Within just a few weeks of the [Kenneth] Arnold sighting [near Mount Rainier in Washington], the most famous alleged UFO incident occurred at Roswell, New Mexico. More significant in terms of its cultural impact than in terms of its scientific verifiability, this event, perhaps more than any other UFO event, has spawned a whole body of literature, numerous television documentaries, various movements, a network of conspiracy theories, and many fictional works (e.g., The X-Files, Roswell High and Independence Day).

The event in question involved a farmer finding metallic fragments on his property which he investigated after hearing an explosion. The military soon appeared on the scene to gather the fragments, eventually claiming that the pieces in question were part of a weather balloon. Over the years alleged testimony of those involved in the cleanup would claim that in reality a crashed UFO complete with alien bodies was retrieved which remains in the custody of the military. The conflicting accounts have fueled not only one of the greatest debates in American history, as well as an annual celebration that put Roswell on the national map, but this has also developed into a phenomenon that has taken on religious dimensions at times. Returning again to Partridge:

Roswell is now firmly established as what might be described as a key ufological ‘sacred site’. That is to say, whilst of course many ufologists would not interpret the significance of Roswell religiously, it does tend to inspire the same sort of behaviours as religion. In other words, it inspires implicitly religious attitudes and actions.

So while Americans clean up their streets, driveways, and parks after Independence Day celebrations, let’s not forget the annual anniversary of the Roswell UFO incident. For some, it’s downright sacred.

VISITORS IN THE NIGHT: ALIEN ABDUCTIONS AND SLEEP PARALYSIS

by Paul Meehan

Since the 1960s, published accounts of humans allegedly being abducted by aliens and subjected to various medical and psychological procedures have captivated the public mind and have provided inspiration for a number of mass-market books and movies. The question is, do these fantastic tales have any basis in nuts-and-bolts reality or do they originate in dreams and the dark recesses of human imagination? More specifically, do these narratives emerge from the mysterious and little-understood phenomenon of sleep paralysis?

As readers of TheoFantastique are aware, sleep paralysis (abbreviated as SP) is a sleep disorder that occurs during the twilight consciousness between sleep and wakefulness, when the sleeper is either waking up or falling asleep. The sleeper seems to be fully awake, although the body feels paralyzed except for the eyes. Unusual light phenomena may be perceived, along with tingling bodily sensations and sexual arousal. Then a mysterious, usually threatening entity approaches the sleeper, sometimes speaking to them and pressing down upon their chest and preventing them from breathing. SP may segue into an out of body experience (OBE) in which the percipient has the subjective experience of leaving their body and being transported to some fantastic locale. In rare cases, SP may be experienced by more than one individual at the same time. It’s easy to see how an episode of sleep paralysis could be interpreted as an alien abduction by someone who has no knowledge of the SP phenomenon.

During the 1990s skeptics seized upon SP as an explanation for the majority of alien abductions. While there is much truth to this contention, it is not the whole story. Clearly, while some abduction narratives originate with SP/OBE experiences, the abduction phenomenon did not originate with SP, as a historical review of alien abductions will demonstrate.

The 1961 abduction experience of Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple from New Hampshire, provided the paradigm of the phenomenon. Prior to this incident, alien encounters consisted of highly dubious stories told by “contactees” about meetings with human-looking “space brothers,” or by fleeting confrontations with UFO “occupants” who were observed from afar while repairing their craft or gathering plant or soil samples. The Hill case, which involved the abduction of a husband and wife while they were driving from Canada to their home in New Hampshire, occurred while both of them were wide awake and driving in an automobile, and would later provide the basis for the 1975 NBC-TV telefilm The UFO Incident. There was corroborating evidence for their close encounter in the form of an anomalous radar track recorded at nearby Pease Air Force Base that night, an in a circle of warts that appeared on Barney’s groin after the incident.

Interestingly, the Hill case, popularized in John Fuller’s 1963 book The Interrupted Journey, did not immediately spark any further abduction tales for a decade. Then, in the 1970s, abductions began to be reported with more frequency. One of the most well-publicized close encounters was that of Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, who claimed that they were abducted by robotic “claw men” while fishing from a pier in Pascagoula, Mississippi in October, 1973. Another famous case was that of Travis Walton, a logger who was zapped by a beam from a UFO when he approached too close to the craft and was later found missing in November of 1975. Walton’s encounter with the UFO was witnessed by five other members of the logging crew, and was later dramatized in the 1993 feature film Fire in the Sky. The Pascagoula and Walton cases were widely reported in the media at the time.

In addition to these well-publicized events, a number of more obscure abduction cases also came to light during the 1970s. In August of 1975 Sandra Larson reported being abducted while driving in a car late at night along with her daughter and a male friend, the latter two being immobilized (or, in abduction parlance, “switched off”) while Ms. Larson was taken aboard a UFO and subjected to a medical exam. David Stephens and his friend “Glen” (a pseudonym) were driving around a lake area near Norway, Maine in the early hours of one morning in October, 1975, when their car was immobilized and Stephens was abducted. Three women, Mona Stafford, Louise Smith and Elaine Thomas were returning to their homes in Liberty, Kentucky one night in January, 1976, when their car was reportedly levitated into a UFO and the women were subjected to a series of frightening and painful ordeals. In Essex, England, John and Elaine Avis and their three children reported being abducted from a country road in October of 1974. The abduction of the so-called “Allagash Four” occurred during August, 1976 when four men were abducted while night fishing in a boat in the Allagash Waterway recreation area in Maine.

Note that all of the cases cited above involved multiple witnesses and all of them occurred while the abductees were fully awake. Additionally, there were a number of single witness abductions that took place under similar circumstances. Mr. Carl Higdon reported an abduction while he was hunting in the Medicine Bow National Forest in Wyoming in October, 1974. Air Force sergeant James Moody reportedly underwent an abduction experience while watching a meteor shower in the desert near Alamagordo, New Mexico one night in August of 1975.  “Steven Kilburn” (pseudonym) reported an abduction and medical exam conducted by gray aliens during the 1970s while driving from Fredrick to Baltimore, Maryland one evening to researcher Budd Hopkins. These types of abductions continue to be reported decades later.

It’s difficult to see how any of these cases could be related to sleep paralysis, but as the abduction phenomenon emerged into public consciousness, researchers began to investigate another type of scenario: the “bedroom visitation,” which was clearly related to sleep paralysis. Perhaps the earliest of these was the experience of Pat Price, a single mom living in Utah who awakened to find two intruders in her room and later, under hypnosis, told a tale of being taken aboard a UFO by spacemen who recorded her thoughts. Ufologist John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies, was the first researcher to link what he termed “bedroom invaders” to alien abductions in the early 1970s. But it was Whitley Streiber’s bestselling book Communion, published in 1987, that cemented the link between SP and abductions. Streiber, author of popular horror novels like The Wolfen and The Hunger, wrote that he was asleep in his cabin in upstate New York and woke up to be confronted by a diminutive humanoid creature who paralyzed him.  He was then floated out of his bedroom and into an alien craft where he was examined and later returned. Streiber’s book later became the subject of a 1989 feature film..

