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Destination Moon (1950)
6.3/10on IMDb
Released
Where the decade's boom took off, and a rare one that takes the engineering seriously. Robert A. Heinlein worked on the script, Chesley Bonestell's matte paintings supply the lunar landscapes, and a Woody Woodpecker cartoon pops up to explain rocketry to the backers. It won the Oscar for its special effects.
Expect sober procedure rather than monsters. Watch it as a time capsule of how 1950 imagined a Moon trip, nineteen years before the real one.
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The Thing from Another World (1951)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
A genuine classic, and the snappiest-talking monster movie of the decade. Made by Howard Hawks's company, with Christian Nyby credited as director, it lets its Arctic crew talk over one another, which gives the base a lived-in, wisecracking warmth before the dread sets in.
James Arness plays the creature. It comes from John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There?, the same source John Carpenter went back to in 1982, and the closing broadcast's "Keep watching the skies" became the era's motto.
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When Worlds Collide (1951)
6.6/10on IMDb
Released
The original disaster blockbuster: a runaway star heads for Earth, and a team races to build a space ark that can carry a chosen few off the planet. George Pal produced it in Technicolor from the 1933 novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, with Chesley Bonestell advising on the ark's design, and its effects earned an honorary Oscar.
The acting is stiff and the people-choosing drama creaks, so treat it as enjoyable spectacle rather than a serious classic. It is where later end-of-the-world movies got their playbook.
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The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
The serious one to start with. An alien visitor and his robot, Gort, arrive with a warning about humanity's weapons, and Robert Wise wanted it to look as realistic and believable as possible, which makes the message land harder.
Bernard Herrmann's score uses two theremins, and that eerie wail became the sound of 1950s science fiction. Learn the phrase "Klaatu barada nikto" before you press play; the film never translates it. It joined the National Film Registry in 1995.
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The War of the Worlds (1953)
7.0/10on IMDb
Released
The big-screen spectacle of the decade. Producer George Pal and director Byron Haskin move H. G. Wells from Victorian England to 1950s Southern California and shoot the destruction in saturated Technicolor that still looks gorgeous.
Its effects won an Oscar, and the Martian attacks hold up far better than the romance. Pick it when the room wants an old-fashioned invasion epic with color to match, rather than the bleaker 2005 version.
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Invaders from Mars (1953)
6.3/10on IMDb
Released
A paranoid fever dream told from a child's height. A boy sees a saucer land behind his house, then watches his father, and soon his mother, turn cold and wrong. Director William Cameron Menzies builds sets with bare walls that stretch far too high, which makes the grown-up world feel like a nightmare.
The Martians look homemade and the color is vivid in a strange, candy-bright way. British audiences got a different ending from Americans, so check which version you are watching.
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It Came from Outer Space (1953)
6.5/10on IMDb
Released
The thoughtful saucer movie. Built from a film treatment by Ray Bradbury, it imagines visitors stranded in the desert who mean no harm, which turns the usual invasion story into a plea for patience with strangers.
Jack Arnold directed it as Universal's first film in 3D, so the meteor crash was made to come right at you. Even flat, the empty desert at night is genuinely eerie. A good pick for viewers who want ideas with their chills.
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The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
6.6/10on IMDb
Released
The American film that started the atomic-monster craze: an Arctic bomb test thaws a dinosaur, which heads for New York. It is considered the first live-action film to feature a giant monster unleashed by an atomic bomb, and its lighthouse attack comes straight from Ray Bradbury's story "The Fog Horn."
The real star is Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion beast, which still has weight and personality. The human scenes are routine; the roller coaster finale is not.
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Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
6.9/10on IMDb
Released
The best monster suit of the decade, and the underwater photography makes it. Ricou Browning plays the Gill-man in the swimming scenes, gliding beneath the cast in shots that are beautiful and creepy at once.
Milicent Patrick designed the creature's head and face, a credit that went mostly to Bud Westmore for about fifty years. Jack Arnold shot it in 3D, though many first audiences saw it flat. It sits closer to horror than ideas, so choose it for atmosphere rather than science.
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Them! (1954)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Giant ants, played completely straight, and that is why it works. Gordon Douglas directs like a police procedural, so the strange discoveries in the New Mexico desert and the slow piecing-together of clues build real tension before the first ant appears.
It was the first of the decade's big-bug movies, with radiation from the first atomic test blamed for the mutation, and its effects earned an Oscar nomination. The final hunt through the Los Angeles drains is still a terrific set piece.
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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
7.2/10on IMDb
Released
Disney's Jules Verne adventure, and the most lavish film here. James Mason makes Captain Nemo brooding and wounded rather than simply villainous, Kirk Douglas brings the swagger as the harpooner Ned Land, and the Nautilus is a gorgeous piece of design.
The giant squid attack was reshot from scratch at night in a storm, and it shows: it is the scene everyone remembers. It won two of its three Oscar nominations. The one to choose when younger viewers are on the couch too.
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This Island Earth (1955)
5.9/10on IMDb
Released
Pure pulp in glorious Technicolor. Scientists build a mysterious device called an interocitor and end up recruited into a war on the planet Metaluna, which gives the second half its painted skies and bombarded alien cities.
The bug-eyed Metaluna Mutant became one of the genre's defining alien designs. Much of the Metaluna footage was reshot, uncredited, by Jack Arnold. The pace sags, as fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie will remember, but the color and the creature make it a treat.
