‘The Man from Planet X’: cinema’s first gothic sci-fi
If asked to name the first gothic sci-fi film ever made, many would immediately think of Ridley Scott’s classic Alien. After all, that movie is effectively a haunted house story set in space. The Nostromo spaceship, with its cramped, dark hallways and endless shadows, is a futuristic version of the old, creaky castles in gothic tales. The planet the crew lands on—complete with the gargantuan extraterrestrial skeleton known as the ‘Space Jockey’—wouldn’t be out of place in a gothic horror tale. The audience then follows a crew stalked by a horrifying monster they can barely comprehend.
What if we told you, though, that the first gothic sci-fi movie actually came out 28 years before Alien? And it beat more celebrated pictures like The Thing From Another World and The Day The Earth Stood Still to the big screen. Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man From Planet X is that movie, and it is now credited with being the first feature-length Hollywood alien invasion film. Not bad for a low-budget effort the director shot in only six days, eh?
Before we go any further, though, it’s worth defining what “gothic sci-fi” even is. According to Filmmaking Lifestyle, it is “a genre that blends the eerie atmospheres and motifs of traditional Gothic literature with futuristic settings and advanced technology”. It’s all about “a fusion of the old-world horror aesthetic with speculative technological innovations”. On top of that, “The genre embodies themes such as isolation in time or space, encounters with the unknown, and complex moral quandaries often posed by scientific advancement.”
Reading this definition, it’s easy to see how Alien fits the bill and how The Man From Planet X pioneered this uncanny mix of genres on the silver screen. The story follows a group of scientists in an observatory who know a rogue planet will soon pass by Earth. They believe it will cause major disruption to our planet, so the leading expert retreats to an ancient castle on the Scottish moors. You see, this unlikely location is the best place to watch the planet go by.
The scientist, his daughter, and an American journalist then come across a fallen spacecraft on the foggy moors. A bizarre alien emerges from the craft and reveals it is an emissary from the doomed planet, which is freezing over. Its job is to set up communications between the craft and its home world, as its species intends to escape the dying world by invading Earth.
All the elements of gothic sci-fi are present and accounted for here. The setting of Scotland’s misty moors would have worked in a tale like Wuthering Heights. The spooky castle could have been at home in Dracula or Frankenstein. Yet, in this story, the characters are visited not by a ghost or a monster but by an unknowable being from a distant world that clearly has much more advanced technology than ours. There is a compelling moral dilemma at work, too; one of the scientists wants to steal the secrets of the alien’s technology and then kill it, while the heroes endeavour to help the strange being save its people.
Visually, the film is a gothic wonderland. That is likely because director Ulmer was directly inspired by F W Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu, itself an unlicensed retelling of Dracula. In fact, Ulmer previously worked with Murnau and was, therefore, very familiar with his shadowy imagery, which is now known as German Expressionism. This style is intentionally aped in The Man From Planet X, and the picture, therefore, has a truly unique vibe.
In the end, The Man From Planet X’s low-budget origins meant it wasn’t initially hailed as an important film. It was a quickie thrown together specifically to beat its bigger-budget counterparts to the screen, and in that regard, it succeeded, becoming the first-ever Hollywood alien invasion film. But over time, its status as the first gothic sci-fi ultimately proved much more historic—and led to it being hailed as much more than a simple footnote in Hollywood history.