Streiber’s Communion experiences, which in retrospect resemble an episode of SP/OBE much more than they resemble the earlier abduction stories, served to bring sleep paralysis narratives within the orbit of alien abductions as UFO researchers, who knew nothing of SP, began to interpret SP experiences as abductions. In 1992, a poll conducted by the Roper organization designed to measure the prevalence of abductions within the general population incorporated several questions that are more indicative of SP than of alien contacts.  Questions like, “have you ever awakened paralyzed, sensing a figure or strange figure or presence in the room?,” and “Have you ever felt like you are actually flying through the air without knowing why or how?,” and “Have you ever seen unusual lights or balls of light in a room?,” are all indicative of SP and OBE.  On the basis of responses to the Roper Poll, researchers concluded that abductions, now conflated with SP, were thought to be fairly prevalent within the American population.

The Roper Poll’s methodology was criticized at the 1992 Abduction Conference held at M.I.T. by folklorist and SP expert David Hufford, who had been invited to present a paper on SP and its relevance to abductions. Hufford’s paper made it glaringly obvious that many bedroom encounters were in reality episodes of SP, but in the wake of these revelations, skeptics like Carl Sagan and others in the media seized upon SP as an explanation for all abductions.  Reviewing the UFO literature on the subject, the cases involving SP/OBE become glaringly obvious. One individual who reported awakening from sleep and seeing balls of light in his room, stated that, “My body would be completely paralyzed. I couldn’t yell or scream, but I wanted to. I could feel the pressure of something or someone coming toward me, then I’d feel pressure on top of me, and then I wouldn’t be able to see.” Another alleged abduction report described a woman’s experience as follows: “One night in the 1980s, she was abruptly awakened from sleep to find an entity standing by her bed. It was a type she had seen before and had even painted in oil paints on paper…Although terrified and unable to move, she physically broke through the paralysis and lunged at the creature,” which promptly dematerialized. Anyone familiar with SP will see that these experiences most likely represent SP dream imagery rather than close encounters with extraterrestrial visitors.

In other times and in other cultures these bedroom visitations would be interpreted as encounters with “ghosts,” “witches,” “vampires” or “incubi.”  Our technological culture, however, interprets these same experiences as “alien abductions.”  Drawing upon imagery derived from pop culture science fiction or UFO literature, these creatures of the night are transformed from supernatural beings into extraterrestrials during episodes of SP augmented by hypnogogic or hypnopompic dream imagery.  Oddly, some UFO researchers have reversed this trend.  In her 1998 book How to Defend Yourself Against Alien Abduction, respected ufologist Ann Druffel theorizes that these bedroom visitations are caused by jinns, spirit beings in Islamic folklore thought to be creatures that are intermediate between men and angels.

Given the above, it’s easy to distinguish between bedroom visitant/SP/OBE “alien” encounters and the original abduction paradigm of events that take place during a waking state of consciousness, frequently have multiple witnesses and sometimes leave corroborating evidence. There is, however, another connection between these two disparate types of experiences. The trauma of alien encounters have been known to produce sleep disorders in abductees. In the Hill case, for instance, their experiences first surfaced as terrifying nightmares. It appears that abductees can suffer from episodes of SP after having undergone non-bedroom type close encounters as part of what researchers call “Post-Abduction Syndrome.”  Abductee “Steven Kilburn,” who had first experienced an automobile abduction, later underwent bedroom visitations that were probably inspired by his initial abduction. Jim Weiner, one of the “Allagash Four,” also seems to have developed SP as a result of his alien encounter. SP alien visitations and non-bedroom abductions do not appear to be mutually exclusive.

There are other links between dream states and abductions as well. Some skeptics theorize that night-time highway abductions are the result of  “highway hypnisis,” an altered state of consciousness caused by driving down straight roads at night that reportedly produces hypnogogic dream imagery of ET encounters. It should also be noted that virtually all abductions, bedroom and non-bedroom alike, involve the abductee being put into a state of full or partial paralysis by the aliens. Finally, many abductions are recalled under hypnosis, which is a type of trance or dream state.  The relationship between sleep paralysis and alien abduction experiences is complex and multifaceted. Further research is needed into both of these fascinating and enigmatic phenomena in order to define the distinctions between them.

Related posts:

“Paul Meehan – SAUCER MOVIES: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema”

“Sleeping with the Aliens: Weird Encounters of the Fourth Kind”

Now, noted theoretical physicist and sci-fi fan Stephen Hawking has weighed in with his views on real alien contact in an Associated Press report:

Hawking claims in a new documentary that intelligent alien lifeforms almost certainly exist, but warns that communicating with them could be “too risky.”

He speculates most extraterrestrial life will be similar to microbes, or small animals — but adds advanced lifeforms may be “nomads, looking to conquer and colonize.”

The comments came in connection with the Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking series on the Discovery Channel. It sounds as if Hawking agrees with H. G. Wells in that future visiting aliens may be “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.” See the news item as printed in The Detroit News, and a more extensive article here. And for a contrary perspective on the topic, consider this article.

SLEEPING WITH THE ALIENS
WEIRD ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND

by Paul Meehan

The enigma of alien abduction is one of the enduring mysteries of our time.  Beginning with the famous case of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, in which a couple were allegedly abducted while driving down a New Hampshire highway late one night, these reports of extraterrestrial kidnappings have continued unabated into the 21st Century.  While a minority of abductees claim that the experience is a positive one, most of those who have purportedly been taken relate terrifying stories about being subjected to strange medical experiments and mysterious mind games.

Alien abductions reached the zenith of their popularity in 1987 with the publication of horror writer Whitley Strieber’s book Communion and UFO researcher Budd Hopkin’s Intruders, which were serious explorations of the phenomenon that made the New York Times bestseller list.  Because abduction reports were so similar to each other and presented a very limited narrative format (people are picked up, prodded and let go), the experience has not translated well onto the screen.  Only two theatrically-released features were based on real-life cases, the film version of Strieber’s Communion (1989) and the abduction account of Arizona logger Travis Walton, Fire in the Sky (1993).  Two telefilms, NBC-TV’s The UFO Incident (1975), a faithful rendition of the Hill abduction case starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons and CBS’s Intruders, based on the Hopkins book, were the two most powerful screen treatments of the abduction theme.

Now comes writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s The Fourth Kind (2009) with a tale of alien abduction allegedly based on 65 hours of “archival footage” of “actual case histories” relating to a series of purported abductions in the Nome, Alaska area in October of 2000.  The film’s title is a reference to the typology of UFO sightings formulated by the legendary ufologist Dr. J. Allen Hynek that was used for the title of Steven Spielberg’s UFO opus Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with abduction being the fourth level of an ET encounter.  Resident Evil star Milla Jovovoch plays Alaskan psychiatrist Abigail Tyler, who is mourning her husband Will after he was knifed to death by an unknown assailant in their home and is caring for her two children.  Abigail is counseling Nome residents with sleep disorders who all tell the same story of waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a scary-looking owl staring at them and hearing voices speaking in a strange language.  When one of her patients, Tommy (Corey Johnson), goes nutzoid after a hypnosis session and kills his family and himself, Nome Sheriff August (Will Patton) suspects that Abigail’s therapy was somehow responsible for the tragedy.  Abigail and her psychiatrist colleague, Dr. Abel (Elias Koteas) fire back by citing dozens of mysterious deaths and disappearances that have occurred in the Nome area since the 1960s.  “There’s something going on in this town that we don’t understand,” she warns the Sheriff.

