Description
Book Synopsis Science fiction cinema, once relegated to the undervalued B movie slot, has become one of the dominant film genres of the 21st century, with Hollywood alone producing more than 400 science fiction films annually. Many of these owe a great deal of their success to the films of one defining decade: the 1950s.
Essays in this book explore how classic ''50s science fiction films have been recycled, repurposed, and reused in the decades since their release. Tropes from Don Siegel''s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), for instance, have found surprising new life in Netflix''s wildly popular Stranger Things. Interstellar (2014) and Arrival (2016) have clear, though indirect roots in the iconic 1950s science fictions films Rocketship X-M (1950) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and The Shape of Water (2017) openly recalls and reworks the major premises of The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). Essays also cover 19
Trade Review
Consistently engaging, this volume's essays make a thoughtful and important contribution. I'm delighted with the focus and range of material and perspectives and am excited to see this work take its place in the body of scholarship on 1950s science fiction films."—Dr. Cynthia J. Miller, senior faculty, Emerson College
"Unique, fascinating and well-written...helpful to other scholars of sci-fi yet at the same time accessible to general readers."—Dr. Aeon J. Skoble, Bartlett Chair in Free Speech and Expression, Bridgewater State University
Table of Contents
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: The Past and Present Future
- Dennis R. Cutchins and Dennis R. Perry
- Part I: Adapting a 1950s Science Fiction Aesthetic
- Presenting Frank Darabont's The Mist (2007) in Glorious Black & White: The Remaking of a 1950s Sci-Fi Aesthetic
- Greg Semenza
- Retro Reboots: Adapting 1950s Science Fiction in Bioshock, Fallout, and Wolfenstein
- Daniel Singleton
- The Truth Is Out There: 1950s Science Fiction, The X-Files, and the Shifting Dynamics of National Anxiety
- Jessica Metzler
- Part II: Monsters Within and Without
- Extinction Panic: Prehistoric Creatures of the Anthropocene
- Zak Bronson
- "Forget the world and hang on to the people you care about the most": Giant Monster Movies from the 1950s and Their Twenty-First-Century Counterparts
- Robin Jeremy Land
- "Something's lost in the translation!" Hemimetabolic Adaptation (or Incomplete Metamorphosis) in David Cronenberg's The
- Richard Berger
- Adapting the Monstrous Other: del Toro Re-Shapes Creature from the Black Lagoon
- Glenn Jellenik
- Part III: Alien Invasions
- The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World, and the Creation of Two Archetypes
- Dennis R. Cutchins
- Queer Anxieties and Perverse Desires in the Alien Infiltration Film
- Mica A. Hilson
- The War of the Worlds: Masculine Heroism and Symbolic Spaces in Invasion Narratives
- Joan Ormrod
- The Space Children and the Alien: Magic and Paranoia at World's
- Dennis R. Perry
- The Alien in the Graveyard: Extraterrestrial Reanimation in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space and Walter Mosley's The Wave
- Paul Piatkowski
- Double Trouble: Martin Guerre, Invaders from Mars, and the Body Snatchers Films
- Sam Umland
- Part IV: Other Worlds and Dystopian Visions
- Escaping Earth: The Uninhabitable Home in Rocketship X-M, Interstellar, and Ad Astra
- Christopher Love
- From the Promise of the 1950s to the Uncertainty of the 1960s: The Surety of Forbidden Planet Against the Empty Center of Solaris
- Robert Mayer
- New Maps of Hell: Racebending and Fahrenheit
- William Hart
- Still Captive? The Maternal Body in 1950s Science Fiction Disaster Films and Mad Max: Fury Road
- Rebecca Johinke
- Afterword: Yesterday's Tomorrows: The Double Consciousness of Science Fiction
- Thomas Leitch
- About the Contributors
- Index
