BFI Sci-Fi festival Days of Fear and Wonder hits the South Bank

The BFI’s three-month festival devoted to sci fi of every description will be a treat for the geeky and not so geeky. Afrofuturism, queer sci-fi and a celebration of 2000AD (the comic) are among the more arcane offerings – but at Culture Whisper we’re excited about October’s programme of cult classics, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to A Clockwork Orange (1971), Mad Max 2 (1981), Brazil (1985) and Akira (1988). In November, fans of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey will be treated to an extended run of his masterpiece with a panel discussion including the original stars of the show, Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, plus Professor Brian Cox and Sir Christopher Frayling.

Whether it’s the monster from the black lagoon, the resurrection of the dead or a malevolent spaceship, science fiction’s creations possess an alarming ability to embed themselves in our imaginations. But however scary the monster, these tropes draw their true power from their conscious or unconscious reflection of the anxieties of their age.

From the crushed industrial workers of Metropolis’s dystopian city state, to our present day discomfiture with the blurring of boundaries between human and machine, sci-fi has been able to articulate some of our greatest fears and allegorize some of our greatest failings.

Mutant monsters = nuclear threat

Fear of atomic warfare has never really left the post-war psyche, but the subject dominated the sci-fi genre of the 1950s, mostly embodied by mutant monsters.

Gone were the days of King Kong (1933), where super-sized monkeys were simply accepted as exotic curios. A (justified) fear of nuclear fall-out created a new trend in cinema for giant-sized ants (Them!, 1954), spiders (World Without End,1956) and mournful, angry lizards (Godzilla,1954) the latter a monster that cinema audiences love to hate to this day (see Pacific Rim, 2013). In Godzilla (2014), starring Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston, he’s even on the side of the good guys.

Extraterrestrials = communists, angels, ethnicity

The outsider is one of the great themes of fiction, and you can’t get much more ‘other’ than a visiting alien. In the Fifties, American McCarthyite paranoia about the Communists walking among them unnoticed and intent on destruction produced cult classics like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Other film-makers took a more liberal-minded approach. In The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), it takes an outsider in the form of a visiting alien to tell humanity that it has lost its way, and what the consequences will be if we can’t make peace with one another.

By the 1970s, our alien visitors had been radically reframed from the egghead of the Twilight Zone to cosmic saviour or idiot savant (The Man Who Fell to Earth). Afro-futurism celebrated black artists like Sun Ra (Space Is The Place, 1974) but also offered directors a new way to discuss black identity in America (The Brother from Another Planet, 1984).

Today, aliens are more likely to be a way for directors to explore tensions and injustices in the clash between an indigenous and immigrant community (District 9, 2009). In Monsters (2010), a journalist and a tourist are forced to go crosscountry into areas that aliens have colonised. As in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) the climax of the film is the meeting between us and them, but more importantly, it’s a moment that brings human characters together.

Computer technology and artificial intelligence = human isolation and alienation

Sci-fi films can also remind us of our loneliness, as well as our fear of others. The scariest part of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) comes when the protagonist, Dr David Bowman, finds himself at the mercy of an operating system. Skynet (The Terminator 1984), is even more god-like, starting a war before initiating a global genocide.

Nowadays we’re much more frightened about falling in love with operating systems than being murdered by them. The lead character in Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013) is just as isolated as Dr David Bowman but his love affair with his computer exposes his emotional, rather than physical, vulnerability.

Zombies = our own worse selves

Zombie horror arguably has its roots in folklore rather than science, but there are several films in which the dead are revived by an epidemic – and in this case it’s our similarity to the undead that make them so very disturbing – and politically resonant.

In George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the zombies resemble nothing so much as an inexorable lynch mob ranged against Romero’s black protagonist. The director’s subsequent follow-up Dawn of the Dead (1978), in which the undead wander a mall in search of retail therapy, is a droll critique of vacuous consumerism.

Zombies, as critic Linda Badley observes, ‘are us’. Perhaps Dead People (1973) makes the point best. In one scene, a woman looks up to find herself surrounded – with the undead occupying every other seat in the cinema.

For more information on the BFI's Days of Fear and Wonder, visit the website here