Things continue to go bump in the night as Abby finds a weird-looking mark on her body and suspects that she herself may have been abducted and that aliens may have been responsible for her husband’s death.  An expert in ancient Near Eastern tongues identifies the language on the police tapes of Tommy’s murder/suicide as ancient Sumerian, the first written language in history dating back to the Fourth Millennium B.C.E.  The mysterious voice seems to be saying, “Our creation…examine, ruin and destroy,” in the ancient language  Then another patient, Scott (Enzo Cilenti) insists on being hypnotized in the wake of an abduction experience he describes as “the worst you could ever imagine,” and is possessed by an alien force during the session that causes him to levitate and go into convulsions that literally break his back.  A chagrined Sheriff August orders Abby confined to house arrest after this debacle, but a UFO descends on her house in the middle of the night to abduct Abby’s young daughter, Ashley (Mia McKenna Bruce).  Despite the fact that a police officer witnessed the UFO while the police video recorder conveniently goes blank, August still blames Abby for her daughter’s disappearance.  In the movie’s climax, Dr. Elias hypnotizes Abigail in an attempt to probe her own abduction memories and ultimately solve the riddles of her husband’s murder and her daughter’s disappearance.

Writer/director Osunsanmi presents this narrative using split screens that reportedly show the “real” Abigail Tyler (as portrayed by an uncredited actress) and her patients on “documentary” videos on one half of the screen going through the identical actions that are dramatized by Jovovich and the actors on the other half.  Osunsanmi even becomes an actor in his own movie when he appears as Abigail’s interviewer in a tape purportedly made at Chapman University, a real college in Orange, California.  In an effort to take The Fourth Kind “back over the line from fiction to reality,” (in the film’s own words), the movie attempts to pass off bogus video archival footage of therapy sessions and police videotapes as real documents.  In addition, the release of The Fourth Kind was accompanied by a clever ad campaign designed to mislead audiences into believing that the events depicted are factual, even going so far as to set up a phony website about Dr. Abigail Tyler’s Alaskan medical practice and manufactured Internet stories about her.  A September 1, 2009 investigative piece written by Kyle Hopkins for the Anchorage Daily News convincingly debunks the existence of Dr. Tyler and the events depicted in the film.  As for the mysterious deaths and disappearances, of which there have been about 20 since the 1960s, an FBI investigation conducted in 2005 concluded that most of the deaths were related to alcoholism and exposure to the elements in Nome’s harsh environment, with no hint of alien involvement.

In cinematic terms, The Fourth Kind does establish considerable screen tension and uses the Blair Witch-inspired technique of filming people who are acting intensely frightened in order to induce similar feelings in the audience.  Osunsamni’s style is documentarian, utilizing shaky hand-held camera setups, naturalistic lighting, time-coded video and split screen cinematography.  The photogenic Milla Jovovich carries much of the film with her earnest portrayal of the tormented Abigail, but she is sometimes upstaged by the intense performance of the odd-looking unknown actress playing the “real” Dr. Tyler, who often appears onscreen in the same split frame.  Professional thesps Will Patton and Elias Koteas lend their support, but none of the supporting characters is drawn in any depth.  The film seems to take its cue from The Mothman Prophecies (2002), both in its subject matter of mysterioso goings-on in a backwater stretch of rural America and in its coy avoidance of showing anything overtly extraterrestrial.  Much of The Fourth Kind was shot in Bulgaria, lending its “Alaskan” locations a temperate, forested look in lieu Nome’s real landscape of frozen Arctic tundra.

While purporting to be a true-life archival record of the abduction phenomenon, The Fourth Kind offers up a smorgasbord of ufological cliches and half-truths.  To set the record straight, no abductee has ever murdered anyone as a result of their experiences, nor has anybody ever levitated or suffered back-breaking injury during a hypnotic recall session.  Contrary to popular belief, alien abductions are not connected in any way we know of with missing persons cases, murders or unexplained deaths.  According to research carried out by legitimate abduction investigators like Budd Hopkins, Raymond Fowler and David Jacobs, abductions are ongoing, intergenerational studies that would be severely impeded by its human subjects dying, and although abductees report painful and terrifying experiences, no one has been seriously harmed during abductions.  The Sumerian language angle is derived from the work of rogue archaeologist Zecharia Sitchin, a theme which has been amplified in recent novels by Whitley Strieber but does not appear in mainstream abduction research.  On the other hand, the film’s owl imagery has frequently been reported as what is termed a “screen memory” of gray aliens used to mask their true appearance, but whether this is a function of the human mind or an illusion produced by the aliens is open to debate.

Despite its many flaws and execrable advertising campaign, The Fourth Kind does manage to capture the mind-numbing terror of the abduction phenomenon, as anyone who has listened to the hypnotic regression tapes of Betty and Barney Hill can attest.  But it’s also possible that the director is describing an entirely different phenomenon, that of sleep paralysis.  This is an experience that occurs in a twilight state between sleep and wakefulness in which one seems to awaken paralyzed in bed.  Some kind of being or entity is perceived to enter the room and approach the bed.  The “entity” then begins to exert pressure on the sleeper’s chest until they awaken, only to find themselves alone in the room.  Sometimes anomalous lights can be perceived, and sexual arousal can be a feature of the experience.  Sleep paralysis is frequently found in people who suffer from bouts of sleepwalking, or somnambulism, and is also related to hypnopompic and hypnogogic sleep hallucinations.  Alaska, where there are months on end of darkness or sunlight, is a prime location for sleep disorders (think of Al Pacino trying to get some shuteye in the Land of the Midnight Sun in the 2002 crime thriller Insomnia).

It’s easy to see how episodes of sleep paralysis, which is reported in many cultures around the world, could be interpreted as a close encounter with a ghost, a vampire, an incubus—or an alien.  Indeed, all alleged alien abductions that begin in a sleep state are suspect.  The abduction experiences described in The Fourth Kind all occur during sleep, and I suspect that director Osunsanmi has had a personal experience of sleep paralysis that provided the inspiration for this film.  In other words, he may have been “sleeping with the aliens.”

For decades popular culture has experienced and enjoyed two related phenomena, that of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), along with alleged alien visitation, as well science fiction films that feature flying saucers and their occupants. Indeed, as author Paul Meehan has noted, “[s]aucer movies are a distinct subgenre of science fiction film, and perhaps should constitute a genre of their own.” Meehan has done fans of science fiction films involving UFOs, as well as those interested in the UFO phenomenon, a great service in writing Saucer Movies: A UFOlogical History of the Cinema (The Scarecrow Press, 1998). Paul has a B.A. in Cinema Studies from Hunter College in New York, where he studied with film writer Barbara Leaming. One of his classmates was Maitland McDonagh, author of Filmmaking on the Fringe and other books on the horror genre. In addition to Saucer Movies, he is the author of Tech-Noir: The Fusion of Science Fiction and Film Noir (2008), Cinema of the Psychic Realm: A Critical Survey (2009) and Horror Noir: The Nexus of Film Noir and the Horror Film, (to be published in 2010).  He lives in San Francisco.

Paul and I explore the thesis of Saucer Movies in the following interview.

