Nucluear bombs, aliens, irradiated bugs, and more aliens - who *wouldn't* want to watch something like that?

 Invasion of the Body Snatchers

 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Sounds real hilarious don't it?   So does

Invasion of the Mind Swappers from Asteroid 6!

  But the trick is that both sound equally interesting. As stupid and dumb and hilarious and hilariously stupidly dumb as both of these sound, don't they also sound really darn interesting to you? Don't you want to know more? That's the trick to all these 1950s-1970s Horror movie names. No games, no subtlety, no beating around the bush, just simple, long as heck, and straight to the point. In this day and age, you sure as heck wouldn't see a horror movie called Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. No freaking way. Instead, it's be called The 50-Foot Woman,  if we were lucky, but more likely it would be named either by the place in which the fifty-foot woman (who knows, in this modern era, sexism might bend it into a man) makes her "attack," or by the woman's (or, again, man's) name. 

  Them! is probably the shortest title you'll ever see plastered onto a 50s era movie, or really any movie, for that matter, considering it's one syllable. The shortest movie titles ever actually belong to two movies knows as Z and M. But that's off topic. 

Them!

  Not only is this the shortest title of the many irradiated monster movies  spawned by the 50s, but it's also one of the least descriptive. With other movies, we have War of the Worlds, pretty self-explanatory, considering we only have one world, thus alien invasion, duh-doy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, also pretty darn self-explanatory, so does The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Sensing a pattern? You should.

  Enough about titles though. Why were all these classic, much-loved horror movies all cranked out in the Cold War era? What do they all have in common? Both of those questions can be answered with one question. 

  Above: Self-explanatory. You are not five. This is an 

article aboutthe Cold War. You see before you a red 

explosion in the shape of a mushroom. Extrapolate.

  

   If the answer you took away from that was "mushroom" or "cloud" or even "mushroom cloud" then I'm afraid I've got bad news for you: you're wrong. Yes. I'm sorry, but you're wrong. The correct answer is "nukes," or "nuclear bombs." Five points from Gryffindor.  

  In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we see alien "seedpods" from outerspace landing on Earth, growing perfect replicas of the human beings in the town of Santa Mira. When the person whom the pod is growing a replica of falls asleep, they are replaced by the doppelganger. One could easily point out that this is almost blatantly trying indoctrinate Americans with the idea that this is indubitably what will happen in the event of a Communist or Soviet (God forbid, both) takeover. 

   The film seems, hilariously like it is trying to subtly convince the watcher that this is indeed the only outcome of socialist rule. We see mindless drones walking about like zombies towards the end of the movie - clear symbolism of the brain-dead nature of those, ahem . . .

  . . .  who are dominated by Communism. The movie seems to want to convey that, in the event of Soviet takeover, human beings will become, as portrayed in the movie, mindless drones. 

  The moral? 

  

You Communist fool!