Bloodsuckers from Beyond: Cold War Era Space Vampires of the Cinema

Abstract

Like other gothic horror monsters of the screen, the film vampire has received much in the way of critical attention over the span of the past several decades. However, not all strains of the famous bloodsucker have received equal critical attention. Scholarly writing on the space vampire is strikingly limited. This chapter is intended to shine a critical light on these elusive screen monsters’ connection to the Cold War (United States and the Communist Bloc) and the resulting Space Race. I will be focusing on four Cold War-era space vampire films produced in the United States originating within the two decades seen as the height of Cold War tensions, the 1950s and 60s. From the 1950s, I will be examining Roger Corman’s 1957 film Not of This Earth along with 1958s It! The Terror From Beyond Space and Riccardo Freda’s Caltiki: The Immortal Monster (1959). The lone film from the decade of the 1960s is Curtis Harrington’s Queen of Blood (1966). These films will function as case studies and serve as primary sources for this examination which argues these lone cinematic representatives of the Cold War-era b-movie space vampire articulate a variety of the era’s fears particularly around communism and foreign threats, dehumanization, otherness, scientific-technological anxieties, and apocalyptic concerns. The films will be read as visual artifacts of their cultural time and place, and this chapter will discuss the films and the findings from these readings. The hope is to open up discourse about and shed more light on the elusive extraterrestrial film vampire and its interesting connection to our terrestrial history.