TheoFantastique: Paul, thanks for a great read in Saucer Movies. They have long been a favorite expression of science fiction for me going back to my childhood nightmares over Invaders from Mars. I’m glad to see someone explore this topic, and do so well. Your passion for the subject matter comes through in your writing. What is your personal connection to UFOs and their expression in cinema and television?

Paul Meehan: I was always a big fan of science fiction books, comics, TV and movies, and like everyone else I read the occasional news story about UFOs but was not overly concerned with them. Then in 1976 my wife saw a large, football-shaped object with extremely bright lights passing over the Jerome Park Reservoir in the Bronx in broad daylight. Although I did not see the UFO myself, I was mystified by her sighting and afterwards decided to explore the phenomenon in earnest. I discovered the “forbidden science” of ufology, an area of study with a rich and compelling literature that was very distinct from science fiction narratives. At some point I asked myself the question, “what if you analyzed sci-fi films in regard to their ufological content rather than as science fiction, and the idea for Saucer Movies was born. I looked at each of the 300 films in the book not only in terms of their critical and film historical significance, but also in terms of how they connect with the study of UFOs.

TheoFantastique: You remind your readers early on that science fiction has long had a connection to extraterrestrials. What are some of the earliest cinematic expressions of aliens, and to what do you attribute this early exploration of life on other worlds?

Paul Meehan: Cinema pioneer George Melies featured costumed “Selenite” moon-dwellers in A Trip to the Moon (1902), and in the British short When the Man in the Moon Seeks a Wife (1906) a moon man comes to earth looking for human females. Other silent film aliens appeared in A Trip to Mars (1910), A Message from Mars (1913), and Algol (1920). In the modern era, the Republic serial The Purple Monster Strikes (1945) provided the template for practically every Hollywood alien invasion film made during the 1950s. Prior to the arrival of flying saucers on the national scene in the summer of 1947, extraterrestrial themes were inspired by advances in aviation and rocket science, particularly in Germany, Russia and the United States during the 1920s and 30s that first popularized the idea of space travel. The works of Verne and Wells, and later the American pulp science fiction writers and cartoonists of the 30s and 40s, created a lively mythology of planetary voyages and extraterrestrial visitations. These themes did not find their true expression in movies, however, until after the UFO phenomenon first reared its ugly head during the “Roswell summer” of ‘47 and the Hollywood product began to be driven by what was being seen in the skies over America and reported on the front page of every newspaper in America.

TheoFantastique: You also describe the “relationship between UFOs and saucer movies” as “complex and multifaceted.” Before you examine this relationship chapter by chapter you describe various explanatory hypotheses to account for this relationship, including the Bad Film Hypothesis, the Government Conspiracy Hypothesis, and the Prescience Hypothesis. Can you briefly define these, and would you care to share which one you might subscribe to?

Paul Meehan: The Bad Film Hypothesis is the belief that the entire UFO phenomenon is an artifact of pop culture, derived specifically from obscure sci-fi dreck like Killers from Space, that presumably implant extraterrestrial notions inside the heads of UFO witnesses subconsciously. If this hypothesis was correct, then abduction reports should have emerged during the 1950s, when saucer movies were very popular, but abductions weren’t reported until the early 1960s. Abductees do not report meeting popular screen aliens that resemble E.T., Chewbacca, Yoda, Mr. Spock or the creatures from the Alien and Predator movies, but go on reporting the same bland little gray guys with monotonous regularity. The Government Conspiracy Hypothesis suggests that our government knows the truth about UFOs and is using the film business to disseminate info on covert U.S. contact with aliens. This theory is popular with many UFO proponents, but I have found absolutely no evidence to support this. The Prescience Hypothesis posits that film-makers are unconsciously tapping into the UFO reality and expressing this in movies in a precognitive fashion. One example of this is the flying saucer landing in Washington in 1951′s The Day the Earth Stood Still preceding the spectacular series of radar-visual sightings over D.C. in July of 1952. Another example is the Japanese monster movie Rodan (1956), which featured missing time amnesia and recovered memories associated with a mysterious flying object years before these themes became a standard feature of abduction reports. Since writing Saucer Movies, I have found more evidence of prescience manifesting itself in films on subjects other than UFOs, but that’s a topic for another book.

TheoFantastique: At several points in your book you note parallels between German folklore and UFOs and aliens. At least one folklorist, Bill Ellis, has made similar connections. Have these parallels been food for thought for you in the mix of UFO and alien sightings, and cinema perhaps all functioning as contemporary forms of folklore?

Paul Meehan: A connection between folklore themes and UFO lore was first explored in scientist Jacques Vallee’s 1969 book Passport to Magonia, in which he noted similarities between folk tales about elves, fairies, pixies, changelings and leprechauns and 20th Century accounts of UFO occupants. While there may be resemblances between the narratives (i.e. little people with magical powers, time dilation, stolen babies, etc.), many ufologists, myself included, do not find Vallee’s arguments persuasive. It’s undeniable that UFOs and aliens have a folkloric dimension in American culture, and those interested in this aspect of the phenomenon should consult Douglas Curran’s book In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space. In the 1990s, academic folklorist Thomas Bullard analyzed the content of nearly 200 alien abduction reports and concluded that the stories did not exhibit the standard characteristics of folklore narratives such as successive embellishment. I think that people often confuse the cultural manifestations of the UFO phenomenon with the phenomenon itself. We point to a ridiculous man in a tin foil hat rather than at a UFO that profoundly disturbs our worldview.

TheoFantastique: How has the cyclical nature of the popularity of UFO and alien movies related to UFO sightings? There doesn’t appear to be a direct correspondence in your research.

Paul Meehan: My research has found a negative correlation between historical UFO “waves,” or times of high UFO activity, and the release of important saucer movies. For instance, a significant UFO wave occurred in 1952, but the only alien-themed feature film released that year was the low-budget oddity Red Planet Mars, which didn’t even feature a spaceship. Similarly, 1973 was the year of the biggest UFO wave in history, but no saucer movies were produced by Hollywood in that year. Conversely, if movies produce UFO sightings, then 1953 would have been a peak year after the release of Jack Arnold’s classic 3-D saucer movie It Came from Outer Space and the first two alien invasion films in color, William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars and George Pal’s War of the Worlds, but this did not happen. Similarly, there was no upsurge in sightings after the release of Close Encounters in 1977 or Independence Day in 1996.

TheoFantastique: I was intrigued by your comments on the “cinematic religious experience” that came with 2001: A Space Odyssey. You describe something similar with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, though not to the same extent in the film or in audience reactions. I had never noticed this element before in CETK, but I think you are correct. In what ways do you see CETK as expressing a type of religious or spiritual experience in connection with UFOs and aliens?

Paul Meehan: Spielberg reportedly modeled CETK after 2001, watching Kubrick’s film numerous times during production. The vertical structure of Devil’s Tower was meant to suggest the similarly-shaped monolith in 2001. Both films center around a quasi-religious quest by a single individual (Keir Dullea in 2001, Richard Dreyfuss in CETK) to make contact with a godlike alien intelligence. The Moses-like Dreyfuss, climbs Devil’s Tower, a figurative Mt. Sinai, and later is taken up into the heavens in a celestial ship like the prophet Ezekiel. The entire film has a visionary quality that climaxes with the descent of the glittering mothership in the final reels. CETK‘s message of interplanetary peace, music and goodwill delivers a powerful spiritual message.

