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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - August 26th

"WAR OF THE WORLDS" released in 1953

[opening lines]
Narrator: No one would have believed in the middle of the 20th Century that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligence's greater than Man's. Yet, across the gulf of space on the planet Mars, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded our Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely joined their plans against us. Mars is more than 140 million miles from the sun, and for centuries has been in the last status of exhaustion. At night, temperatures drop far below zero even at its equator. Inhabitants of this dying planet looked across space with instruments and intelligence's that which we have scarcely dreamed, searching for another world to which they could migrate!

When audiences first heard these words spoken by narrator Sir Cedric Hardwicke, H.G. Well's classic novel was brought to life in this tale of an alien invasion that starts in a small California town but quickly escalates around the entire world! Only Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry), former scientist for the Manhattan Project has the insight to assist the military forces of the world in defeating these Martian invaders, in Gene Pal's cult classic film, War of the Worlds!

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While fishing outside a small southern Californian town of Linda Rosa with his colleagues, nuclear scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester (Barry) witnesses a large cyclindrical crash on the outskirt of town. Investigating the impact site, Forrester meets Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson) and her uncle, Pastor Matthew Collins (Lewis Martin) amongst the other townspeople.  Later that day, the "cylinder" opens and the inhabitants of the ship kill a welcoming party, simultaneously shutting down all technology in the town with an electromagnetic pulse. The National Guard quickly send troops in to surround the object, as reports from all over the world start to come in regarding hundreds of similar identical objects landing. When Collins is killed trying to make peace with the Martian's, the militray attack, but easily defeated by the alien's "heat ray". Forrester and Sylvia escape the battle and hide in an abandoned farm house, where they encounter and dismember an "electronic eye" from the Martian machine, and collect a blood sample from a wounded Martian. Meanwhile, with many of the major capitols of the world having been destroyed in the attacks, the United States government makes the decision to use nuclear weapons against the invaders, but the nuclear strike fails due to the integrity of their shields. Forrester and Sylvia manage to bring the Martian camera and blood samples to his team at Pacific Tech, with hope that by studying their technology to find weaknesses, there may yet be hope for the human race to avoid total extermination!

Forrester: Are they sure it's a meteor? It certainly didn't come down like one.
3rd forest ranger: That's right... it came down in kind of spurts, didn't it?

Top:   Dr Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) and Sylvia (Ann Robinson);

Above:   Pastor Collins (Lewis Martin) encounters the Martians

The rights to H.G. Wells novel were orginally purchased in 1925 by Cecil B. DeMille, with the hopes he would be directing the epic sci fi picture. As development stalled, DeMille looked for a replacement director, with Alfred Hitchcock set to direct a proposed version in the 1930s. DeMille briefly considered Orson Welles, who rose to prominence with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast during the evening before Halloween of 1938 and scaring numerous radio listeners, and was being pressured into making this his first feature film - but he wanted no part of it. However, DeMille's personal choice to produce the film after Alfred Hitchcock declined to direct it was George Pal, who was renowned for his Puppetoon animation technique and two earlier live-action sci-fi films: Destination Moon (1950) and When Worlds Collide (1951). DeMille gave complete control to Pal over the production, who chose Byron Haskin to direct the film, a decision with which DeMille was pleased. By way of acknowledging the part that Cecil B. DeMille had played in bringing the story to the screen, Pal wanted him to narrate the film, but DeMille suggested Sir Cedric Hardwicke instead. Pal also paid tribute to DeMille in the film by having his film Samson and Delilah (1949) listed on the theater marquee early in the film.

Production officially began in January 1952, but briefly after just two days of shooting when Paramount discovered that its filming rights of the novel were only for a silent version. It was quickly resolved through the kind permission of H.G. Wells's estate, and production resumed. While most of the filming took place on Stage 18, the largest stage at Paramount Studios, location shooting also took place in Simi Valley, California and Phoenix, Arizona. It was in Phoenix where actors Gene Barry, Ann Robinson and the production crew joined real US National Guardsmen while they were on exercises. Robinson would later relate that when the action started, the tanks the Guardsmen were using weren;t going to stop-and-start for the cameras, leaving Barry and Robinson to dodge them as they roared past! War of the Worlds was also the first motion picture to film on the newly completed Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles known as the Stack, with producers gaining special permission to drive on it before it opened in 1953. George Pal originally planned for the final third of the film to be shot in the new 3D process to visually enhance the Martians' attack on Los Angeles. The plan was for the audience to put on 3-D glasses when the actors put on their goggles for the nuclear strike against the Martian flying machines. However, The plan was dropped prior to actual production of the film, presumably being deemed too expensive.

Dr Clayton Forrester: You might get a clue from that anemic blood.
Duprey: Are you suggesting a biological approach?
Dr Clayton Forrester: We know now that we can't beat their machines. We've got to beat them.

Top and Above:   Sylvia encounters the aliens in the farmhouse!

