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CRAWL OUT THROUGH THE FALLOUT

Destruction didn’t necessitate the onset of World War III. Reports that exposure to an invisible and odorless substance could cause change in somatic cells, rumors that the nation’s water supply was poisoned and that New York City’s dust had become radioactive, made the mere existence of the A-Bomb and the H-Bomb enough to cause the demise of men. [17] A LIFE magazine article covered the development of a new anti-radiation lollipop (“the complete safeguard against radioactive fallout.”) that contained 3 chemicals: iodine, strontium and potassium, to counter the harmful radioactive iodine 131, strontium 90 and cesium 137, “to combat a worry which nags parents all over the world: the gradual increase in the atmosphere of radiation products from nuclear bomb tests.” [18]

Nuclear tests became quite the national attraction. The ‘Last Frontier’ hotel in Las Vegas publicized itself as the best place to watch an atomic bomb test. Visitors would gather around for a picnic when a test took place and watch the mushroom cloud, while Miss Atom Bomb (winner of the Ms. Atomic Bomb Beauty Pageant) handed them protective sunglasses and served them food and drinks. [19] In 1955 the ‘Last Frontier’ appropriately changed its name to the ‘New Frontier’.

Radiation-related side effects were an individual hazard as well and there was rarely a way back from them. Scott Carey shrinks in size as a result of entering a radiation cloud and has to fend himself against cats and spiders in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957), eventually going into the wild – his own backyard – future unknown. Glenn Manning is caught in the midst of the first plutonium bomb detonation and grows in size to become THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (1957). Manning’s natural world becomes Las Vegas, where the oversized settings fit his own. Even though a cure is found to his condition, he finds his demise falling off the Hoover Damn (to make a disfigured return in WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, 1958). A slew of radiation-induced-giant-creatures roamed the world: Crab monsters, giant spiders, grasshoppers, leeches and ants… the possibilities were endless.

Edgar Ulmer’s BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER (1960) is set in the year 2024, a future in which the dreaded nuclear war never happened but the destruction of the Earth did. Radioactive dust from all the nuclear test detonations destroyed the protective layer in the atmosphere that was guarding the Earth from deadly space rays. THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE (1961), a British production directed by Val Guest, opens by assuring us that “within a few hours the world will know if this is the end, or another beginning.” Impending doom is caused by simultaneous H-Bomb detonations in the United States and the Soviet Union that result in “the biggest jolt the Earth has taken since the Ice Age started,” shifting its orbit and sending it spinning towards the sun.

CRACK IN THE WORLD (1965) features Dana Andrews as a slightly mad doctor, dying of radiation sickness, who plans to penetrate Earth’s crust in order to extract new metals from the emerging magma. To achieve this he launches an atomic missile towards the Earth’s center but the explosion causes a crack that threatens to split the Earth in half. The proposed solution to the problem is blowing up more atom bombs in the way of the crack, to stop it from spreading. The solution in THE DAY THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE is to detonate enough bombs to change Earth’s orbit again, although the ending leaves a question mark regarding Earth’s fate. Problems that arise from nuclear explosions are treated the way an alcoholic treats a hangover, by increasing the dosage.

“Children should have lots of vitamin A and calcium, but they shouldn’t have any Strontium-90 or Cesium-137. These things come from atomic bombs and are radioactive, they can make you die.” We learn this piece of wisdom from a narrator in a Lyndon Johnson campaign ad from 1964, accompanying a video of a young girl licking ice cream. Determined to defeat the GOP candidate, Barry Goldwater, LBJ set out on a scare-campaign that peaked with a series of cinematically brilliant television spots against atomic bomb tests in the atmosphere, which Goldwater supported. In the most famous, and notorious one, a young girl stands, picking off flower petals and counting up from ‘1’. When she reaches the number ‘9’ an intimidating voiceover starts counting down from ‘10’, as if to launch an atomic bomb. The frame freezes and pushes into her eye, at which point the bomb explodes: “We must either love each other, or we must die.” Reality collided with the language of these films and proved both the strong effect of their language and the real (and often legitimate) anxieties of the period.

