War of the Worlds: Why Does Pop Culture Hate Aliens?

By Anthony Pilloud
Contributing Writer

This question has bothered me for some time now: why does pop culture hate aliens? And I don’t mean the contemporary political implications of the term; I mean outer space, intergalactic space invaders. Little green and gray men who swoop into our stratosphere with powerful technology and blow up all of our most cherished historical landmarks and tourist locations. What is it about aliens that we feel so compelled to consistently make them the primary antagonist of both our classic and our modern science fiction?

Space invaders became popularized (excluding the staple arcade game) with science fiction films from the ‘50s. Films such as “Invasion of the Saucer-Men” exemplify this animosity; the bug-eyed, big-headed green monsters crept and crawled from their disc-shaped flying machines to steal our most beautiful blonde American women (as was the most popular way to portray the aliens on the movie’s posters).

The Saucer-Men from this film were so monstrous that their hands would skitter towards love-seeking naïve teenagers when they were mistakenly amputated by the sex-starved high schoolers. The tag line of the film itself was “CREEPING HORROR … from the depths of time and space!”, with beam of light coming from the aliens space ships cutting down between the words “and” and “space”. Before that, in ’53, “IT Came from Outer Space” showed us that some space monsters didn’t even deserve a name.

But the invasions hardly stopped with their 1950s semi-origin. In fact, once we came to ‘80s, the creatures from space began to morph and transform into all sorts of nightmares from our imagination. In 1986 came “Critters,” terribly cute aliens that crashed into our farmsteads (a place that would hardly be safe later on, as we will see) and giggled with chittering vileness as they grinned their razor-sharp smiles. With their fur-covered bodies and animalistic actions, it came that our pets where no longer safe from their invasion (as was the case in “Gremlins,” though Gizmo was not an alien).

John Carpenter’s horror classic “The Thing” brought the aliens even closer to home. No longer did they arrive in visibly foreign flying saucers and blast our homes and steal our women, but changed their very appearance to look like our closest friends. No one was safe from the anonymous “thing.” The infamous skin-peeling scene from “V” exemplifies our fear of the alien beneath. Every remake or reimagining of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” has kept this tradition alive.

And no place was safe on the 4th of July in 1996. “Independence Day,” starring the increasingly popular Will Smith and the unflappable Jeff Goldblum, blew up the very symbol of American independence to smithereens before our very eyes. But with a good, strong-jawed president and patriotic pride to back us up, we blasted them right out of the sky.

Until we come to the most recent example, “Battle: Los Angeles,” which may as well have been “Red Dawn” for the science fiction marine. I swear I heard more “hoo-rahs” in that movie then I did in “Jarhead.” Once again, with a good ol’ fashioned American flag at their back, the human forces quelled the alien invasion bent on stealing our (our, mind you) planet’s precious resources.

So what is it about blockbuster SciFi flicks like these that attract our desire to, dare I say it, alienate aliens?

Obviously I can’t finish this article without bringing to attention the counter-example films.  “E.T.” is the first that comes to mind, a single, simple, small lost alien who befriends American sweet heart Drew Barrymore before she was an American sweetheart. Yet even here, the kind-heart extraterrestrial was abducted by clandestine forces bent on vilifying him (her?).

More importantly (and more contemporary) is Neill Blomkamp’s powerful space-drama “District 9.” Here, we see clearly and emotionally the director’s vision of an alien race forced into subjugation by the whim and power of a corrupt government and corporation. In “Cloverfield,” even though the primary antagonist appears to be an evil, mindless, contemporary Godzilla, many times we can see clearly that this creature-from-somewhere-beyond may have just been an adolescent suffering from separation anxiety from its parent, as was the inspiration that the director calls upon.

So why do aliens propagate our xenophobia of the unknown rather than heighten our wonder of the stars? Why do we fear invasion across atmospheric boundaries and not yearn for contact with something different? NASA constantly sends probes into space filled with art, music, names and images from our planet into space (in fact they posted the name of anyone who signed up for it online in their Mars rover).

Why not imagine what it would be like to receive one of our own?

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