Pulsing brain, twitching tentacles: how Invaders from Mars supercharged the alien invasion movie
A favourite of directors including Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, the 1953 version of Invaders from Mars frightened a generation with its vision of Martian mind-controllers arriving on Earth. As a new restoration comes out on disc, we revisit the terror and charm of one of the quintessential Red Scare films.
“Avoid all things Mars”: a filmmaking superstition that holds true when you consider Red Planet (2000), John Carter (2012), My Favorite Martian (1999) and Ghosts of Mars (2001). Each was a critical and commercial misfire and seemed to confirm that depicting our neighbouring planet is the celluloid equivalent of breaking mirrors or licking knives.
However, as shown by the first British science fiction film ever made – 1913’s A Message from Mars, which borrows the plot of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol but swaps the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come for a Martian – there is always capacity for change. This month sees the restoration of one of the most striking films to reference the red planet: William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars (1953).
If its plot feels familiar that’s because it’s been copied multiple times in the decades since its release. Young David MacLean (Jimmy Hunt) wakes up during a storm and sees a flying saucer descend into the sandpit behind his house. The next morning, he encourages his jovial dad (Leif Erickson) to take a look – only for dad to return hours later with a strange cut on his neck and an angry new personality.
Soon other adults are displaying the same mark and mannerisms, and it’s up to David and a sympathetic doctor (Helena Carter) to investigate the threat that’s set up home behind our young hero’s house and is taking over the town.
Released during the McCarthyism ‘Red Scare’ years of the Cold War, it helped that the hostile scarlet planet in Invaders from Mars matched the national colour of America’s rival superpower, the USSR. With political subtext only slightly less subtle than that of Rocky IV (1985), director Menzies – who pioneered the production design on Invaders, and who had previously directed the British sci-fi superproduction Things to Come (1936) – pulled no punches in warning us of the diabolical force with designs on the brains of smalltown America.
At the time of release, the science of Invaders from Mars seemed plausible to cinemagoers. Mars was not yet seen as a lifeless planet, having been imagined as both home to an advanced royal society in David Butler’s futuristic musical Just Imagine (1930) and as an adventure-filled zombie lair in hit serial Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938).
The British release of Invaders from Mars – which included reshoots demanded by UK distributors – even features an expanded planetarium sequence in which astronomer Arthur Franz explains to our heroes that, of the 22 planetary systems within landing distance of earth, Mars is the only celestial body to boast ice caps. The earth also “has been under systematic and close-range observation for more than 200 years”, he warns.
Once revealed, the observers-turned-invaders are the stuff of childhood nightmares. As David enters the caverns that the Martians have established underground he’s met by one of early sci-fi’s most iconic monsters: a disembodied silver head (Luce Potter) that watches him from a glass sphere, its skull augmented with a pulsing brain and twitching, branch-like tentacles.
“He is mankind developed to its ultimate intelligence” explains one of the Martians’ brainwashed human captives. The alien leader clearly has a mental advantage over the earthlings which means the humans have only one course of retaliation: maximum firepower care of some military stock footage inserts.
It would take another Martian movie from the same year as Invaders – Byron Haskin’s 1953 adaption of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – to show that brute force alone wasn’t how to beat those rascals from the red planet. By the time of 1967’s Mission Mars, the US had endured a real-life brush with extinction in the form of the Cuban missile crisis. The American and Russian astronauts on the big screen were now on friendlier terms.
After the Viking 1 lander visited Mars in 1976 and sent back pictures of a rock-strewn desert, the idea of any invaders from the red planet (particularly those capable of taking over earth via mind control) began to disappear. But Menzies’ cautionary adventure had already begun to spread through the minds of a generation of budding filmmakers.
In a recent interview, John Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London (1981), recalled: “My great affection for it is partially because I saw it at the right age and was very frightened by it.”
Steven Spielberg (who in 2005 would helm his own adaptation of classic Martian marauders tale War of the Worlds) remembers: “It really turned my world around … It certainly touched a nerve in all the kids like myself who saw the film at a very young age.”
Martin Scorsese ranked Invaders from Mars as one of the 10 best films for use of light and colour, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) director Tobe Hooper shot a remake in 1986. But as the 1953 movie makes clear when its human impersonators rise out of the sand: it’s hard to duplicate the original.