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Popular Culture Review
hybridity.7 I argue that the dilemma surrounding the what-isness of these films
resembles significantly the ontologic uncertainty postwar western filmmakers
(and filmgoers) found themselves confronting with regard to the nature of “the
Russian,” the bomb, and the post-Hiroshima world they had been reborn into.
We can already discern in the highlights of this debate an opposition
emerging between horror—with its exotic figures, its Gothic overtones, and its
struggle between good and evil—and sci-fi—with its sleek, robotic characters,
their equally sleek and robotic mindsets, and its gung-ho investment in the power
of futuristic technology. While horror recalls the past, the fascination and
revulsion of old-world freaks and “characters,” sci-fi lunges hungrily and with
great perspicacity toward the future. While horror looks within, meditating
obsessively on the goodness and evil found in both its heroes and villains, sci-fi
abandons the centrality of character altogether, developing action sequences that
move with lightening speed. While the monsters of horror films are “evil,” the
creatures of sci-fi films are simply, mindlessly destructive.
Thus, while Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958)
blithely surrenders Vampira’s graveyard to a sky full of flying saucers,8 few other
films have followed such an eccentric and disorienting path? Much in the two
genres seems to repel each other like opposite charges: while they were close
enough in the 1950s to remain a subject of debate and delineation today, they
have been branching steadily ever since, exemplified in their current extremes by
the slasher Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street) and possession (fhe
Exorcist, The Omen) films as the latest in horror and everything from action films
(Terminator, Robocop) to domestic utopias §tar Wars, Close Encounters) to
mind-bending dystopias (Blade Runner, Liquid Sky) as millennial sci-fi.
Yet during the period in which horror and sci-fi opposed but also
conversed with and bilaterally influenced each other, they produced, due to the
exigencies of the political world surrounding them, what I argue is indeed a
hybrid of both—the Martian or alien-invasion flick. In positioning this genre of
film thus—both between and bom of the opposing, earlier genres—I am recalling
to a significant degree Vivian Sobchack’s argument which constructs a continuum
similar to the one I suggest above, with positions for horror and science fiction
genres corresponding to my ultra-metaphoric and ultra-metonymic distinctions,
respectively, and a centrally designated “alien” film which contains both
“monster” and “creature” subgenres, between which, I argue10 the Martian film is
best registered:
Ultra-Metaphoric--------------------------------- Ultra-Metonymic
(Martians = “us”)
(Martians = Russians)
(Martians = Martians)
Horror---- (monster) — alien — (creature)----- science fiction