Journey Through Sci-Fi: Science Fiction Film History

It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Warning from Space (1956). Two sets of aliens who mean us no harm, and both decide the safest thing to do is put on a human face.

Journey Through Sci-Fi continues We Come in Peace, our series tracing the history of friendly aliens on screen. This time, two films where the visitors are not hostile, and nobody believes it until they see it with their own eyes.

First, Ray Bradbury's desert. A meteor that isn't a meteor, an amateur astronomer nobody listens to, and townspeople going missing one by one. Bradbury handed Universal the monster movie they asked for and the one he actually wanted to make, and got away with it. We get into Jack Arnold's frontier eye, the 3D gimmicks, and the spider speech that says everything the film has to say and changes nobody's mind.

Then Japan, three years later. Starfish aliens in fabric suits, a rogue planet on its way, and a script by one of Kurosawa's regular writers. Japan's first science fiction film in colour swerves from horror to magical girl comedy to a bleak disaster movie, sometimes inside one scene. It has the friendliest aliens we have met so far, which does not stop them acting mostly in their own interest.

In this episode: - Universal's first 3D film, and the cork boulders fired at the premiere audience - An intermission 55 minutes into an 80 minute film, and why the projector is to blame - Barbara Rush's Golden Globe and her three identical screams - Starfish pyjamas, and the scene that shows you far too much - A ring communicator, a tennis match, and a magical girl detour into a nuclear disaster movie - Friendly aliens, or just extremely risk averse ones?

Also discussed: The Day the Earth Stood Still, A Message from Mars, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Space Children, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Godzilla, Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Ran, The Hidden Fortress, I Live in Fear, Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura and Star Trek: First Contact.

Starfish or a one-eyed jellyfish alien? Tell us which one you would rather find at the bottom of your garden.

Next time: The 27th Day (1957) and The Space Children (1958).

Hosted and produced by James Payne and Matt Willcock. Edited by James Payne.

Bonus episodes on Patreon: patreon.com/journeythroughscifi Join the JTSF Logbook, our free newsletter: https://journeythroughscifi.beehiiv.com Full back catalogue and everything else: https://journeythroughscifi.com

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Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the EOH Network.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and its 2008 remake. The alien who comes in peace and brings a threat with him.

Journey Through Sci-Fi continues We Come in Peace, our series tracing the history of friendly aliens on screen. This time, the foundational one. A saucer lands on a Washington baseball field, a man walks out with a gift and a message, and he is shot for it inside a minute.

Klaatu is polite, patient and 78 years old in a 35 year old body. Behind him stands Gort, seven foot seven of rubber suit and near limitless force. We get into what 1951 audiences carried into the cinema with them, why a film about world peace was built from a short story that had nothing to do with world peace, and how much of the friendly alien playbook starts right here.

Then 2008. Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, a swarm of nanobots and a McDonald's. The nuclear threat becomes an environmental one, Klaatu arrives having already decided we are not worth saving, and the remake we both expected to be terrible turns out to be an admirable attempt at updating the classic sci-fi movie.

In this episode:

• Flying saucer mania
• Farewell to the Master: Harry Bates' 1940 story, and the twist Fox threw away
• Michael Rennie's charm offensive, and the two separate times he gets gunned down
• Gort's little pants, circus strongmen and the Superman connection
• Who would you take an alien to today? Brian Cox or Martin Lewis
• Milk, milkshakes, and the day the American dairy industry stood still
• GORT as an acronym
• Old Testament orbs, arks and biblical locusts
• Is humanity worth saving? Asked and answered in a McDonald's car park

Also discussed: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, A Message from Mars, Destination Moon, The Man from Planet X, The Twilight Zone, War of the Worlds (2005), The Happening, WALL-E, Armageddon, The Matrix, John Wick, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Alien: Romulus, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Disclosure Day.

Gort or GORT? Tell us which robot you would rather meet in a field.

Next time: It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Warning from Space (1956).