TheoFantastique: When you discuss UFO cinema and television in the 1970s I appreciated your mention of significant but neglected television efforts such as The Love War, The Enemy Within, and The UFO Incident, programs that resonated with my interest in UFOs as a teen. But then in the late 1970s UFO cinema exploded with films like CETK, Star Wars, and Alien. In this time period you say that the influence of conceptions of UFOs and aliens in cinema moved away from literature and toward the influence of UFO reports. Can you give a few examples?

Paul Meehan: Close Encounters led the way by incorporating material from various UFO reports into the plot, as detailed in my book, including the description of gray aliens. Even the film’s title is derived from the UFO typology developed by researcher Dr. J. Allen Hynek (who also appears briefly in the film). This trend actually started with the 1975 telefilm The UFO Incident, a docudrama based on the real-life UFO abduction of Betty and Barney Hill. After CETK, a number of films inspired by UFO events rather than fictional sources, including Starship Invasions (1977), Mysterious Two (1979), Hanger 18 (1980), Endangered Species (1982) and Wavelength (1983). Beginning in the late 1980s, films based on best-selling books about alien abductions, Communion (1989) and Intruders (1992) were produced, followed by the movie version of the Travis Walton abduction, Fire in the Sky (1993). TV’s The X-Files would later incorporate ufological material into the plotlines of the highly successful series..

TheoFantastique: You consider Contact a “lyrical film” that you rank alongside 2001 and CETK. What is it about this film that merits your praise in this context alongside these cinematic classics?

Paul Meehan: Contact is one of a very small number of alien-themed films (the short list includes 2001, Close Encounters, Cocoon, E.T., Starman and Phenomenon) in which extraterrestrials are friendly and provide something beneficial to mankind. It’s also a study of the Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) character, who is loosely based on real-life SETI scientist Jill Tartar. As such, the film has a distinctly feminine perspective that is very rare in science fiction cinema. The scene in which Ellie confronts the alien intelligence, disguised as a simulacrum of her dead father on a tropical beach with galaxies wheeling through the sky overhead is perhaps the most beautiful image in the history of the genre.

TheoFantastique: Given that your book was published in 1998 it ends with an analysis of UFO cinema as expressed from 1994-1997. If you were to update the book in order to account for developments in UFO cinema in the next decade, what type of observations would you make?

Paul Meehan: After the glory days of the saucer movie wave that lasted from 1994 to 1997, the whole subject became passé and science fiction film turned to cyberpunk and superhero themes. The few alien-themed movies that were made during this period were awful dreck like Evolution and Dreamcatcher, and after 9/11, aliens became equated with terrorists in films like the War of the Worlds remake and Cloverfield. The last few years, however, have seen a resurgence of the form in movies like Alien vs. Predator, The Day the Earth Stood Still retread, Monsters vs. Aliens and Race to Witch Mountain. This may be due to an uptick in dramatic UFO sightings reported in the media recently, including the Stephensville, Texas, Chicago-O’Hare and Tinley Park, Illinois sightings. I have been considering writing a sequel to Saucer Movies, which may be my next project.

TheoFantastique: Paul, thanks so much for your research into an interesting topic. I hope you’ll come back to discuss your other books and their subject matter.

Sean Cubitt

TheoFantastique: Sean, thank you for your willingness to discuss Aliens R Us. I have been a fan of science fiction since my youth, and your book provides helpful materials for reflection on it as an adult in what it tells us about ourselves and our culture. One facet of science fiction that Western consumers of the genre may not reflect on much is the type of culture and civilization it projects into space, the future, and as a representation of humanity. Your co-editor Ziauddin Sardar discusses this in the Introduction to your book with his mention of the “science” of sci fi being that of the “psyche of Western civilisation, its history, preoccupations and project of future domination..” He also notes that sci fi does not exist outside of Western civilisation. Why do you think the West has gravitated toward sci fi as a narrative structure for storytelling, and what does our lack of awareness of its Western emphasis (bias?) tell us about ourselves?

Sean Cubitt: We found in our research that this isn’t exactly the case. Japan is the obvious exception, but Hong Kong has some interesting examples, and there are films and narratives using science fiction devices scattered through Bollywood (e.g. Mr. India where the eponymous protagonist is invisible, a clear political allegory in the film) and Latin American poetic realism. But a major response we heard was “We don’t write about the future because it may never exist for us. Poverty makes you think about survival, not futures”. In the West, we have the long tradition of fantasy as well as science fiction operating as satire, in fact in many of the most famous literary examples (Orwell, Huxley, Zamyatin). What is strikingly western is the space opera, from Edgar Rice Burroughs and EE Doc Smith on down. Some of that is deeply entrenched in colonial attitudes, for example the proximity of Burroughs’ Mars books to his Tarzan cycle. My reading of Zia’s phrase is that the drive of capital in the west is towards not so much domination in the future as domination of the future: the drive to make the future subject to the present, to make it as much like the present as possible. This it shares with Stalinism: both rely on the Five year Plan to ensure that the future is not the future. These Western futures are characteristically either just like the present (Philip K Dick’s hypercapitalist Californias of the mind) or just like the past (all the empires, from Foundation to A.E. van Vogt). There’s an odd convergence between the satirical and the dominating trajectories: both use the future as a way of narrativising the present, though one does it to ensure continuation of the onward expansion of capital, and the other to undermine it, to say that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can usually see the satire, though frankly I always preferred the imaginative aspect over the political or ethical allegories, especially when I got into SF in a big way in my teens.

What we can’t see so much is the normative function of futuristic SF where the ideals carried into the future are so deeply our own – as say in the ‘new frontier’ rhetoric that was so inspiring in the Kennedy era ­it simply was the new frontier, and critiques that said this was a way of extending the terra nullius doctrine of a genocidally expanding US imperium over the indigenous native Americans to the future would have been at least churlish, and at worst incomprehensible.

TheoFantastique: Another interesting aspect of the Introduction was the recognition that texts like Frankenstein take “up the narrative thread where alchemists, magi and witches left off.” The book even raises the question as to “how important science actually is the genre.” Some have said that sci fiis really the stuff of fantasy and magic but with a thin veneer of technology. Why do you think, in general, that Westerners have been more comfortable with sci fi than fantasy and magic when we consider that there is very little that distinguishes the two subgenres, and that which does separate them is questionable at best?

Sean Cubitt: There is of course Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The continuum lies I think in the power of secrecy. In ancient times, we might like to think, everyone in the tribe shared in what knowledge there was, and all forms of knowledge,­ hunting and cooking techniques, stories of the gods, healing properties of herbs was equal. Under the regime of the temple, some of that knowledge was removed from the commons, and given special status. The Enlightenment tore open the gates but rapidly professionalised knowledge and turned it into specialism, replacing the temple priests with guilds of experts who separated their knowledge through arcane languages and rituals of initiation like university degrees. In the process we have diminished the ancient respect fro common knowledge ­how to make things, how to do stuff, any knowledge that can’t be expressed in the mathematical or jargon-clad language of specialisation. That’s why hunters and cooks rarely make it as heroes and heroines in SF where technocrats do. The hierarchy of knowledge is reflected in the automation of the kinds of knowledge we undervalue: cooking by ATM aboard the Enterprise!

