The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Paranoia is a fear-filled state of mind where someone believes that the world is conspiring against them. Paranoia is listed as a psychological disorder by the American DSM. That said, most people at one point or another experience varying degrees of paranoia without it being pathological. These can range from full-on belief in conspiracy theories and alien lizard people to merely that a partner or co-worker may be up to something. Usually when we talk about paranoia, we refer to people fearing things happening based only on tenuous suppositions or slim imaginings.
What we are concerned with here is paranoid mood. That is to say, the sense created in a film that something is going on around the protagonist(s). This can range from conspiracies by the government or secret organisations, that aliens are stealing people’s bodies, that neighbours might be Satanists, serial killers or up to some form of no good, of alien abductions, medical experiments being conducted on people, of lurking monsters, that They (the government, the military, scientists, the medical establishment, alien lizard people, corporations, forces of conformity etc) might be out to get you. Or even that what you suspect about reality itself may be in question.
Some themes by their very nature lend themselves to paranoia – Body Snatchers, Secret Societies, Conceptual Reversal Twists and of course Conspiracy Theories. The tone of most paranoia films sit in an edgy state of mind where a person’s belief about the world around them may be an illusion that is abruptly peeled back to reveal something far more sinister. The paranoia will be evoked in terms of uncertainty and will often have a perfectly calm and rational alternate explanation that makes it seem that everything is in the protagonist’s mind. Many works of Black Humour also come with a sense of paranoia that is pushed to an hysteric extreme.
Amid the mostly silly output of James Bond copies in the 1960s, this is one that comes with a sharp satiric bite in which president’s analyst James Coburn finds himself caught in the midst of a series of conspiracies
An astonishingly bleak John Frankenheimer film in which a disillusioned middle-aged man is contacted by a secret organisation that rejuvenates him to become Rock Hudson
A work of considerable brilliance from a young Roman Polanski with Catherine Deneuve as a woman slipping into madness in an apartment over the course of a weekend. What makes the film particularly disturbing is Polanski’s lack of a blurring line between reality and hallucination
John Frankenheimer film. concerning a Communist plot for creating a brainwashed assassin, Frankenheimer shoots with stark and blackly funny effect and this has duly become a cult classic
Orson Welles’s adaptation of the Frank Kafka novel about a man caught in a nightmare bureaucracy is one of the most visually stunning black-and-white films ever shot
The third of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films, the only one without Vincent Price. Here Ray Milland develops a fearful obsession of being buried alive
This was one of the last gasps of the 1950s alien body snatchers genre. Conducted on a low budget, this nevertheless comes with some modest effect as a scientist and his family face mysterious doppelgangers
The third film about the title criminal mastermind from Fritz Lang. Here Lang returns to a radically different Germany to the one he fled in the 1930s, the West Germany of the Cold War, to deliver a creepily paranoid work about the surveillance society
The third film and least version of the classic horror story about a pianist who receives hands transplanted from a murderer and is driven mad believing they are possessing him
Defying the sensationalistic title, this is actually a fairly reasonable entry in the 1950s alien body snatchers fad in which wives discover their husbands have been taken over by aliens come to Earth to repopulate their species
A B budget variant on the 1950s an alien body snatchers film uncreditedly based on Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Other films in this niche created great paranoid atmosphere but here the results only look cheap and tatty
The finest film to come out of 1950s SF cinema, concerning an invasion of pods that replicate people but for their emotions. The sense of paranoia and psychological tension is unsurpassed
The very first alien body snatchers film. With Jack Arnold’s eerily haunted landscapes and a memorably literate Ray Bradbury script, this is one of the classic SF films of the 1950s era
Classic of the 1950s alien invader genre in which a young boy discovers that the adults around him are being taken over by Martian invaders. Director William Cameron Menzies makes striking use of sets to further a sense of alienation
One of the first Reds Under the Bed hysteria films of the 1950s where a man stumbles on a small town where a Communist fifth column are conducting biowarfare experiments as part of a planned invasion
One of the classic films from producer Val Lewton concerning a secret society of Satanists. An oppressive atmosphere of gloom and morbidity hangs over the film and, as always with Lewton, it comes with striking directorial effects that play on the imagination
Considered one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films, this centres around Joseph Cotten as the favourite uncle who comes to town as his niece increasingly suspects that he may be a serial killer
Classic German silent film about a pianist who receives hand transplants and believes they are possessed. Superbly stylised direction from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari director Robert Wiene and with Conrad Veidt putting his all into the contorted mime work