Cold War fears made the 1950s a golden era for paranoid science-fiction flicks. TIME looks back at the decade's best outer-space and nuclear-monster movies.
Today’s special-effects dudes work with computers and zillion-dollar budgets. Ray Harryhausen’s monsters and space ships were handmade, on a shoestring, then animated in frame-by-frame stop motion — the grueling process of a medieval craftsman. He created the giant octopus in the 1955 It Came from Beneath the Sea (where the budget was so skimpy that Harryhausen could afford to give the creature only six arms) and the sleek spaceships here. The aliens want a top-level government meeting to assure a peaceful landing, but the bastards are lying! (Moral: Never negotiate with the Russkies.) Cold War edginess aside, the movie has splendid action scenes featuring these gorgeous killing machines from outer space, all courtesy of Harryhausen’s one-man effects factory. Miraculously, the master is still around, a living inspiration to modern FX savants.
To parry the dozens of sci-fi films about things growing to monstrous size, writer Richard Matheson imagined man getting smaller in a universe that kept expanding. Scott Carey (Grant Williams), exposed to radiation and insecticide, starts shrinking, gradually, which at first is an embarrassment, then a national curiosity, then a terror as the doll house he lives in is attacked by a house cat. Now an inch tall, he battles a giant spider, before being reduced a size where the infinitesimal meets the infinite. Jack Arnold is the director of this poignant, realistic parable. Matheson would become a sci-fi titan, writing the novel I Am Legend, most of Roger Corman’s Poe thrillers, the “gremlin” episode of The Twilight Zone, the Spielberg TV movie Duel and the vampire-in-Vegas classic The Night Stalker. But Shrinking Man proves his career was full-grown at birth, with a story that ended a fascinating era of sci-fi not with a bang, but in wonder.
In light of the Material Girl performing at Super Bowl XLVI, TIME takes a look at her life and career, both of which have been lived firmly in the public eye.
