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The science fiction film genre is separate from the irrational or unconscious meanderings of the human mind. In line with this, this book regularly pertains to examples of the genre that can found on television, in books, comics, video games and even fine art, as part of the project to locate the films within a wider cultural context. Science fiction has surely adopted material from both the musical and horror film. The genre of science fiction film allows the kind of debate witnessed among critics, writers and aficionados of the written novels. The chapter then looks at what might be called proto-science fiction films. These films came before the science fiction film which boom in the 1950s. It is shown that Metropolis had a huge impact on science fiction. The interwar films evidently address the political and social unrest of their times. Until the 1950s, the science fiction feature film genre actually started in America.

This chapter investigates the science fiction films of the 1950s in America. The 1950s was the decade that marked the beginning of the end for the Hollywood studio system when the oligopoly of the major studios began to break down. The alien invasion films and the science fiction/horror films of that era exhibited an overwhelming concern with the family. Like so many of the American and Japanese films of the time, the British science fiction/horror films of that time ostensibly dealt with the destructive potential of atomic weaponry and concerns surrounding the development and future use of nuclear power. The British films presented largely substitute the female with the monster in their fight to retain an orderly, masculine realm. Finally, an interview with Billy Gray regarding his role in a science fiction film is provided.

This chapter describes a range of films that appeared in the 1960s. It then addresses the ‘new art’ films that appeared in the late 1960s throughout the 1970s. The 1960s was a time when science fiction and science fact became remarkably intertwined, sometimes blurred, particularly within the context of an American national preoccupation with the story of the Space Race. The first ‘golden age’ of the science fiction film is frequently placed in the 1950s, with a second ‘golden age’ typically dated from the late 1970s and early 1980s. An interest in drugs became a defining feature of the ‘new art’ science fiction films. Examples of the American ‘new art’ science fiction films are then considered. The chapter also investigates a couple of British films, Zardoz and The Quatermass Conclusion. These British films also show the counter-culture as a feminine threat. An interview with Director Ken Russell is finally presented.

This chapter explores how issues of race are played out in science fiction films. It also deals with the differences and similarities between the representations of racial issues between Euro-American films and American-produced films. Star Trek and Planet of the Apes presented audiences with a future/present world in which racial difference equalled inequality, violent discord, division and conflict. The authentic/inauthentic opposition in science fiction films is then addressed. The black protagonists in Strange Days and Virtuosity act as a kind of reminder of what the white community appears to have lost or, perhaps, never had. ‘Oriental’ characters also appear in a number of Hollywood films. A variety of responses by a European film industry to Hollywood science fiction is noted and there are also clear similarities between these otherwise diverse films. An interview with Joe Morton is presented, which deals with racial issues in science fiction films.

This chapter discusses the technology of science fiction films, both as an intra- and extra-diegetic component of the genre. Academics have addressed Tom Gunning's article in their efforts to investigate the aesthetic shifts and modes of address that emerged with post-classical cinema. It was the science fiction blockbusters that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s that more readily affirmed cinema's ‘roots in stimulus and carnival rides’. The continued use and development of computer graphics (CG) effects and computer technologies in mainstream science fiction film followed two parallel routes throughout the 1990s. These are the figuring of human characters interacting with computer-generated or computer-controlled objects/characters in a ‘real world’ environment or the human/post-human character immersed within a computer generated environment. It is thought that science fiction will continue to visit the screens in one form of another. Finally, an interview with Stan Winston, a special effects technician, is presented.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on American science fiction films of the 1950s, many of which are fondly remembered, yet critically dismissed. It argues that it is through the intersection of past and present, of unresolved trauma superimposed upon present anxieties, that 1950s science fiction films acquire topical relevance within their historical context. Science fiction films from the 1950s are a belated response to the national trauma of World War II and the Korean War projected onto the unsettling experience of the Cold War. With much of the critical work on the Cold War aspects of the films already delivered by other scholars, this book will weigh in on the side of the argument that has, as yet, remained critically neglected—the side of past trauma: on World War II and the Korean War, and their troubling legacy in the first decade of the American Century.

