When we think of the “flying saucer” film, we typically picture sci-fi terrors from the 1950s like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, The Day The Earth Stood Still, and even War of the Worlds. It was an extremely popular subgenre at the time, and theaters were chock full of tales of mankind being threatened by spaceships shaped like dinner plates. But what is perhaps the first entry in the “flying saucer” genre is a far cry from what was to come: 1950’s The Flying Saucer isn’t about visitors from outer space — instead, it aims at replicating real world nightmares, and turning the paranormal into the paranoid.
The late 1940s had seen the craze over the flying saucer reach a fever pitch. People had reported seeing “unidentified flying objects” for centuries, but after World War II, it bloomed into an outright international obsession. This interest combined a lot of factors, the renewed popularity of science fiction in a post atomic world chiefly among them.
