The movie that made Stephen King “terribly frightened and alone and depressed”
Although as an author he’s never found himself too concerned with the realm of science fiction, Stephen King vividly recalls a movie he saw in his youth as being one that left him borderline traumatised by the time the credits came up. As a future master of fear, this experience had a marked influence on the creations that would follow.
For more than half a century, King has become synonymous with the scary and the spine-tingling, becoming one of the bestselling authors in history along the way. It was only a matter of time before Hollywood came calling to start turning his back catalogue into an equally profitable enterprise, and when it did, the floodgates would never close again.
Brian De Palma’s Carrie was the first major adaptation of a King title – and one of the few he openly admits is superior to the source material – but ever since then the consistency has veered all over the place, which is par for the course considering there are dozens upon dozens of them to have hit screens both big and small over the decades.
That’s not to say King hasn’t dipped his toes into sci-fi, but they’re very few in number compared to the raft of paranormal, supernatural, and/or horrific novels, novellas, and short stories that have become his stock in trade. Little green men from beyond the stars aren’t up his street, but one movie featuring alien invaders proved to be a harrowing experience.
When Fred F. Sears’ Earth vs. the Flying Saucers premiered in early 1956, King was only eight years old, but he wouldn’t catch the film for himself for another year and a half. When he did, though, he ended up being equal parts blown away and genuinely unnerved by the B-movie’s depiction of its far-flung narrative.
Describing it as “a movie I’ll certainly never forget” to Playboy, King would then explain why it ended up making such an impression on him. “The film was pretty standard stuff, about an invasion of earth by this deadly race of aliens from a dying planet,” he said. “But toward the end – just when it was reaching the good part, with Washington in flames and the final, cataclysmic interstellar battle about to be joined – the screen suddenly went dead.”
Just like that, his flight of fancy was interrupted by the encroaching threat of the Soviet Union, with the movie being stopped outright so that the theatre manager could tell the audience the Russians had launched the Sputnik satellite into the Earth’s atmosphere. There was a mix of confusion and disbelief among the crowd, but the third act hit completely differently for King as a result.
“I immediately made the connection between the film we were seeing and the fact that the Russians had a space satellite circling the heavens, loaded, for all I knew, with H-bombs to rain down on our unsuspecting heads,” he continued. “And at that moment, the fears of fictional horror vividly intersected with the reality of potential nuclear holocaust; a transition from fantasy to a real world suddenly became far more ominous and threatening.”
By the time Earth vs. the Flying Saucers had ended, King struggled to put into words “how terribly frightened and alone and depressed I felt in that moment,” with the film now seared into his memory as one of his most powerful cinemagoing memories. This notion of playing with form and delving into the very substance of fear is something he has matched ever since.