This chapter reports the depiction of the masculine subject in mainstream American science fiction films from 1980–1990. The popular rebirth in the science fiction film in America results to the genre's market dominance. Star Wars and Close Encounters offer a picture of disintegrating family structures and absentee fathers. The Back to the Future series continues the themes of family and fatherhood. The cyborg films, The Terminator and Robocop, in 1980s are explored. It is believed that it is wrong to see either of these films as unproblematically upholding the dominant ideology of the time. It appears that, with the influx of the American film product onto the global marketplace in the 1980s, some national cinemas responded by producing national films. The interview with Paul Verhoeven clarifies the ways in which American culture came to be ‘written’ into the film.

This chapter examines the interconnections between British television, radio and film companies in relation to science fiction, particularly with regard to the numerous film adaptations of science fiction dramas in the 1950s by companies such as Hammer. This period saw the rise of television as a dominant domestic medium, and a growing backlash against the perceived threat of American soft power, as typified by the alluring shine of science fiction with its promise of a bright technological future. There was therefore a tension within the uses of domestically produced British material in a popular genre that was perceived as American. The interaction between film and broadcast media in relation to science fiction was therefore crucial at this historical juncture, in helping promote the identities of filmmakers like Hammer, but also in supporting the identity of the BBC, and in acting as a nexus for debates on taste and national identity.

This chapter investigates the representation of the feminine subject in science fiction. It is shown that feminine subjects have traditionally been joined within the science fiction film. The 1990s saw the development of a different kind of female figure in science fiction cinema. The chapter states that female figures which emerged in science fiction/action films appeared to take on a functioning role more normally assigned to the male hero. Comparative analyses of three films in which a female hero appears are given: Hardware, The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Nemesis 2: Nebula. Both Hardware and Nemesis 2 exploit the Terminator films, but each in its way also subverts the narrative trajectory of their blockbuster counterparts. Starship Troopers effectively takes both the female hero and the femme fatale. An interview with Director Paul Verhoeven regarding the female heroes is also offered.

Big budget Indian productions such as Koi… mil Gaya (I…Found Someone, dir. Rakesh Roshan 2003), its sequel Krissh (dir. Rakesh Roshan 2006), Love Story 2050 (dir. Harry Baweja 2008) and Krissh 3 (dir. Rakesh Roshan, 2013), all demonstrate that science fiction has become a major box-office draw in India and its diaspora. This chapter traces the literary origins and history of Indian science fiction film. Whilst doing so it also examines the influences, both international and local, which have gone into these productions. The chapter suggests that whilst borrowing heavily from Hollywood and the western science fiction tradition, Indian science fiction cinema is not entirely imitative. As a genre we suggest that it displays a cinematic tradition quite distinct, such as the inclusion of musical numbers, alongside certain significant Indian thematic elements, such as strong religious and Hindu nationalist references. Thus Indian science fiction cinema provides the possibility for not only generating significant revenue for the industry as a whole, but also remonstrating against ‘the homogenising impulses of Hollywood’ (Vasudevan 2000) whilst at the same time imitating its forms and styles.

This chapter focuses on the recruitment of the audience into the “military metaphysics” that C. Wright Mills decries as a symptom of America's Cold War mentality. More specifically, it reads attempts at recruitment made by science fiction films of the period through the use of military stock footage. Pilfering the public domain for footage to be inserted into one's own film was a standard device of inexpensive filmmaking that found one of its most extreme expressions in Alfred E. Green's Invasion U.S.A. (1952). Generally dismissed as a hack job and mercilessly lampooned by Mystery Science Theater 3000, Invasion U.S.A. is a prime example of a politically engaged film using one of the common stylistic devices of 1950s low-budget filmmaking.

This chapter examines Oshii Mamoru's animated Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). It analyzes the connections between the ‘cult’ elements of the film and the science fiction (sf)-esque issues that Oshii explores throughout his oeuvre. It argues that for Oshii, the film is a kind of performed philosophical speculation, and many of the same elements that allow us to define his work as ‘cult’ also function to highlight and enact his theories regarding technobiopolitics — theories typically linked to sf. To define Innocence as ‘cult’ here is not a secondary designation; rather, ‘cult’ is a fundamental element in producing the meanings of this sf film.