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The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
6.6/10on IMDb
Released
Britain's grim answer to Hollywood's rocket movies. A crewed rocket crashes back to Earth with one astronaut left aboard, and something is changing him. Val Guest adapts Nigel Kneale's 1953 BBC serial with a gray, documentary feel, and Brian Donlevy plays Professor Quatermass as a bulldozer of a scientist.
Hammer dropped the "E" from the title to trade on its adult X certificate, and the film's success steered the studio toward the horror films it became famous for. Bleak, tense and well worth seeking out.
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
7.7/10on IMDb
Released
The decade's sharpest piece of paranoia, and the film to show anyone who thinks 1950s science fiction is all rubber suits. Don Siegel directs a small-town doctor's discovery that his neighbors are being replaced by emotionless copies, and Kevin McCarthy's mounting panic carries it.
Critics have read it as a warning about McCarthyism and as an allegory for losing your individuality, which makes for a good argument afterward. The studio added the framing scenes against Siegel's wishes. National Film Registry, 1994.
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Forbidden Planet (1956)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
The decade's most imaginative space film, and the closest thing to a 1950s Star Trek. A starship crew lands on a distant world where a scientist, his daughter and Robby the Robot are the only residents, and the plot loosely echoes Shakespeare's The Tempest.
MGM shot it in Eastmancolor and CinemaScope, and Louis and Bebe Barron supplied the first entirely electronic film score, all bleeps and moans that still sound alien. Robby has more personality than most of the humans. Essential.
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Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)
6.3/10on IMDb
Released
The flying saucer movie in its purest form. Ray Harryhausen animates the spinning ships frame by frame, and the payoff is a black-and-white assault on Washington in which saucers crash into monuments and government buildings.
The story was suggested by Donald Keyhoe's bestselling 1953 book about UFOs, so it plays its invasion as straight Cold War defense drama. The dialogue is functional, the destruction is the point, and it is where a whole genre of alien attack films found its look.
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The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
7.6/10on IMDb
Released
The B-movie premise that turns out to be a quiet masterpiece. After a mix of radiation and insecticide, an ordinary man starts to shrink, and his own house becomes a wilderness: the family cat is a predator and the basement spider a giant.
Richard Matheson adapted his own novel, and the ending, in which Scott decides that however small he becomes he still matters in the universe, is unexpectedly moving. It won the first Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and joined the National Film Registry in 2009.
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Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)
3.9/10on IMDb
Released
Pure camp, and the decade's most famous bad movie. Ed Wood produced, wrote, directed and edited this tale of aliens raising the dead, padded it with silent footage of Bela Lugosi shot for another project before the actor's death in 1956, and used a stand-in for the rest of Lugosi's scenes.
The Golden Turkey Awards named it the worst film ever made, which is unfair to its sincerity and the reason it lives on. Watch it with friends, then watch Tim Burton's Ed Wood, which recreates its making.
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Quatermass 2 (1957)
6.7/10on IMDb
Released
The best of Hammer's science fiction, and the most adult film on this list. Professor Quatermass stumbles on a secret government plant built to the same design as his own Moon-colony plans, and finds that the aliens behind it have taken control of key people in the British government.
Nigel Kneale wrote the first draft from his own TV serial, and Val Guest's key location was the Shell Haven oil refinery, whose pipes and domes give it a cold industrial menace. In America it was released as Enemy from Space.
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Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)
5.1/10on IMDb
Released
Gloriously cheap camp with a surprisingly satisfying revenge plot. Allison Hayes plays a mistreated wife whose husband, played by William Hudson, is cheating on her with Yvette Vickers's good-time girl, until an alien encounter makes her very, very large and very, very angry.
It was made for around $88,000, and the effects look it, which is half the joy. Its poster towers over its reputation, but the film is brisk and ideal for a party where nobody needs to concentrate.
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The Fly (1958)
7.1/10on IMDb
Released
The original 1958 version, told as a mystery: a woman confesses to killing her scientist husband, and only then do we learn about his matter-transmitter and the housefly that slipped into it. That structure makes it more tragic than gruesome.
It was James Clavell's first filmed screenplay, shot in CinemaScope and color, with Vincent Price as the dead man's brother. The final "Help me!" is both chilling and absurd, and it has outlived the film. Pair it with Cronenberg's 1986 remake for a fascinating double bill.
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It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)
6.0/10on IMDb
Released
Watch this one for the family tree. A spaceship blasts off from Mars for Earth with a creature hidden aboard, and the crew is picked off one by one in the cramped decks. It has been cited as inspiration for Dan O'Bannon's script for Alien.
Edward L. Cahn keeps it tight and cheap, and the monster suit is no Giger design. The fun is spotting how much of the 1979 classic's skeleton is already here.
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The Blob (1958)
6.3/10on IMDb
Released
The drive-in favorite, and the most purely fun film here. A gelatinous mass from space grows with every victim while the local teenagers fail to convince the adults, a setup that feels like a rehearsal for a whole teen-horror genre.
It was Steve McQueen's first leading role, shot in color around Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for about $110,000, and Burt Bacharach co-wrote the jaunty theme song. Phoenixville, one of its locations, still holds an annual Blobfest. A great pick for a group.
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I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958)
6.3/10on IMDb
Released
Don't let the title fool you: this is a smart, sad little film hiding behind a drive-in name. Gloria Talbott plays a new bride who slowly realizes that her husband, played by Tom Tryon, is not the man he was before the wedding.
Director Gene Fowler Jr. had been an editor for Fritz Lang, and the shadowy, atmospheric look shows it. Paramount planned it as the main feature on a double bill with The Blob, until audiences preferred the color monster. Critics overlooked it for years; it deserves the rediscovery.
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