Hosted and produced by James Payne and Matt Willcock.

Edited by James Payne.

Bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/journeythroughscifi Join the JTSF Logbook, our free newsletter: https://journeythroughscifi.beehiiv.com Full back catalogue and everything else: https://journeythroughscifi.com

Follow the show so you never miss an episode, and if you can, a review or a share costs nothing and helps a lot.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the EOH Network.

Where does the friendly alien begin? Not with E.T., but with a Martian exiled to Edwardian London to reform the most selfish man alive.

Journey Through Sci-Fi returns with a brand new series. We Come in Peace traces the history of friendly aliens on screen. In this opener we set out the stall: what makes a visitor friendly rather than hostile, why everything gets measured against E.T., and how one mistranslated Italian word put Martians in our heads.

Then we go back to 1913 and A Message from Mars, widely held to be the first British science fiction film. Ramiel, a Martian stripped of his rank and banished to Earth, has to reform a selfish London bachelor called Horace Parker. It is A Christmas Carol with a spaceman, and almost every benevolent visitor since owes it something.

In this episode:

• Friendly visitor or invader? Where the line actually sits
• Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), possibly the first friendly alien story ever written
• Kenneth Arnold, Roswell, and how 1947 gave us the flying saucer
• Schiaparelli's canali: the mistranslation that built fictional Mars
• Ramiel's tough love, the zap power, and some baffling 1913 camera trickery
• Lizard people or Arthurian courtiers?
• Britain in 1913: picture palaces and a film industry inventing itself

Also discussed: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Cocoon, Batteries Not Included, Earth Girls Are Easy, It Came from Outer Space, Aelita: Queen of Mars, A Princess of Mars, Project Hail Mary and Armageddon.

Watch along with us. A Message from Mars is free on BFI Replay: https://replay.bfi.org.uk/video/7f470ecc-3ccd-5cde-aca0-ac97153f8ecd

Lizards or courtiers? Tell us what you saw.

Next time: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) meets its 2008 remake.

Hosted and produced by James Payne and Matt Willcock. Edited by James Payne.

Bonus episodes on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/journeythroughscifi

Join the JTSF Logbook our free newsletter: https://journeythroughscifi.beehiiv.com

Full back catalogue and everything else: https://journeythroughscifi.com

Follow the show so you never miss an episode, and if you can a review or a share costs nothing and helps a lot.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the Evolution of Horror Network.

Some of them came to warn us. Some of them just wanted to go home.

We Come in Peace is a new series from Journey Through Sci-Fi, tracing the friendly alien across a century of film and television. We start in the earliest days of visitors from other worlds and work our way to the present, asking how and why that image kept changing.

Along the way: The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came from Outer Space, Warning from Space, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Starman, Cocoon, Alien Nation, Coneheads, Men in Black, The Iron Giant, Arrival and plenty more.

Episode one arrives (in peace) on 10 September, with new episodes every other week.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is part of the EOH network. Hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock.

Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss the first episode.

New to Journey Through Sci-Fi? Start here.

Before we launch our next full series on friendly aliens, we're taking a journey back through the archive with a special starter pack episode, featuring some of our favourite clips from past series.

Across this episode, we revisit some of the biggest ideas in sci-fi cinema: the mythic storytelling of the original Star Wars trilogy, the artificial intelligence and uneasy humanity of Blade Runner, the time-loop perfection of Groundhog Day, the simulated reality of The Matrix, the collapsing world of Mad Max, and the haunted-house-in-space horror of Event Horizon.

Featuring discussions of:

• Star Wars Original Trilogy
• Blade Runner
• Metropolis
• Groundhog Day
• The Matrix Trilogy
• Mad Max
• Event Horizon

Whether you're a longtime listener revisiting old favourites or a new listener looking for the best place to begin, this episode is a guided tour through the many worlds, subgenres and strange obsessions of Journey Through Sci-Fi.

