Notes from the sketch book — They live

How do you make a movie about the total collapse of the American character without the audience running out of the theatre in a panic? In the summer of 1982, John Carpenter released The Thing, and the audience did just that—they ran, they recoiled, and they rejected it. The cinematic representation of extraterrestrial contact and invasion from 1951 to 1988 serves as a barometer for American cultural anxiety, charting a distinct and evolving trajectory of paranoia and conspiracy. By analysing six seminal films—Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Thing (1982), They Live (1988),...