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Before Frankenstein Conquers the World, there had been no official collaboration between America’s Hollywood and Japan’s Toho studios, which had each been churning out their own giant-radiation-induced-monster films.
Read MoreFrom the imagination of Ishiro Honda, the man who made Godzilla and most of its succeeding kaiju films, comes one of the weirdest films I have ever seen. Unlike Honda’s other films, this is no giant monster movie.
Read MoreThem! is undeniably underrated. It is a wonder to me that it is not on the AFI 100 list. Strangely, Warner Bros. is said to not have had much confidence in this film, abandoning plans for it to be both in color and 3D, two popular gimmicks of creature films at the time. Despite this, Them! has forged a legacy as a prime example of the giant, radioactive monster craze of the 1950s and would go on to be Warner Bros.’s most successful picture of 1954.
Read MoreJust nine years after the U.S. nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the film Godzilla was officially released. Separating these two events are seven years of American military occupation of Japan, the testing of hydrogen bombs off the coast of Japan (by both Americans and Soviets), and a dramatic reshaping of Japanese culture, owing much to the American efforts to remake Japanese society.
Read MoreThe Beast from 20,000 Fathoms could be called the cinematic atomic bomb that awakened the giant cinematic monster and kaiju in the 1950s. It was an unassuming film in many respects, but The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms helped to chart the immediate course for 50s horror, with classic films like Them! And Godzilla following it.
Read MoreZombie films first came to America in the 1940s. At this time of war anxiety, zombie films centered around mind control and invasion from afar. Themes like those in Revenge of the Zombies, in which a mad Nazi scientist, Dr. Max Heinrich von Altermann (John Carradine), uses technology to secure power over Lila’s mind.
Read MoreLew Landers’ The Return of the Vampire (1943) plays almost like an Aesop’s fable told by the Grimm Brothers, set against a backdrop of wartime London. There is the typical Gothic villain, an occultist turned vampire, Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi); his reluctant henchman caught between good and evil; a religious and righteous force of good; an arc of moral redemption; and a bomb-ruined, foggy backdrop simmering with creeping vengeance.
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