merican science-fiction sparks memories of robby the robot, pod people, clashing lightsabers, terminators and bright blue avatars. But what of British science-fiction on screen? rather than space operas and special effects, Britain seems to excel in Blue peter spacecraft, whimsical caperings in disused Welsh quarries, and cosy catastrophes featuring the end of the world and a nice cup of tea. although Britain has produced a major body of sF films since the 1930s, few have captured the public imagination in the same way as the quirky absurdism of television, from Quatermass and the avengers to red Dwarf, Blake’s 7 and, of course, Doctor Who. those that did, like hammer’s the Quatermass Xperiment (1955), often started out as tV series or, like 2001: a space odyssey (1968) and alien (1979), didn’t seem very British at all. nevertheless, Britain’s forgotten history of science-fiction cinema boasts rock-solid classics (things to come, 1936), cult masterpieces (a clockwork orange, 1971) and enough spaced out trash – think 1954’s Devil Girl from mars or 1976’s Queen Kong – to delight the most discerning cinephile.
British science-fiction goes back to the birth of British cinema itself. in the early years of the last century a handful of silent films played on fears of invasion and war in the sky, such as the airship Destroyer (aka Battle in the clouds, 1909) and aerial anarchists (1911). But the landmark of early British sF was things to come, hG Wells’ retort to the Germanic gloom of metropolis a decade earlier. Wells’ utopian vision of rule by scientific elites makes for stiff and talky drama, but the film is memorable for the stark white futurism of its set design and for spookily prophesising the Blitz in scenes of london under aerial bombardment. it wasn’t until the 1950s, when the genre took off in hollywood, that British sF production began in earnest. this first wave included some
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outstanding films – insular black-and-white scare stories about post-war threats to the British way of life. the best were Val Guest’s 1957 Quatermass 2, in which aliens take over the establishment, and the documentary-like the Day the earth caught Fire (1961), which imagines the planet plummeting towards the sun. they were joined by 1960’s Village of the Damned, whose happy ending, uniquely, requires the mass murder of schoolchildren; and Joseph losey’s the Damned (1963), a bleak, masterly nuclear fable made for hammer, whose theme of gang violence presaged a clockwork orange. these films show British sF at its best: sober and unsensational in style, yet rife with subversive ideas and allegorical subtexts about the changing social landscape.
a deliciously camp tale of an interplanetary dominatrix on the prowl in rural scotland. after Quatermass, in which a contaminated spaceman morphs into a giant fungus in Westminster abbey, and hammer’s resuscitation of the horror genre with gory Gothic romances like Dracula (1958), most British sF films of the late ’50s and ’60s evolved into monster movies and other hybrids of sF-horror. unlike science-fiction, horror would prove a reliable money-spinner for cash-poor British producers. two plot lines predominate – alien invasion and urban disaster. the earth Dies screaming (1964), directed by terence Fisher, is typical: a handful of cheaply costumed aliens invade a village, whereupon a cross section of social types retreat to the pub and react with variously stiff upper-lips to these symbols of modernity and ‘otherness’.
“BRITISH SF LOOKED A N X I O U S LY B A C K W A R D S R AT H E R T H A N I N TO T H E FUTURE, NERVOUS ABOUT THE EMPIRE’S LOSS OF PRESTIGE, POWER AND INFLUENCE.”
a significant number of these films were adaptations of radio and tV hits, like Guest’s the abominable snowman (1957), the strange World of planet X (1958) and the trollenberg terror (aka the crawling eye, 1958). the heroic auteur of the period was manx writer nigel Kneale, who wrote the tV Quatermass serials and the abominable snowman. his 1958 tV show Quatermass and the pit, adapted by hammer in 1967, is a superb 2001-like story of alien interference in human evolution, whose pessimism and irony bracingly contrast the gung-ho tone of most american scifi. it also offered a contrast to those cheap, luridly titled exploitation movies like stranger from Venus (1954) and Fire maidens of outer space (1956) that imitated and often tried to pass themselves off as american productions. cult favourite Devil Girl from mars is the pick of the bunch –
one baffling aspect of the invasion film is why any self-respecting alien colonist should bother with post-war Britain at all. annihilating Washington or new york made sense in american films like 1951’s the Day the earth stood still, but why launch the conquest of earth from scottish pubs and sleepy villages? in fact, British sF tended to look anxiously backwards rather than wonderingly into the future. classic american films of the 1950s like invasion of the Body snatchers (1956) channelled paranoia about the communist threat and subversion from within. British sF was nervous about the empire’s loss of prestige, power and influence after the war and the humiliation of suez in 1956. the recurring theme of invasion tapped directly into memories of the Blitz and the threat of fascist conquest – aliens tended to resemble nazis rather than communists, most famously those nazi pepper pots, the Daleks. the Day the earth caught Fire, for example, looked back to the war as a time of purpose and resistance and asks whether ‘the Blitz spirit’ – the pluck and resolve londoners showed during the bombing – could survive the new realities of the nuclear age. indeed, the enemy in British sF would prove to be that classic alien archetype, the shapeshifter. it morphed from fascism into the bureaucratic establishment behind the emerging Welfare state (as in Quatermass 2); dangerous youth (like the super-intelligent aryans in Village of the