FILM CHRONICLE
295
urbane and benevolent (Walter Pidgeon plays the role) and is trying to
realize an ideal community on the far-off planet he has discovered. Al–
though he has invented a robot (Ariel) who cheerfully performs man's
baser tasks, we learn that he is also responsible, though unwittingly, for
a terrible invisible force (Caliban) overwhelming in its destructiveness.
While he sleeps, the aggressive forces in his libido activate a dynamo he
has been tinkering with which gives them enormous power to kill those
the doctor unconsciously resents. Thus, Freudian psychology
~s
evoked
to endow the scientist with guilt. At the end, he accepts his guilt and
sacrifices his life in order to combat the being he has created.
The Interplanetary Monster series sometimes reverses the central
situation of most horror films. We often find the monster controlling
the scientist and forcing him to do its evil will.
In
It Conquered the
World
(the first film to capitalize on Sputnik and Explorer), the pro–
jection of a space satellite proves to be a mistake, for it results in the
invasion of America by a monster from Venus. The monster takes con–
trol of the scientist who, embittered by the indifference of the masses
towards his ideas, mistakenly thinks the monster will free men from
stupidity. This muddled egghead finally discovers the true intentions
of the monster and destroys it, dying himself in the process.
In
The
Brain From Planet Arous,
a hideous brain inhabits the mind of a
nuclear physicist with the intention of controlling the universe. As the
physical incarnation of the monster, the scientist is at the mercy of its
will until he can free himself of its influence. The monster's intellect,
like the intellect of the Mad Doctor, is invariably superior, signified
graphically by its large head and small body (in the last film named
it is nothing but Brain). Like the Mad Doctor, its superior intelligence
is always accompanied by moral depravity and an unconscionable lust
for power.
If
the monster is to be destroyed at all, this will not be done
by matching wits with it but by finding some chink in its armor. The
chink quite often is a physical imperfection: in
War of the Worlds,
the
invading Martians are stopped, at the height of their victory, by their
vulnerability to the disease germs of earth. Before this Achilles heel is
discovered, however, the scientist is controlled to do evil, and with
the monster and the doctor in collaboration again, even in this qualified
sense, the wheel has come full cirde.
The terror of most of these films, then, stems from the matching
of knowledge with power, always a source of fear for Americans-when
Nietzsche's Superman enters comic book culture he loses his intellectual
and spiritual qualities and becomes a muscle man. The muscle man,
even with X-ray vision, poses no threat to the will, but muscle in col-
