Science fiction, no matter how far into the future it’s set or how bizarre is the alternate universe it inhabits, is always about its own time, about the cultural fears of the era in which it is produced. So, for example, all the invading aliens and giant bugs of the 1950s were expressions of nervousness and paranoia over the Cold War and Communism. Are those flicks scarier if you first saw them at just the right time in the culture as well as in your own life? If the golden age of science fiction is, as some wag noted, 12, and you were a 12-year-old kid at just the right time to be steeped in the anxieties of the 1950s, do movies like Them! and The Day the Earth Stood Still have a particular resonance for you that’s unique to your generation? I suspect it does.
So: I was 12 in 1981. I came of age -- as did all of Generation X -- in a world in which medicine and technology and advancing scientific knowledge were altering our understanding of how our bodies work, how they can be made to fail, and how we may be able to change who we are on a fundamental level, none of which were particularly pleasant lessons to learn. Not only could devices and drugs meant to help us suddenly turn on us, either inadvertently (tampons causing toxic shock syndrome) or by deliberate design (tampered-with Tylenol killing people with headaches), but we were playing with the stuff of life (test-tube babies) while our genes were reshuffling on their own to attack our bodies (AIDS).
Is it any wonder that many of the horror films of the 1980s have a science-fictional bent to them, and that they spook us in ways intimately tied up in the integrity of our bodies?
The best example is probably David Cronenberg’s 1986 update of The Fly, a rare example of a remake that might actually be better than the original... although it’s possible I feel that way because my formative years were intimately affected by the same concerns that fuel Cronenberg’s film and not those of the 1958 original. The meaty, organic nature of the film’s visual horror is utterly visceral (pun intended): from the dead teleported steak to the gross hairs growing out of Jeff Goldblum’s back to the regurgitated digestive goo, this film is all about a level of bodily invasion that’s like a horrifying itch you simply cannot scratch, it’s too deep inside you. When your own DNA, the very stuff that defines who you are, turns on you, then there’s simply nothing in the universe you can trust.
In Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, on the other hand, from just a year earlier, is all about the attack coming from without, but its particular intonation is very 80s. Vampirism has always been a metaphor for sexuality, but any lingering allure of the vampire is dismissed instantly here. The beautiful female space vampire of this film executes a vicious one-two punch, the promise of her total, lovely nudity a lie: she does not, as other, more romantic vampires have done, have a little feed and then leave her victims languorous and swooning in the afterglow. She sucks all life from her prey in a moment, leaving them mere husks. The allusion to the ravages of AIDS is inescapable.
Ken Russell’s 1980 film Altered States features an alteration on the genetic level that inspires a mental journey, but while this film -- notably from the very beginning of the decade -- is more a throwback to the hippie 1970s, the many films about expanding the mind that came later in the 80s have a hard scientific bent to them that grounds them more in reality. Only counterculture weirdoes were fooling around with their brain chemistry in the previous decade -- but no matter how farfetched the speculations of the rest of these 80s brain-horror flicks, they were all about geeky, unspiritual scientists turning out tools that eventually we’d all be able to use to see ourselves and the universe in a new way... whether we wanted to or not.
Brainstorm, for instance, Douglas Trumbull’s 1983 film, wanted to have us all, in essence, plug our cool new VCRs into our brains and share our most intimate experiences with whomever wanted to share them; now the privacy of our minds would no longer be inviolate. Our dreams could be invaded by scientists hooked up to another machine in 1984’s Dreamscape. Abilities that, in a different cultural environment, would have sprung from supernatural sources in the 1980s were all the doing of government geeks experimenting with new drugs: 1984’s Firestarter gave pyrokinesis and other mental talents a chillingly rational basis, and with merely the right prescription, it could be something any of us could do, no superpowers needed. Even 1983’s The Dead Zone, another from director David Cronenberg, while positing nothing particularly technological as the root cause of Christopher Walken’s newfound ability to foresee the future, places that amazing capability in the hands of the most ordinary, even boring person imaginable, as if to suggest that anyone -- even you or me -- could find ourselves dealing with such trauma... and it is traumatic for Walken’s character. Even the weirdest "diseases" was something any of us were likely to succumb to.
Ideas about genetic engineering and scares about alien creatures inhabiting the human body were certainly not original to the 1980s, nor have such concepts disappeared from the films of subsequent years. But for their ability to creep out audiences, or at least the generation that shares some of their fundamental fears, the flicks of scientific horror of the 1980s are unparalleled.
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