Gothic Science Fiction

In the late 1950s Richard Hodgens lamented that Science Fiction (SF) 1 films had come close to ‘ruining the reputation of the category of [literary] fiction from which they have malignantly sprouted’ (1959: 30), citing films like Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950) or The Thing from Another World (Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby, 1951) as ‘strange throwback(s) of taste to something moldier and more “Gothic” than the Gothic Novel’ (30). Hodgens’s increasingly savage attack on Science Fiction film finds him dissatisfied with cinematic versions of a genre that he considers ‘the only kind of writing today that offers much surprise’