The War of the Worlds and Its Adaptations

Abstract

This chapter assesses twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds to show how its cultural context, and subsequent meaning, has altered over the course of 125 years. It examines how Wells cloaked his initial serial, and later novella, in an unsubtle fear of rampant British imperialism while considering the notion of malign evolution, and the extermination of earth’s Indigenous races. Respective variations of the book, loosely adapted and modernized, such as the 1938 Orson Welles/Howard Koch radio drama, 1953’s George Pal/Byron Haskin feature film, Steven Spielberg’s 2005 blockbuster, and the 2019 BBC TV mini-series scripted by Peter Harness, are all rooted in various forms of contemporary panic and/or paranoia. Welles undermined insular 1930s America’s sense of invincibility. Pal presented the “Red Menace” of Cold War Soviet Russia in the guise of rampaging Martians who would strip the United States of her sense of self. And, post-9/11, Spielberg fed off the terror of the unknown “other” – the faceless specter of Al-Qaeda – to strip away humanity as part of the massacre of mankind. Harness may have been inspired by climate change in his representation of the voracious red weed as it sucks on the very essence of the earth to turn the planet into a wasteland. Thus H. G. Wells’ abstract concept of vampirism, expressed either obliquely or explicitly (as depicted in Jeff Wayne’s 1978 musical version of The War of the Worlds), is present throughout these very different renderings. All portray something being taken: aggressively, politically, ideologically, culturally, hungrily, implacably, or fearfully. The vivid nineteenth-century anxieties that drove H. G. Wells in 1897 still form the core of The War of the Worlds, but they have metastasized into a broader dread that encompasses xenophobia, racism, pan-global tension, protectionism, and ethnic annihilation.