TheoFantastique: Before we talk about a couple of sci fi staples in the form of film and television, a statement by Jan Mair in the book struck me in connection with the process of “Othering” that goes on in sci fi (and horror too). Mair states that “The pornography of spectacle reigns supreme, and we are all voyeurs now desperately seeking out images of the unthinkable and unspeakable.” I think this is certainly true in certain expressions of horror, such as so-called “torture porn,” or road-horror films. What is it about our late modern or postmodern condition and context in the West that contributes to our desire for voyeuristic spectacle?

Sean Cubitt: Jan is drawing on some critical concepts in European social theory of the last fifty years or so. Guy debord’s Society of the Spectacle argued that capital no longer circulated in the form of money (exchange value in the expert jargon of economics) but in signs: some US sociologists called them symbols, or noted a move to buying things for status rather than use. Reality, Debord went as far as to argue, is a sham: like the stage sets in some of Dick’s novels. We are all rats in a maze of adverts and logos. Jean Baudrillard picked up this theme in the 1970s and 80s. His take on pornography is that it is excessively visible. In the first instance, this means making things visible that are normally hidden like the sexual organs.

But like debord he went much further. The excess of visibility concerned making everything visible all the time, not just sex or violence but everything everyone does everywhere all the time. So the idea of seeking out the unspeakable is a way of forcing the excessive visibility, the pornography of everyday life, to reveal its limits. If we are all voyeurs, and if we all present ourselves as intimately visible, there have to be limits, or the system can’t function. That at least is the theory. But this theory is wrong. It’s based on the idea that western civilisation represses sexuality and violence. Sadly, this is the exact opposite of what’s really the case: the West has, in the entire period since the Enlightenment, devoted itself to genocide, torture and rape on a global scale, from slavery to the genocides in Latin America, Australia, NorthAmerica . . . in a process which continues today in untreated pandemics and the industrialisation of death by drugs. There’s a great SF novel waiting to be written about the connection between the US’s last remaining great industries: software, entertainment and armaments. (And just to balance that out, let’s recall that software and kalashnikovs are not that far apart either).

I’ver never really liked horror. Suspense maybe, but I’m too squeamish. And I think the reason may be that I’m the son of a doctor. My brother is a doctor too. I have the hugest respect for their profession, but no desire to enter it. The respect and the lack of training go hand in hand to produce ignorance on my part. I don’t think that’s entirely autobiographical. My belief is that fewer and fewer of us in the developed world, and perhaps especially the teenage boys who are the biggest market for horror, have any inkling what goes on under our epidermis. Women have a different experience: their bodies have been thoroughly medicalised. But ours aren’t. They are in fantasy at least entirely without orifices (whence the recurrent threat of anal penetration as demeaning and terrifying). Body horror plays on this fantasy of integrity. It shows us bodies inside out, with the wet parts on the outside. This triggers feelings of disgust and shame, feelings that can be conquered. the pleasures of horror are, I think, sociologically about conquering disgust and shame at our own bodies and their frailty. People who are closer to death, who live closer to animals, are used to killing them, who see people die at home rather than in secure, separate spaces surrounded by professionals, have no need for that management of emotion.

TheoFantastique: Let’s talk about a few specific sci fi films to draw out what they tell us about ourselves. Mair’s chapter discusses Independence Day. The film did well at the box office in 1996, but in critical reflection it presented images of America as world redeemer and stereotypical characterizations of African Americans, homosexuals, and women. How is it that we are able to Other our fear of alien invasion (extraterrestrial or terrestrial) but not recognize the Othering of our national bravado and stereotypes that reveal some of the worst aspects of the American psyche?

Sean Cubitt: I can’t really talk about the ‘we’ of North America. I lived in Montreal for four years, but French Canada is very much not America; and I spent a stint at the University of Chicago. An odd institution, packed with Nobel prize-winners, it’s situated in the heart of the South Side ghetto. You can’t help feeling that the US is an apartheid state there ­so talking about an American psyche seems odd to me, though from news reports and movies, etc. we non-norte americanos do have a sense of what you mean.

So let me come at it a different way: In the West today, we live in a deeply managed society. From traffic regulation to the management of crowd movements through malls and stations and airports; from statistical aggregation of behaviour to the management of supermarket stock, our societies work on probabilistic predictions that tomorrow will be pretty much the same as today – within statistical variations which themselves can be planned for. In this kind of world, action is incredibly difficult. It’s even more difficult because we are told over and over in our stories that only individuals can take action. But how can little me make an action that changes global warming? I can’t. We feel like action is impossible. In SF, action is possible, heroism, sacrifice, generosity, making a moral choice, changing the course of history.

The alien other in cinema is always a special effect (even if the effects are sometimes cheesy). In one perspective, the alien is a technological artifact of the cinema who has to be somehow brought into relation with the human part. That might simply be a matter of explaining. It might be a wonderful; marriage of the species, as in ET. Or in can come as conquering. I always thought of Independence Day as a remake of Dr. Strangelove: it is a comic pastiche of the kind of heroism we know that US presidents are absolutely incapable of. On the other hand, it might also be that like the Black presidents of the TV series 24, they point towards a future we all wish was going to come true ­ lots of commentators say it’s because of these fictional presidents that it became possible to imagine Obama in the White House. There’s no doubt that the aliens of Independence Day are images of the colonial relation, and as Native American artist Jimmie Durham says, the Indians are always shown as the ones who do the scalping, raping and burning, when historically it was the colonisers. A film that to me is far worse ideologically and morally is Mars Attacks, where we are invited to identify with the attackers, and in my mind to identify with Columbus and the Conquistadors, to laugh at how simply we can erase the colonised other.

Alien mvies were often said to be about fears of communist invasion. I always thought they were about fears of immigration. Catholics coming and breeding all over the place. Nice quiet applicants turning into gremlins the minute they hit Manhattan. It’s odd because some of the most generous-hearted and inspiring SF is about aliens: I’m thinking here of Brin’s Uplift saga, one of my favourites. Really convincingly specific species, but with the extraordinary capacity to help one another. I’m a bit of a softy, but I like my future to have a little hope in it.

TheoFantastique: Christine Wertheim’s chapter looks at the film Star Trek: First Contact. As a Star Trek fan going back to the original series as a kid this was perhaps the most enjoyable chapter for me, and yet the most troubling in terms of the discussion of the human relationships with The Borg and with the android Data. Throughout the lifetime of the Star Trekfranchise it has claimed to present an idealized expression of future humanity that has “arrived” and moved beyond 20th and 21st century foibles. And yet Wertheim points out that in the character of Data the Other is the machine who seeks to be human, and yet in Data’s quest for humanity it is usually a quest that is only tolerated by humans when it is convenient, as in the example of Data expressing the emotion of fear generated by his emotion chip, and yet Picard suggests (commands?) he turn it off until a more convenient time. Doesn’t the Othering of Commander Data reveal, at least in part, our continuing struggle to come to grips with our interactions with technology, and in particular, issues related to the trans-human?

