be such a dense atmosphere that even if these skyscrapers, which would only be, you know, a foot tall an an inch in diameter with thousands of little holes in them, would be lit up and create a kind of a glow in the atmosphere, which turned out to be really quite beautiful.
It was a spooky way to shoot, but it was the magic that made it all happen.
Only when Trumbull's gigantic mothership opens its doors do we get a brief glimpse of the aliens who have come in peace.
What was wonderful about it, was that Steven had this optimistic idea that when the aliens would get here, they would be friendly.
They would not be here to invade us, they would not to be here to kill us.
I don't know that that had ever been ever done before.
In Close Encounters, the aliens make only a fleeting appearance before flying back into space.
But this gave Spielberg an idea.
What if one of them had been left behind? This was the premise of his next venture into science fiction - E.
T.
Set in a California suburb, E.
T.
is the story of a young boy, Elliott, struggling in the aftermath of his parents' divorce.
But one night, he finds a kindred spirit - a lost, lonely extraterrestrial.
E.
T.
was like a child himself.
And he was a little, naked creature an impossibly long distance from home.
He could not have been more vulnerable and helpless.
Wow.
Steven Spielberg once said that E.
T.
was inspired by his own experience of his parents' divorce, as well as his sense of isolation as the only Jewish boy in his neighbourhood.
And it plays on a very common anxiety.
Suburbia might look like the ideal American community, but it could also be the loneliest place on earth.
Like the children in the story, we come to care passionately about the fate of this wrinkly brown alien - thanks, in no small part, to his wonderfully endearing design.
It might have taken 12 people to operate the E.
T.
puppet, but to the young Drew Barrymore, who played Elliott's sister, he seemed very real.
- COYOTE: - I don't think she paid any attention to the fact that there was a cable coming out of his belly.
I think when she looked in his eyes, and he went .
.
and looked at her and tipped his head and extended his neck, I think that was aa miraculous creature in front of her, and we could see the wonder growing on her face.
E.
T.
may have come from space, but who are the real aliens in the film? For Elliot, and I think for much of the audience, they're the adults.
Because it's no accident that Spielberg places his camera at Elliot's eye level.
With the obvious exception of his mother, almost all of the grown-ups in the story are remote and anonymous.
Here, the government agents hunting for E.
T.
are lit so as to be literally faceless - and most intimidating of all is a figure identified only by his jangling keys.
I've been presented as a scary figure.
I've been shown from the waist down, uh, these keys at my belt.
And it's all the awe and power and danger of the grown-up world on the world of children.
But I said to Steven, "It's very important "that we don't make either adults or science the enemy.
"So, let's craft of my character, someone who is like Elliot, "all grown-up.
" And nothing better captures his childlike enthusiasm than this exchange between an ailing Elliott and his awestruck visitor.
- ELLIOTT: - He came to me.
He came to me.
Elliott .
.
he came to me too.
I've been wishing for this since I was 10 years old.
I don't want him to die.
E.
T.
was phenomenally successful, eventually overtaking Star Wars as the biggest box office hit ever made.
You know, when I first saw it, as an 8-year-old, at Christmas 1982, I was in floods of tears.
And even now, I think that if you don't watch E.
T.
with a lump in your throat, well, what ever happened to your soul?! E.
T.
had overturned the classic invasion story.
This time, the aliens were the good guys.
So, who were the bad guys now? In 1993, an enormously popular TV series offered a disturbing answer.
In this invasion story, the enemy aren't outside, trying to get in.
They're the people in the bunker, the people in charge - the government, the security services, the military industrial complex.
After all, why ARE they so secretive? To protect us or to cover up something altogether more sinister? MUSIC: "The X-Files theme music" The series was The X-Files, and it captured something paranoid in the air.
- CARTER: - This show was relevant in the early '90s, politically, socially, because we were still, you know, experiencing the hangover from Watergate and Iran-Contra.
There was a general distrust of government and authority.
Chris Carter didn't have to make that up.
He just kinda looked out the window and went, "Oh, there it is.
"We gotta put that in the show and scare the hell out of people.
" PHONE RINGS - MULDER: - That was fast.
- MAN: - Terry, is that you? Yeah.
Who's this? The X-Files follows FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder whose job it is to investigate unexplained phenomena.
And as the series unfolds, they uncover a high-level conspiracy to promote an alien takeover of Earth.
That bacteria I had analysed .
.
they're saying that it doesn't exist in nature.
They're saying that it could be extraterrestrial.
- CARTER: - There's been a belief, for a lot of folk, I've come to find out, that the government is hiding evidence of the existence of extraterrestrials and spaceships and aliens.
And all we did was, I think, take advantage of a fact - that people believed the government is hiding things from them.
And through the contrasting attitudes of Mulder and Scully themselves, the X-Files cleverly played on the audience's own mixture of credulity and scepticism about the possibility of alien visitors.
The joy of Scully and of Mulder with their two competing and opposing world views - one always going off in an explanation that wasalways tended to be rooted in science fiction and fantasy, and one absolutely pragmatic, medical They were a glorious team.
Much of the appeal of the X-Files lay in its heady atmosphere of anti-government paranoia.
But not all science fiction was quite so distrustful.