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE: THE NEW FRONTIER
“What you are about to see may never happen… But to this anxious age in which we live, it presents a fearsome warning… Our story begins with… THE END!”
– Roger Corman’s DAY THE WORLD ENDED

In 1950 the destruction of New York by an atomic bomb was visualized in detail in the pages of Time Magazine: “Within three-quarters of a mile of the burst, substantial destruction of all except modern, reinforced concrete and heavy steel-frame buildings; up to 1.5 miles, complete destruction of most old-style brick and frame buildings, and serious damage to modern buildings. For at least two miles from the burst, streets blocked by rubble, and power, light and water lines knocked out.” [20]

In 1955 it was reported that major cities were lacking in defense against bomb attacks. Boston had almost no chance of survival, Pittsburgh was totally unprepared, Cleveland was a sitting duck, Chicago would lie helpless, and Los Angeles would be in shambles. [21]

Exploitation film producers capitalized on the inevitable coming of the apocalypse, or at least on the fantastic imagination of the nation’s youth, reassuring the audience that the end would also be a new beginning. Often they suggested that the Earth’s landscape would become a new frontier for man to conquer, a land that challenges modernized definitions of manhood and provides new opportunities as a result of complete destruction. There is a notion of mankind reverting to a pre-historic state, aptly expressed in ROCKETSHIP X/M (1950): “There’s not much different between the future and the past.” In the film, a group of scientists travel to Mars to find a landscape destroyed by atomic wars, in time to warn the Earth of its own coming danger (for more on the dying planets angle check out FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS, 1960).

In FIVE (1951), a group of 4 men and 1 woman form a community and strive to create a new, better world, “Let’s not make the mistakes people made,” says Michael, the film’s protagonist. Independently produced by Arch Oboler and distributed through Columbia Pictures, FIVE presents one of the first cinematic visions of a nuclear holocaust. The barren landscape resembles that of a western movie and the men in it have to get used to a different type of life: no longer city dwellers, they will need to work their land, build their own homes, generate electricity, become ‘real’ men. This western land forms a world of opportunity for some of the film’s characters. “I’ve never had it so good — a house, food, no problems.”

The fifth member of the group is a foreigner who arrives by sea. He rejects the new life-style and insists on moving to the city and embracing the material world, and his punishment for rejecting the new society is death. The city is a dead place, a frame frozen in time – dead traffic, dead electronics, and dead people. It is a relic of man’s past rather then his future. Michael expresses the uselessness of the old world when he finds an old cereal box: “Tear up a box top, mail it in, and you’ll be rich and famous.”

Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte) gets trapped in a mining shaft. When he finds his way out he discovers the world has been destroyed by atomic war. The Belafonte-produced THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959) suggests that the city could also become that frontier. Burton creates his own world in the dead city of New York, getting phone lines to run, fixing up electricity, creating a world of opportunities he would never have been granted in modern day society. While the city is in the same ‘freeze-frame’ mode for its lack of movement, Burton has a toy train running in his apartment, for he is the hope for life.

Joining Burton are a 21-year–old white girl, Sarah (Inger Stevens), and Benson (Mel Ferrer), a white man. Even the new city functions as an interpretation of the Wild West with Burton and Benson going on an all-out duel over the girl in the deserted Manhattan streets. As the film ends, the possibility exists of Burton and Sarah being the two who will repopulate the world, and the end title reassures us it is only THE BEGINNING.

Roger Corman’s science fiction films are especially worthy of note, for he seems to denounce both religion and science as hypocritical or incompetent. He favors starting films with almost religiously apocalyptic statements that are rather ironic considering the films’ content. A narrator starts DAY THE WORLD ENDED: “Man has done his best to destroy himself . . . There is a force more powerful than man, and in his infinite wisdom he has saved a few.” Again there is the notion of an unknown new frontier in which Jim Maddison (Paul Birch) has to protect his home and his daughter Louise (Lori Nelson) from radiation, mutants and human invaders. The lawlessness of this world makes the rule of the gun the only way to enforce human morals and we are reminded that while some humans became mutant monsters, a man could be monstrous in his nature as well. With no representation of religion in this world, the only hope for future civilization is marriage and impregnation, salvation in conformity.

