JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

(An earlier post on 1950’s atomic bomb popular culture appears here.)

I strongly doubt that anyone could “read” or dowse or interpret eyeballs in these movie advertisements and take very much away from them at all outside of the big atomo-nuclear death-fear that gripped most people in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R in the 1950’s and 1960’s.  That, and it made for a good way of selling the promised fear in these movies, gentle as they were by curernt standards, but fearsome nonetheless in context with their time.   

[Images from the wonderful Retronaut site, here.]

It is a little difficult watching even the clip of the Ray Milland movie in that he wasn’t really that much more different than the people around him, judging him.  And it turns out that in this differentially-abled-free world, where everyone looked like the white couple in some commercial for Borax, that his weirdish blackish eyes were deemed so incredibly repulsive–though since not having slickee-boy hair was enough to be set apart from most groups, or at least those in this movie, its not that surprising that he would be turned into a monster.  It didn’t take all that much to get down Monster Road, then.