The one thing the Pal and the filmmakers would shortchange was the remarkable special effects! With a budget of $2,000,000, only $600,000 (30%) was spent on the live action scenes while $1,400,000 (70%) was spent on the extensive and elaborate special effects. Originally, the Martian war machines were supposed to walk on visible electronic beams. This was attempted by having electrical sparks emanate from the three holes at the bottom of the machine. This was quickly abandoned for fear of it becoming a major fire hazard. The first two shots of the first war machine emerging from the gully have this effect. During filming, the actors were under the impression that they were dealing with the walking tripod machines of the book. This explains the farmhouse scene when Gene Barry says, "There's a machine standing right along side of us." However, the results of the walking can be seen wherever the Martian machines fly throughout the film, even though the sparking effect was no longer used. George Pal initially planned to portray the Martians and their fighting machines similarly to how they appear in the original novel. However, after being informed by a United States Army technical adviser that the Tripods, as they are portrayed in the 1897 novel, would pose no real threat to a 1950s era human military, he opted to change the fighting machines. Namely, Pal chose to make the machines fly and introduced the atom bomb-resistant deflector shields!

The Martian war machines had about twenty wires running to each one, with some for suspension and maneuvering, while others carried power to the various lights and mechanisms (all this being produced before there were lightweight circuits and sophisticated radio controls!). The heat ray was created by burning welding wire with a blowtorch forcing the sparks off of it, and any vaporizing that happens in the movie was created by rotoscoping, which is tracing animation over live-action footage. For example, the disintegration of Colonel Heffner took an astounding 144 (a gross) individual mattes. For the force fields, the crew filmed plastic bubbles against a black screen and layered that over the war machines. To simulate the nuclear explosion's mushroom cloud, a metal drum filled with explosive gas was detonated which blew colourful explosive powders resting on top of the drum 75 feet into the air. The sound effects of the Martian war machines' heat ray were created from three electric guitars played backward. The sound of the Martian screaming after Forrester hit it was a mixture of a microphone scraping along dry ice and a woman's scream played backward (the former set of sound effects became widely used stock sound effects after the film was released). The miniature sets were exact duplicates of real L.A. buildings, with Ann Robinson recalling, "It looked like Gulliver's Travels." The set also included an 8-foot-tall miniature of City Hall that was blown up from the inside and filmed on high-speed cameras.

Radio Reporter: [voiceover] In the First World War, and for the first time in the history of man, nations combined to fight against nations using the crude weapons of those days. The Second World War involved every continent on the globe, and men turned to science for new devices of warfare, which reached an unparalleled peak in their capacity for destruction. And now, fought with the terrible weapons of super-science, menacing all mankind and every creature on the Earth comes the War of the Worlds.

Top:   The miniature sets for War of the Worlds;

Above:   Producer George Pal

When War of the Worlds was released in 1953, the film polarized critics and audience alike. The New York Times review of War of the Worlds by Armond White, noted, "[The film is] an imaginatively conceived, professionally turned adventure, which makes excellent use of Technicolor, special effects by a crew of experts, and impressively drawn backgrounds ... Director Byron Haskin, working from a tight script by Barré Lyndon, has made this excursion suspenseful, fast and, on occasion, properly chilling."  "Brog" in Variety felt, "[It is] a socko science-fiction feature, as fearsome as a film as was the Orson Welles 1938 radio interpretation...what starring honors there are go strictly to the special effects, which create an atmosphere of soul-chilling apprehension so effectively [that] audiences will actually take alarm at the danger posed in the picture. It can't be recommended for the weak-hearted, but to the many who delight in an occasional good scare, it's socko entertainment of hackle-raising quality." War of the Worlds still receives high acclaim from critics to this day: review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes' consensus reading, "Though it's dated in spots, War of the Worlds retains an unnerving power, updating H. G. Wells' classic sci-fi tale to the Cold War era and featuring some of the best special effects of any 1950s film".

War of the Worlds won an Academy Award for Special Effects (it was the sole nominee that year), while Everett Douglas and Loren L. Ryder were nominated for Film Editing and Sound Recording respectively.  War of the Worlds was deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant in 2011 by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. The Registry noted the film's release during the early years of the Cold War and how it used "the apocalyptic paranoia of the atomic age." The Registry also cited the film's special effects, which at its release were called "soul-chilling, hackle-raising, and not for the faint of heart." The film also features on four American Film Institute lists; AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills, AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains (with Martian invaders ranking at #27), and AFI's 10 Top 10 – Nominated Science Fiction Film. War of Worlds also inspired a TV series/sequel, with Ann Robinson reprising her role as Sylvia Van Buren in three of the episodes. It would also have two loose remakes, both released in 2005, beginning with The Asylum's direct-to-DVD H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds, and the Steven Spielberg/Tom Cruise adaptation, War of the Worlds. In Spielberg's version, he returned the Tripod mechanism for the Martian fighting machines with surprisingly good effect!

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   85%