It Came from Outer Space (1953) & Warning from Space (1956)

Universal wanted a monster movie. Daiei wanted the next Godzilla. Both studios got handed something considerably stranger by writers who had other ideas, and the two films that came out of it sit either side of the Pacific doing almost exactly the same job.

It Came from Outer Space lands in June 1953, directed by Jack Arnold, from a story by Ray Bradbury and a screenplay credited to Harry Essex. It is Universal's first 3D picture, shot in the Mojave, and Bradbury's first proper go at writing for film. Warning from Space follows in January 1956, directed by Koji Shima for Daiei, written by Hideo Oguni from a novel by Gentaro Nakajima. Oguni had already worked on Ikiru and Seven Samurai and would go on to Ran, and he had just co-written I Live in Fear, Kurosawa's film about a man losing his mind over the bomb. Warning from Space is also the first Japanese science fiction film in colour, which is worth remembering when you see what the aliens look like.

Because here is the thing we keep circling back to. If you are making a film about an alien who genuinely means no harm, you have a presentation problem. Your audience has been trained by every other film on the bill to read the thing coming out of the saucer as a threat. Both of these films arrive at the same solution within three years of each other, on opposite sides of the world, with no knowledge of one another. Put on a human face.

And in both films the disguise turns out to be the most frightening thing in them. Bradbury's aliens copy two telephone linesmen and stand in the desert telling John and Ellen not to be afraid, delivered flat, staring into the sun, and it is genuinely horrible. Oguni's Pairans pick a photograph of a pop singer and send their own leader down with her face, which somehow lands the film in a magical girl comedy for twenty minutes before the rogue planet shows up and the whole thing turns grim. The kindness is real in both cases. It just does not read as kindness, which is more or less the entire argument of the series so far.

In this episode we get into Bradbury handing Universal the monster movie they asked for alongside the one he actually wanted to make, the cork boulders they fired into the premiere audience, an intermission that arrives 55 minutes into an 80 minute film because of a projector, Jack Arnold wanting to make westerns and quietly making one anyway, the spider speech that is the whole film in ninety seconds and changes nobody's mind, Barbara Rush's Golden Globe and her three identical screams, starfish pyjamas and the scene that shows you far too much of them, and a 1950s Japanese film in which nuclear weapons turn out to be humanity's best hope.

Mind the falling rocks, do not scream at the Joshua tree, and settle in.

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Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time.

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