Invasion '51: The Birth of Alien Cinema

Between March and September of 1951, three very different films launched a new Hollywood genre, the alien invasion feature, defining our cultural expectations for extraterrestrial contact in the process. Where The Thing from Another World gives us the first movie monster capable of total human annihilation, The Day the Earth Stood Still provides a messianic messenger who unmasks our own destructive potential. And then there is The Man from Planet X, whose ambiguous alien may have gotten som...