Nuclear Monsters? I'm In
Here is an excellent article which examines the cold-war mentality which produced one of my guiltiest pleasures in life - science fiction monster watching!
Photo by The Unexpectedables flickr.com/unexpectedablesdiy
The Delicious Dreadfulness of Nuclear Monsters
"People who want to talk about the jumpy, kitschy, gloriously lurid movie genre we now know as 1950s sci-fi usually start with Susan Sontag. This is not because Sontag is a bug-eyed alien or 50 feet tall but because she wrote, in 1965, the definitive essay on Cold War dystopian fantasy: 'The Imagination of Disaster.' 'We live,' she claimed in that piece, 'under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.' The job of science fiction was at once to 'lift us out of the unbearably humdrum... by an escape into dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings' and to 'normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it.'... "
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/nuclear_power/2013/01/nuclear_monster_movies_sci_fi_films_in_the_1950s_were_terrifying_escapism.html
The sculpture in this photo was apparently inspired by the movie The Green Slime which is actually not from the same period that the article discusses -- but it looks pretty good and definitely depicts a nuclear monster! Did you see this movie on TV?
Do you like monsters?