Maybe the authorities are only trying to protect us from ourselves? How would you react if, one day, you woke up and heard that aliens really had landed? Would we all welcome them with open arms and ask them if they'd been enjoying all those Beatles songs we've been beaming into space? Or would our reaction be more guarded, more suspicious, even more aggressive? And that question lies at the heart of a number of films that have used the issue of alien invasion as a metaphor for our contemporary anxieties about race relations, multiculturalism and immigration.
In Barry Sonnenfeld's film Men in Black, aliens have been secretly living among us for years, doing their best to blend in.
I think when Barry Sonnenfeld decided to set the movie in New York, it had a lot to do with him thinking, "Where could aliens live that people would basically not even bat an eye "if they happened to see one?" And Manhattan made the most sense for that.
Now, that's the worst disguise ever.
That guy's definitely an alien.
You don't like it, you can kiss my furry little butt.
I remember some of the first images I had for Men in Black.
They werelike, a little tail visible through someone's trenchcoat ordoing a double-take and thinking you see a strange thing, you know, behind aa newspaper stand or something.
And then I started thinking, "Well, wait - what if they're not, like, aliens "that are trying to come down and attack us? "But what if they're aliens "that just are trying to either eke out their own living "or they're stuck here for some reason? "Or what if all this is going on at the same time and we had no idea?" And that was what led me to, "Well, then, what if there's this police force that has to deal with them? Men in Black was based on a comic book series about government agents who, to avoid public panic, have to cover up all manner of alien activities.
I don't know if you've forgotten, but there's an alien battle cruiser about There's always an alien battle cruiser, a Corellian death ray or intergalactic plague about to wipe out life on this miserable little planet.
The only way these people get on with their happy lives is they do not know about it.
In effect, the Men in Black were science fiction's version of the American Immigration Service, the INS, whose role policing the Mexican border was now attracting increasing attention.
One early scene plays on the audience's expectations of a routine check for illegal immigrants.
- Who the hell are you? - INS, Division 6.
Division 6? I never heard of Division 6.
Really? Who you got your money on, D? Tough call, Hank.
- SOLOMON: - To me, the immigration stuff at the beginning was just, "What would be a cool way "to illustrate that they're like INS guys, but with aliens? "What if you think it's an INS bust "and then it turns out to be something entirely different?" Men in Black was playing the idea of alien immigrants for laughs.
But what if the newcomers were living among us in plain sight? In the 1988 film Alien Nation, some 300,000 stranded aliens settle in Los Angeles.
It is really an analogy for racism against immigrants.
But you can tell that kind of story in speculative fiction, in science fiction, in a way that even people who are racist can relate to it, and maybe, somehow, you can change their mind.
In these night-time drive-by shots, the film gives us a relatively convincing vision of aliens adapting to ordinary Los Angeles life.
I swear to God, I hate this place.
Sadly, all this multiculturalism only fuels the prejudices of James Caan's bigoted policeman.
But when fate pairs him up with an alien partner, he has to change his tune.
I loved the idea of teaming up the racist human cop with the far more relatable, interestingly, um, alien cop.
In essence, Alien Nation is a classic mismatched buddy movie.
HE HONKS HORN And this tender domestic scene hammers home the point that despite their cranial differences, these extraterrestrials, at least, aren't so different from the rest of us.
Humans, aliens - we're all brothers under the skin.
Why can't we all get along? But the 2009 film District 9 offers a rather bleaker picture of unwanted alien settlers, corralled into a government-run ghetto just outside Johannesburg.
SHOUTING Just staystay low! Where's he going? What is he? OK, let's move away here.
- REPORTER: - It's clear the security is very high.
LANDIS: What District 9 did so brilliantly was it made that world real, and not just the alien insect people, but everything about it.
You know, you could smell the stench.
It was like Slumdog Millionaire.
Open up! Open - HURD: - The sense of you are there, this is really happening, but with that sort of news journalism, you know, hand-held camera sense, it puts you right in the middle of the danger.
We sent you an eviction notice.
You just put your scrawl there.
Come on! You know, it immediately creates a very disturbing sense that anything could happen.
District 9 was inspired by a real incident from the apartheid era, when the South African Government forcibly cleared a multi-racial area known as District 6, and resettled its black residents in a poverty-stricken township.
As this scene shows, District 9's great technical achievement was to create aliens that are both realistic and repulsive.
The film forces us to confront our own prejudices.
After all, would we really want these less than cuddly E.
T.
s moving in to the house next door? For all District 9's extraordinary effects, at its heart are two very simple questions.
What does it mean to be human? And how do we treat those whom we judge to be less than human? And that brings us all the way back to Horsell Common, and to HG Wells.
"Before we judge the Martians too harshly," says the narrator in The War Of The Worlds, "we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction "our own species has wrought, "not only on animals but upon its own inferior races.
"Are we such apostles of mercy "as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" Those words were written more than a century ago, and they're as true today as ever.
- VOICEOVER: - When this dead hand moves Next time It's alive It's alive! It's alive! From Frankenstein's monster to Blade Runner's replicants - what happens when artificial life turns against its creators? How Cybermen and cyborgs blur the line between man and machine.
Prepare for the rise of the robots.