The Eternal Future of The 1950s : Essays on the Lasting Influence of the Decade's Science Fiction Films.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cutchins, Dennis R.

Contributor:

Perry, Dennis R.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science fiction films--United States--History and criticism.

Science fiction films.

Motion pictures--United States--History--20th century.

Motion pictures.

Nineteen fifties.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (312 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Jefferson : McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2023.

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction : the past and present future / Dennis R. Cutchins and Dennis R. Perry

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

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 Fly / Richard Berger

Adapting the monstrous other : del Toro re-shapes The Creature from the Black Lagoon / Glenn Jellenik

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 / Mica A. Hilson

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 end / 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

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 451 / William Hart

Still captive? : The maternal body in 1950s science fiction disaster films and Mad Max: Fury Road / Rebecca Johinke

Yesterday's tomorrows : the double consciousness of science fiction / Thomas Leitch.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Other Format:

Print version: Cutchins, Dennis R. The Eternal Future of The 1950s

ISBN:

1-4766-4927-8