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.
In one of the great openings in movies, a girl (Sandy Descher) staggers through the New Mexico desert, dazed and mute. Then she erupts into hysterics, screaming, “Them! Them! THEM!” The them are giant ants, magnified to 18-wheeler size by the atomic bomb tests in nearby Alamagordo. The antosaurs somehow set up their formicary in the Los Angeles sewers, where they’re faced down by the usual bunch of cops and scientists (including the Thing himself, James Arness). And it’s no picnic. This superior drama — not a B but a B+ — boasts brisk, no-nonsense direction by Gordon Douglas, working from a story by sci-fi movie ace George Worthing Yates (It Came from Beneath the Sea, Conquest of Space, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Earth vs. the Spider…).
While the ants were annoying Los Angeles, a more majestic trouble-maker rose from Tokyo Bay: Gojira, a Japanese portmanteau word meaning killer whale. In fact, the creature is a 200-ft.-tall dinosaur awakened from a hundred-million-year snooze by, what else, A-bomb tests. He snacks on fishermen from remote islands, then comes to the big city to be a star, and carrying all the modern star’s baggage: nasty disposition, need to demolish things, insatiable appetite for mischief. The original Japanese film, directed by Ishiro Honda, was Americanized as Godzilla (an inspiration coinage, by the way: God + gorilla), with Perry Mason star Raymond Burr inserted into a few scenes. Both versions were big hits; the Japanese followed up with 27 more Godzilla films and many others with such oversize predators as Rodan and Gamera. They’re still making these pictures today.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