This chapter discusses performance strategies linked with the science fiction film genre and the special significance of generic performance in contemporary science fiction film. Using David Cronenberg's films Crash and eXistenZ as the primary examples, the chapter examines the role of performance within these films and the wider implications of performance as encouraged by video and computer games. These films place questions of performance at the heart of their projects, which is made abundantly clear in the reference to past film performances. Both of these films displayed a certain play with an established ‘depth’ formula of being human and visions of a constantly emerging techno-human. The performative aspects of performance are highlighted in the sense that uncertainty and possibility is kept in play. The chapter finally presents an interview with Dean Norris regarding generic performance in science fiction film.

This chapter focuses on science fiction films that featured aliens passing as humans and examines how they tapped into the fears and anxieties about politics and issues of identity in postwar America. In films such as Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, friendly neighbors might be alien invaders pretending to be humans. These Hollywood films were of two main categories: those concerned with the external threat of alien invasions, and those that deal with the internal threat of aliens who infiltrated the earth and passed for human. The chapter suggests that aliens passing for human brought to the fore the connections between anxiety about racial passing, Communism, and subversive gender or sexual identities.

The introductory chapter establishes relationships between archaeology as a trope within SF film and television and as a cultural site from which to investigate the medium’s critical engagement with post 9/11 geopolitics. Arguing that the imagination of the future is indelibly overrun by the past, scholars like Fredric Jameson, Gary Wolfe and Carl Freeman contend that SF is a historicist genre that exposes its master fantasy of progress to the kinds of real and symbolic assaults on Western global power represented by 9/11. The introduction contends that SF film and television offer resistant readings of the ways mediatized weapons of retaliation on the West circulate within popular culture as potent images of threat and fear that have leant Western governments extraordinary powers of surveillance and control over its citizens and the world in the name of freedom and security. The introduction historicises the cinematic and televisual response to 9/11 and its aftermath by looking back to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film that speaks obliquely to the terrible events of the year it imagines, in which the cinematics of terror have been naturalized within the SF cinematic imagination.

This chapter focuses on the traumatized war veteran and the repressed memory of World War II. The key text is Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), which imagines the monstrous invader as an alien creature masquerading in human form. Underneath the perfect human surface is the grotesquely malformed alien creature—a potent visual metaphor that captures the complexity of the veteran's traumatization, especially when the injury is both psychological and physical in nature. The alien impostors in the other two films discussed in the chapter—William Cameron Menzies's Invadersfrom Mars (1953) and Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)—address the larger impact of the male veteran's presence in the peaceful postwar community. The chapter tracks the disturbance caused by the veteran as it spreads from romantic couples to families and to entire towns and the nation at large.

This chapter switches the focus from iconic characters to iconic spaces, following the demographic changes brought about by World War II and the expansion of the domestic infrastructure during the Eisenhower administration. It focuses on the ways in which the military encouraged certain ways of perceiving and experiencing cities, suburbs, and small towns in the transition from World War II to the Cold War. More specifically, it takes on the desert landscape of the American Southwest and tracks its occupation by the military. Closely associated with the development and testing of the US nuclear arsenal, but also with the world of the American frontier and the Western, the southwestern desert appears, in turn, deeply familiar and eerily strange to 1950s American culture. Science fiction films like Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Gordon Douglas's Them! (1954) unfold as the Cold War overwrites the traditional connotations of the landscape.

This chapter returns to Eisenhower's term “military-industrial complex” and outlines the concept's extended afterlife, especially in regard to the so-called “war on terror” after September 11, 2001. It suggests that then post-9/11 America under Bush might have seen a return of Eisenhower's (in)famous term. America may have stopped talking about the military–industrial complex for a while, but that did not mean that the military–industrial complex had, quietly, gone away. The return of the term marked a new awareness of political and economic conditions for which it had always been the most apt description. The chapter concludes with a final consideration of what 1950s science fiction films can tell us about the US in the present day—their impact on later films and their continued relevance to the culture.