Wasn't this propaganda?

WARNING! POSSIBLE SPOILERS!! Do not read further if you are so affected.

I think this movie was exactly what it was intended to be--a child's nightmare. And I think the movie makers succeeded very well; what with the surrealistic scences (ex. the police station); forced perspectives; and the most nightmarish thought of any child--the warm, fuzzy security of their families and familiar adults turned into monsterous beings. I think this movie is best viewed when one is a child. And I feel that's why those who were 'lucky' enough to see this movie as children really remember it in its full visceral dreadfulness. I think if you saw this movie as an adult first....you lost the child's perspective of horror. It's a great flick for kids.

And as for the communist propaganda thing....I think much too much is made of that all '50's scifi flicks had something to do with the red menace. Sure, a few directors purposely made their movies as a metaphor for current happenings...but I believe most scifi flicks were just that--scifi flicks, and nothing more.

I just caught the last 1/2 hour or so of a Turner Classic Movies documentary, "Watch the Skies" about 50's Sci-fi movies. One of the reasons I came here was to check up on IFM. I didn't take notes so I can't be precise but James Cameron and Steven Speilberg said it was as WooWoo6 stated...a child's nightmare.

On the other hand, you could probably see anti-Communist metaphors in just about every 1950's Sci-fi movie (if you squint your eye just right.) Either way, I think it has held up very well. How many movies from your youth have disappointed you as an adult ("I had to sleep with the lights on after watching this?")

"Wasn't this, at the time, propaganda...?"

No

You're confusing propaganda with allegory and metaphor, and everyone is far too quick to mention communism when discusing 50's sci fi. It's become the orthodox view, something everyone knows and can spout whenever the subject comes up.

You say "I recognised a theme where everyone is changing but one person stands out, kinda like IOTBS...", but that's the whole point - what does that have to do with communism? Nothing, specifically.

The film uses the idea of everyone suddenly being different than they were, making the hero the outsider. But this could apply to anything - cults, capitalism, the news and conspiracies, any sort of group or social trend, even mental illnes. Obviously, the idea that everyone might have become a communist fits right in with that theme, but the theme itself is not specifically communist in any way. In fact, it's basically a mental illness thing, as this theme ALWAYS is whenever it pops up, even in Bodysnatchers - the Kaufman remake of Bodysnatchers makes this much clearer than the original, which got tagged with the communist thing so readily that it prevented any deeper analysis.

The mental theme is at the heart of all these similar ideas... everyone has changed but it looks the same, no-one will believe you, they think you're insane, maybe you are, or maybe they've all gone insane - no, wait, they're not insane!! They're spies! Aliens! Intruders! It's all a gigantic conspiracy, but they've taken over and EVERYONE BELIEVES THEM! And now they know you're sane but they're going to lock you away anyway and tell everyone you're mad and keep going with their evil, inhuman scheme and no-one can stop it except you but no-one will listen!!!

This is literally the blueprint for mental illness - specifically, paranoia. The above paragraph can be addressed to anything - say, fundamentalist christianity (the devil is taking over America's youth but no-one will listen, he's stopped prayer in schools and created Harry Potter and sent devils to put evolution into scientist's heads and they're killing babies in mass sacrifices that's why abortion's legal and the government is in on it funding homosexual plots to rape twenty thousand children a day).

Or just as easily flip it the other way (fundamentalist christians are trying to stamp out everything else and start a fascist state they're banning science teaching and sex ed and they've elected Bush to fight their holy wars they've spread lies about other religions and fund homosexual hate campaigns did you know they started the nursery-satanic-abuse scare deliberately so wives would stay home instead of getting jobs and the government is in on it funding catholic plots to rape twenty thousand children a day).

Notice how either one works equally well? The specific theme just fits nicely over the blueprint, no matter what it is. Incidentally, if you think I'm being glib or exaggerating in the first paragraph, read the Left Behind series. If you think the 2nd paragraph's a bit mad, read the news. But the point is, you could make a film about BOTH of these by making a film which isn't specifically about either of them, and everyone who goes to see it would bring their own 'theme' based on what scares them or what they perceive to be going on around them. And Invaders From Mars is a proud member of that tradition of film-making, just like Bodysnatchers is. It's specific in it's plot (the invaders actually ARE aliens from Mars, no mystery there) but the plot is just window-dressing for the theme, and the theme is a classic - that moment which every single one of us must face in our lives, when we realise with absolute horror that everyone else is completely insane and you're the only one you can trust and if anyone ever finds out something absolutely horrible beyond all imagination will happen to you. Or - even worse - THEY'LL MAKE YOU LIKE THEY ARE!!!

