Okay, so it's a 'B-Movie'

That said, I had never seen it - only clips of it - until today when I watched via You Tube - and I was impressed by all the novel, NON-hokey things.

The whole atmosphere was/must have been filmed with "kid nightmare" in mind. The color was "wrong" - just a little too rich, e.g., the "post-dawn" scene of the two police officers interviewing the Mrs. in front of the porch. In one way the lighting looked like the rising sun's rays - but otoh, it was surrealistic as hell. Ditto kid's bedroom window and what will soon become the archetypal "hill over the sand pits". Sand pits. What an appropriately eerie, strange setting for a crashed saucer.

The kid hero was an excellent actor and the paranoia he put on his face was almost too convincing especially in the final scenes of his mad rush away from the saucer. This was helped, I think, by his slightly odd facial features - he looked and acted like a kid, except for his 40-year old face complete with forehead "worry lines". At times this accident of birth was almost suggestive of some kind of dwarfism, which added to my subjective impression of general oddity.

Many have remarked on the effectiveness of the "sand choir", with its use of neutral vocalizations alternately combined with dreamy, Debussy-like chord progressions. Although I'm a fairly jaded viewer of horror-sci-fi, the first time I heard it (just about an hour ago), it disturbed me.

All this in a 1953 film! For all its flaws, it's earned its place as a cult classic.