1957 was a flood year for fantasy, horror, and
sci-fi pictures with an eerily coincidental 57 of them being released in the
U.S. from the German supernatural thriller Unnatural:
The Fruit of Evil in February to Howard Hawks’s classic The Thing from Another World in
December. A number of factors are responsible for this particular phenomenon, most
notably the drive-in explosion and the multiple A-Bomb test explosions leading
up to ’57. Rob Craig’s extensive introduction to his critical movie guide It Came from 1957 lays out all these
reasons with no historical detail spared. Craig supplies a much, much, much
deeper history of atomic weapons and power than you’re ever going to read in
another movie book. It may be excessive for a book of this type, but it is
fascinating and a hell of a lot scarier and insidious than anything I’ve ever
seen in any horror movie, which Craig heightens with his hot-blooded tone. He’s
as serious about his politics as he is about his sci-fi movies.