Sean Cubitt: Absolutely. Data is fascinating. He’s there in the same way Spock functioned in the original series: so there was someone to whom the others could explain what it is to be human. That seemed to be the central purpose of the first two ST‘s. In the best of the movies, First Contact, there’s a stunning scene when Data gets a skin graft from the Borg Queen. You could read that for weeks and still be extracting new layers of meaning and social significance, from the sexualisation of technology (and vice versa) to theories of humanity’s specifically sensual mode of cognition, and on and on. Again, the technology of cinema is driven to daring escapades to pull off the illusion, and part of the fun is that we in the audience are both convinced by the story and at the same time connoisseurs of the special effects. In one way every human actor who appears on a cinema or TV screen is a hybrid of human and technology. And of course actors don’t ‘really’ feel the emotions of their characters: they already have an emotion chip!

Then again it’s fascinating to think of Data in terms of Fanon’s analysis of the experience of being colonised; to be constantly aware that you will always be “un noir” before you are or can be anything else. Data has all the qualities of Fanon’s colonised people ­ except their desire to rise up.

In the Cantos, Ezra Pound says something like “I don’t know how they can stand it / with a painted paradise at the end of it all / without a painted paradise at the end of it all”. SF strikes me like that. The utopias it offers are usually just pretty pictures, and we know they are, but we need those pretty pictures to hope. Hope is believing that the future will be different. Not knowing what it will be or how it will be different, just knowing it will be. Much of the time, the management of capital suggests we have no alternative except Armageddon. SF says no. That’s why I think Vivian Sobchack is right in Screening Space when she says the starfield is the science fiction image of all images, the highest, the most open to all possibilities. The satire, at its best, is razor sharp about what’s wrong with today. But what’s most inspiring is the sense not only that the future can be utterly otherwise, but that we can make it so (to coin a phrase). Without going to the descriptive lengths of an Olaf Stapledon, we can sense, in those images of deep space, the capacity of our species to be utterly different to what it is today. Transhuman themes are for the most part satirical. But in some deft moments like the skin raft sequence, we can sniff at a more indefinite and infinitely more inspiring future.

TheoFantastique: Sean, thank you again for discussing this book. I found its chapters intriguing, and they added new considerations to my reflection on science fiction.

Sean Cubitt: And thanks to you for a great site.

Hostel

The League of Tana Tea Drinks (LOTT D) elite group of blogging horrorheads is putting together another unity blog, and one of the topics for discussion involved an invitation to complete the following sentence: “The problem with today’s horror movies is…” Contributors were given the opportunity to finish this sentence in keeping with its negative connotation, or take another approach that completes it more positively. Given my perspective on the current state of affairs in American horror films I complete this sentence by writing, “The problem with today’s horror movies is our current social and cultural context of postmodernity and the influence of commodification.” No doubt at this point readers are scratching their heads and saying, “What?” Allow me to explain.

Horror is a complex genre involving multiple layers of interpretation, and as Stephen King has noted it “is extremely limber, extremely adaptable, extremely useful.” One of the ways in which horror demonstrates its adaptability is that it provides a means of not only entertainment, but also an expression and means grappling with some of our greatest fears as individuals and cultures. It should come as no surprise then that as individuals and cultures change so do their fears, and these changes result in differing cinematic expressions of horror. Earlier in the modern period horror helped express fears of the Other in its various manifestations that were symbolized in the monster. But with late modernity or postmodernity, a post-1960s phenomenon which is often tied cinematically to films like Psycho (1960), The Night of the Living Dead(1968), or The Exorcist (1973), there has been a shift from the monster as Other to an internalization process whereby the monster is us. The shift from the externalized monster as the locus of horror to an internalized terror is the result of social forces and perceptions that in turn colored interpretation of the self. Lianne McLarty discusses this in her chapter “‘Beyond the Veil of the Flesh’: Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror” as part of The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant (University of Texas Press, 1996):

This ‘delegitimization’ of social institutions and the ‘instability’ of subjectivity finds expression in the ways in which these films depict both the monstrous threat and its consequences for protagonists. In contemporary (postmodern) horror, the threat is ‘not simply among us, but rather part of us, caused by us.’ Institutions (like the church and the military) that were once successful in containing the monster and restoring order are at best innefectual (there is often a lack of closure) and at worst responsible for the monstrous. Contemporary horror also tends to collapse the categories of normal and monstrous bodies; it is said to dispense with the binary opposition of us and them, and to resist the portrayal of the monster as a completely alien Other, characteristics of such 1950s films as The Thing (from Another World) (1951), Them! (1954), and The Blob (1958). This tendency to give the monster a familiar face (the monster is not simply among us, but possibly is us) is tied, in postmodern horror, to the focus on the body as site of the monstrous.

This shift from modern horror with the monster as external Other to the internal us with a related emphasis on the body has resulted in the continued tendency toward the production of slasher films beginning in the 1970s and gaining steam in the 1980s and beyond. A further development of this may be found in more recent films where the monster is not the lone psychological deviant such as Michael Myers of Halloween, but a group dynamic (in terms of the perpetrators) of psychological deviance as in Saw (if not in the original at least in the sequels), and Hostel, where the body most strongly becomes the site of the monstrous through graphic depictions of torture and mutilation.

I am not a prude when it comes to violence in film, but I do have my preferences in expressions of horror, no doubt due to the influences of my social environment as I was growing up. I first encountered horror in the late 1960s and early 1970s through horror’s twins in science fiction and fantasy films that depicted the monsterous Other as alien invader, the result of science gone awry, or prehistoric beast meets modern society. Later I encountered the classic Universal and Hammer horror films which again depicted the monster externally, and it was only in my later teens that I engaged postmodern horror with its emphasis on psychological deviance, the internalization of horror, and bodily mutilation as the primary expression of the horrific. In essence I suppose I was inculturated in a particular expression of horror, the early modern expression with the externalized monster, and as a result I have always found this expression of horror more frightening, indeed, more appealing. I think I might also find the complete internalization of horror within myself extremely distasteful. I recognize that human beings are indeed a curious mix of greatness and tragedy, but for me, postmodern horror’s revelry in human evil and bodily mutilation presents an overly dark and nihilistic expression of human nature and horror that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Related to these social and cultural considerations that result in a struggling horror market is its connection to commodification. Horror films are commodities designed to provide the highest return on investment possible, at least in those films produced by Hollywood and mainstream studios, and the emphasis on horror as commodity often leaves creativity and good storytelling by the wayside. In my view, some of the best contemporary horror comes from independent filmmakers and from the international market, with directors from Asia and Mexico, not the United States. In regards to independent filmmakers, the priority is given to good stories and frights, and while international horror is just as connected to commodification as the American horror market, somehow they have manged to provide a fresh infusion of creativity and conceptualization into the American horror market.

I recognize that my preferences for horror cause me to lean largely toward the Gothic, although my preferences for an early modern form of horror certainly go beyond this specific expression of horror. I am not alone in such preferences, as evidenced by others such as Bruce Lanier Wright in his book Nightwalkers: Gothic Horror Movies (Taylor Publishing Company, 1995):

..I believe that ideas have consequences, and I do worry about the idea embodied both in gore-porn and a good many modern ‘horror’ films. The underlying theme of Grand Guignol entertainment can be stated quite simply: You and I are pieces of meat, and all our interactions – anything we do to or for one another – are merely the random collisions of pieces of meat, without meaning or significance. This is a legitimate artistic position, and one developed with some brilliance by George Romero and others. It’s also a tremendously popular idea in mass media. The handful of individuals how decide what appears on television and in our theaters, not being particularly altruistic by nature, must believe it’s what you want to see.

