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

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 1950's sci-fi influences on video game franchises like Fallout, Bioshock and Wolfenstein.

Dennis R. Cutchins is a professor of English at Brigham Young University. He also researches ways to apply cognitive brain research to adaptation studies. Dennis R. Perry is a professor emeritus of English at Brigham Young University, specializing in American literature and film adaptation. He is the author, co-author or co-editor of several publications on Hitchcock, Poe and Frankenstein.