Now, obviously, this film was made in the 50's. At that time, a lot of people wer supposedly worried about Communism and Communists spreading propaganda through American society and winning converts and maybe your neighbour's a Communist and the first you'll know of it is when he comes to the door and says that the invasion's started and he's got a gun and if you just cooperate everything will be fine. I'm not sure how big a worry this was to most people - I mean, Joe McCarthy seemed to take the bait, and 50's Dads in films seemed convinced, as they advised little Johnny through their pipes to come running if they ever saw a Russian, but I'm not sure how much the average person who WASN'T in a film thought about it... but of course the film works better if it's NOT an everyday worry. Sure, you've heard about 'the Communist threat' but you're more interested in getting to first base with Sally Gunderson so you take her to the pictures... and suddenly you're watching this film about characters who never thought about the threat either until it turned up on their doorstep and THAT'S WHAT THEY'RE COUNTING ON!! Oh my God we're all going to die!!!

But I'm sure quite a lot of people in the 50's were actually more worried about genuine aliens and space-threats - after all, this is the era of Kenneth Arnold and contactee folklore, Roswell and UFO sightings, we've just had WWII where we all learned what governments can and will do if they want to and can get away with it, the whole nuclear menace is on the horizon but also as well as the Russian nuke threat is the possibility that OUR Government may be lying to us, might be warmongering, Dr Strangelove, etc, etc. It's a very rich period in social, US national, and global history and consciousness, and communism's just a small part of that.

Ultimately, if you just think 'Oh, communism' whenever you see a 50's sci fi flick, you're missing most of the point. And being intellectually lazy. It's not communism, it's PARANOIA. And ultimately, the thing which makes these films great is that it's not even paranoia - not really. Aliens could invade. Governments definitely lie to everyone. There are real plots and conspiracies and groups who want to take over, and what's worse, they're not even the ones you think. They're the ones you thought were protecting you from those ones. It's your family, your friends, your church, your country. They're the enemy!!! Or have you gone mad? NO - you wish you could believe that, but you're the only sane one left. WHY WON'T THEY LISTEN?? LET ME GO!! YOU HAVE TO LET ME GO!!! LISTEN TO ME!!!

It's called the human condition. Have fun with it. If any of these things happened (or happened a bit more obviously, to you) in real life things would play out like in the films - no-one would listen. That's the beauty of these films - think of the guy at the end of Bodysnatchers, running down the freeway past the cars shouting "They're here!!! You have to listen to me!!!". When you watch the film, you are him - the one sane man who everyone thinks is mad, because you've seen what he has during the film. But in your daily life you are the people driving past him in the cars, thinking 'Great, another whacko!!!'. The film gets it's power from turning you from one into the other, because where they meet... that's where the horror lies.

Forget Communism, or at least, don't concentrate on it so much. It's just flesh over the skeleton. If you want to understand, look at the bones, man.

You could certainly view this film as propaganda against Communism - the idea that perfectly normal looking American citizens are actually trying to destroy the American way of life...

Absolutely. The film was a metaphor for the fear of Communist infiltration in American society. The invaders, after all, came from the Red Planet! The Martians were like Communist agents burrowing deep into our society and subverting us by "taking over" and controlling civilian and military authorities to do their evil bidding.

Absolutely correct. This came out at the height of the Cold War and was indeed an allegory about America's fear of Communist infiltration and subversion of our society at the time. The imagery and subliminal messages are undeniable. The Martian invaders substituted for Soviet Communists. After all- isn't Mars the "Red" Planet?! And the Martians operated in a manner deemed consistent with the way Soviet agents and provocateurs were operating- secretive, underground, corrupting us from within, turning otherwise good, decent, loyal Americans into mindless drones in service to a hostile alien conspiracy out to destroy us. So it was indeed an anti- Communist Manifesto (I couldn't resist!!)

It was about mind-control rather than communism. Cult techniques developed by Chinese Maoists were applied to PoWs of the N Koreans in the 1950s. Wikipedia has a good article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_control

During the Korean War, Hunter, who worked at the time both as a journalist and as a U.S. intelligence agent, wrote a series of books and articles on the theme of Chinese brainwashing.
[...]
Hunter and those who picked up the Chinese term used it to explain why, unlike in earlier wars, a relatively high percentage of American GIs defected to the enemy side after becoming prisoners-of-war. It was believed that the Chinese in North Korea used such techniques to disrupt the ability of captured troops to effectively organize and resist their imprisonment.[7] British radio operator Robert W. Ford and British army Colonel James Carne also claimed that the Chinese subjected them to brainwashing techniques during their war-era imprisonment. The most prominent case in the U.S. was that of Frank Schwable, who confessed to having participated in germ warfare while in captivity.