The Gothic position, by contrast, is that good and evil do exist, and that men’s actions carry a moral weight; that our choices count. And if our actions have some sort of importance, maybe we do, too. Maybe we’re more than just the some of our desires and hatreds.

This post will likely be a little more “heady” than many of my fellow LOTT D unity post bloggers, but I think there’s something worth thinking about here. If horror is indeed an adaptable and useful genre we might be thinking about not only why it entertains, but also why it changes in its expression, and what the internalized “monsterous us” of contemporary, postmodern, nihilistic horror says about us as individuals and as a culture.

(For those readers interested in reading more of McLarty’s thoughts on Cronenberg and the body as site/sight of horror, as well as the other contributors to The Dread of Difference, or Wright’s further thoughts on Gothic horror in Nightwalkers, these books can be found as part of the TheoFantastique Amazon.com store.)

Related to the angelic destroyer and savior is the figure of the alien in horror films. One of the films the authors discuss in this connection is one of my favorite horror films, Ridley Scott’s Alien. The authors make a connection between this alien and the angelic when they state that:

“It is, in a sense, the Angel of Death, the Exterminating Angel, the avenging linchpin in Judeo-Christian mythology, from Genesis to Revelation. Which makes it all the more striking that the film’s thematic elements, such as they are, emphasize embryosis, gestation, and release. In short, creation rather than destruction.”

As the authors continue to develop their description of this film, and the connection between the alien and the angelic they comment:

“Alien, then, can be read as a hybrid of the angel and the alien genres, addressing all the issues taken up by either genre on its own. On the most basic level, there is the issue of bodily autonomy, of whether humans can withstand an invasion or resurrection of the body. For that matter, is there life after death or life beyond earth? Another issue is whether humans are in control of their personal and societal destiny. Is the Other a helper or a destroyer, and how can one be sure? The deepest issue might be whether humans are the chosen ones, the loved ones, either by God or by beings from outer space. Are they worth forgiving, or even saving?”

This connection between the angelic and the alien in horror films is even more interesting when we consider the influence of Christian demonology in shaping the thinking and symbolism in these areas. I have been engaged in an ongoing research project that explores how horror and fantasy in film and television shapes popular conceptions and interpretations of “the occult,” Neo-Paganism, and Witchcraft, and one of the research strands I am pursuing is contemporary Christian demonology. In his concluding comments in a chapter on this topic in The Re-Enchantment of the West, vol. 2 (T & T Clark, 2005), Christopher Partridge states:

“Whether we consider Johann Heinrich Fusseli’s disturbing paining The Nightmare (1782), which depicts an incubus squatting on the stomach of a sleeping woman, or satanic panics, or explicit Satanist beliefs, or Satan films, or malevolent screen aliens such as Ridley Scott’s Alien, or the compositions and activities of black metal musicians and their fans or Icke’s conspiracy theories, modern Western artists, writers, and religionists have drunk deeply from the well of Christian demonology.”

I find it interesting that many Christians e would likely be repulsed by the depictions of the angelic and the alien in horror films, and yet it may be that the representations of these figures reflects prevalent views of the supernatural other and the very demonology espoused by a number of evangelicals and which also circulates as the background knowledge or ethos of a popular viewing audience.

In our portrayal of extraterrestrials we tend to oscillate between two extremes, that of the evil alien intent on human destruction or enslavement, and the alien savior, redeemer, or messiah. Given the impact of Christian thought in the West, various new religious movements that emphasize extraterrestrials have drawn upon the alien Messiah archetype, and we also see it surface many times in our science fiction films. This is especially the case in The Day the Earth Stood Still, as noted in an article by Matthew Etherden in the Journal of Religion and Film. In another article this journal also noted how cinematic aliens have also functioned in even closer proximity to the Christian story when aliens serve as Christ-figures such as Superman.

The idea of the alien Messiah was picked up on in a post by my friend Matt Stone at his Journeys in Between blog where he used the TheoFantastique interview with Douglas Cowan as his point of departure. There was a brief exchange between Doug and myself that I’d like to repost here, where Doug comments on his feelings about a misinterpretation of The Day the Earth Stood Still (TDTESS):

“What’s interesting about TDTESS is how it’s consistently been misread as a messianic film, I think in part because of the Golden Globe it won when it was released. People seem to forget that Klaatu brings the millennium wrapped in the threat of apocalypse. If you don’t control yourselves, earth people, your planet will be reduced to a burned-out cinder. And I’m going to leave Gort here to keep an eye on things. This actually fits much more neatly with my contention that religion begins with fear. I find it hard to see Klaatu as an alien Jesus, in the way many (most?) commentators do.

“I think that TDTESS is a bridge film between millennium and apocalypse, the one offered on the tip of the other. I go through some of this in a chapter called “Dreams Wrapped in Nightmares: Millennium, Apocalypse, and American Popular Culture,” which is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism.”
Posted by: Doug Cowan February 20, 2007 at 02:28 PM

“Doug, thanks for the comments and being part of the conversation.

“I drew upon the alien Messiah imagery from TDTESS due to the frequent mention of this in commentaries and academic sources which you note are prevalent. In addition, while director Robert Wise did not see this symbolism and the Christian allegory in the film, apparently the screenwriter intended it as such as reported in Anton Karl Kozlovic’s article “From Holy Aliens to Cyborg Saviours: Biblical Subtexts in Four Science Fiction Films,” Journal of Religion and Film 5/2 (2001):

“…Edmund H. North himself admitted that the parallels between the story of Christ and Day were intentional: from Klaatu’s earthly name of Carpenter, to the betrayal by Tom Stevens, and finally to his resurrection and ascent into the heavens at Day’s end. ‘It was my private little joke. I never discussed this angle with [producer Julian] Blaustein or [director Robert] Wise because I didn’t want it expressed. I had originally hoped that the Christ comparison would be subliminal.’” (von Gunden, K., & Stock, S. H. (1982). Twenty all-time great science fiction films. New York: Arlington House.)

“Still, your point is well taken in regards to the strong inclusion of the element of fear in regards to any of its religious underpinnings. Perhaps there is a place for greater recognition of this in Christianity as it seems that fear was a significant part of Jesus’ kingdom messages in regards to the ever-present threat of Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in the background. While fear should not the only or sole element or motivator in religion, it is there and must be grappled with appropriately.”
Posted by: John W. Morehead February 21, 2007 at 04:30 AM

“Thanks much for this, John. I’d forgotten that para in the JRF article. It makes you wonder about the kind of Christianity North envisioned, if he could place those words into Klaatu’s mouth. Kind of like the horrific faith implicated in Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. I’ll consider this further, since the case has just become much more complex, and, therefore, more interesting.”
D

I repost this here, and raise the specific issues related to the mythic ideas and archetypes surrounding the alien Messiah so that we might consider it in more depth. How might we have we misinterpreted films like TDTESS, or perhaps read too much of Christian Messianic conceptions into science fiction films while not allowing more general forms of the archetype to surface on their own terms?

[Painting "Alien Messiah" by Mike Hoffman, www.graemeflanagan.com/mike_hoffman/oil2.htm.]