Men fight over the sole woman survivor in all 3 of the films mentioned above, it is a recurring theme that ties the ideas of conformity with sexual fantasies that can arise from such a situation. Direct references to this fantasy can be found in Bill Haley’s song ‘Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in Town)’ from 1954, in which he dreams of being the lone male survivor of the coming apocalypse: “I had 2 gals every morning / Seein’ that I was well fed / And believ-a you me, one sweetened my tea / While another one buttered my bread”. In 1962, Ann Margret retorted in her own version, ‘Thirteen Men’: “2 men giv-a me oil wells / 2 men giv-a me gold / And another sweet thing bought me a diamond ring / About a-forty carats I am told.”

The idea that the future is our past repeats in many of the post-apocalyptic films. ROCKETSHIP X/M, BEYOND THE TIME BARRIER and THE TIME TRAVELERS (1964) all feature mutated survivors who resort to a pre-historic, tribal lifestyle. Roger Corman’s TEENAGE CAVEMAN (1958) is one of the most interesting examples of this world. Opening with a biblical quote from Genesis sets us in a pre-historic era. People are ruled by ‘the word’ and ‘the law’, representing god and man, the latter forbidding them from venturing beyond the river and away from their own domain, warning of “dirt that eats men” and a “God that gives death with its touch.”

Robert Vaughn plays the son of the tribe’s symbol maker, a teenager who rejects his community, his defined role, and wishes to see the outside world by going into undiscovered, possibly dangerous, land. The banality of modern life does not appeal to him, he doesn’t care to be “safe to live and die in a single place.” When he reaches adulthood he rejects conformity and marriage in order to explore the new frontier. Vaughn appeals to teenagers by denouncing adult ignorance (“Age is not always truth”) and the people quickly band against him.

It is discovered at the end that this world is, in fact, our future. A new Genesis would come about as we revert to a pre-historic world in which the role of God is played by scientists; those who destroyed men with their inventions to begin with and formed the new laws to prevent people from exposure to radiation or mutations. There is the sense of the complete failure of institutionalized science and religion as the two combine into one. Amongst the tribe there are three keepers of god’s gifts to men – fire, the wheel and man’s ability to build and destroy, a simple and yet poignant conviction of mankind.

With science fiction and horror going mainstream, the independent industry turned to other forms of exploitation, such as eroticism and violence, attracting people with the power of a spectacle that Hollywood was not able to provide. Nowadays, when many of the fears remain the same, we see the exploitation of the tense political situation mainly in Hollywood productions that are marketed as quality products rather then used for cheap thrills. In the past, and in many of the films covered here, there was a notion that New York would be the first to go, “ground zero” of an attack, and newspapers supported that theory. The terrible events of 9/11 made this a reality, and made the exploitation of terrorism or the current situation by the entertainment industry problematic.

The industry replaced the atomic scare with other man-made dangers, mainly ecological. If the original THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) was a comment about the Cold War, the new one (2008) is about the environment. M. Night Shaymalan’s THE HAPPENING (2008), and Ronald Emmerich’s THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004), amongst many, exploited global warming. THE HOST (South Korea, 2006) is about a sea monster created as a result of polluting the waters. These are just a few, but they are a part of a general trend that constantly updates itself, changing only the variables. At its core is mankind’s fear of bringing its own destruction.

“When historians come to assess the America of World War II” writes Henry Lee in his 1957 essay, This Age of Fear, “the period 1946 on will have to be written down – or off – as the Era of Fear.” [22] It was 1958 and Lewis Frumkes was terrified. He was certain the end of the world was inevitable due to a conflict over Lebanon between the US and the Soviets: “I took all of my allowance that had been allotted me for the year in college and I spent it on food, I bought a painting, I spent everything I had. When the world didn’t end everyone else was thrilled, and I ended up eating peanut butter for the next six months.”

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