Our new series, We Come in Peace, exploring the history of friendly aliens on screen, begins soon. Follow Journey Through Sci-Fi now so you don't miss it.

A little bonus transmission from the JTSF Patreon feed.

We've been chatting about Spielberg's Disclosure Day, and because our next main-feed series is all about the history of friendly aliens in sci-fi cinema, this felt like the perfect thing to share.

In this spoiler-light extract, we talk Spielberg returning to alien territory, why big first-contact movies feel rarer now, and how Disclosure Day turns the friendly alien story into something closer to a conspiracy thriller for the misinformation age.

The full spoiler episode is available now on Patreon, where we get into the ending, the film's bigger ideas, and whether good old Stevie has still got it when it comes to visitors from the stars.

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We close out our Mad Science series the only way we know how: with a very serious, deeply prestigious and completely unofficial Mad Science Film Awards.

After 58 films and more than a century of sci-fi cinema, we look back at the scientists, monsters, labs, experiments and terrible decisions that defined the season.

From Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Invisible Man to The Fly, Re-Animator, Jurassic Park, Get Out and Poor Things, we trace how mad science evolved from gothic cautionary tales to atomic-age anxiety, body horror, corporate genetics, surveillance, consent and control.

Categories include Best Mad Scientist, Biggest Ego in a Lab Coat, Most Unethical Experiment, Best Creation, Best Lab, Hidden Gem and the big one: Best Mad Science Movie. Plus we unveil what we will be covering the next series of Jounrey Through Sci-fi!

🚀 Join The JTSF Logbook Recommendations, discoveries and updates from our journey through sci-fi cinema: journeythroughscifi.beehiiv.com

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This week on Journey Through Sci-Fi, we head into the Star Trek universe to explore one of its most enduring mad science taboos: genetic engineering. From Space Seed and the rise of Khan to Enterprise's Augments arc and Deep Space Nine's shocking Bashir reveal, we trace how Star Trek keeps returning to the dangers of trying to "improve" humanity.

Along the way, we get into the Eugenics Wars, creator-creation relationships, scientific hubris, and why a utopian future still casts a long shadow over forbidden science.

Plus: Brent Spiner being superbly awful, Bashir's identity crisis, and why this theme runs through Star Trek for more than 200 years of in-universe history.

Episodes discussed:Star Trek: The Original Series — "Space Seed" (S1E22)Star Trek: Enterprise — "Borderland" (S4E04), "Cold Station 12" (S4E05), "The Augments" (S4E06)Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" (S5E16)

Also referenced:Star Trek — "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"Star Trek: The Next Generation — "The Schizoid Man"Star Trek: Voyager — "Tuvix"

What happens when one of sci-fi's oldest stories is reimagined for a modern audience?

In this episode of Journey Through Sci-Fi, we return to the origin of mad science — Mary Shelley's Frankenstein — through two new adaptations: Frankenstein (2025), directed by Guillermo del Toro, and The Bride! (2026), directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal.

This isn't just another adaptation.

It's a full-circle moment for the genre.

From the obsessive creator who dares to make life… to the creation who refuses to belong to him, these films show how the Frankenstein myth has evolved over 200 years of science fiction.

In this episode we explore:

• Why Frankenstein is still the blueprint for every mad scientist story • How these new versions reinterpret the act of creating life • What they keep — and what they completely reinvent — from the original myth • Why The Bride! flips the perspective from creator to creation • What this tells us about where sci-fi — and mad science — is heading next

From gothic horror roots to modern sci-fi storytelling, this is the evolution of one of the genre's defining ideas.

And a fitting end point for our Mad Science series.

Because sometimes the most important sci-fi story isn't about the future…

…it's the one we've been retelling all along.

In this episode of Journey Through Sci-Fi, we dive into the terrifying idea of mad science controlling the human mind through two modern sci-fi horror films: Get Out (2017) and Possessor (2020).

Jordan Peele's Get Out hides a chilling science-fiction twist beneath its social horror story, revealing a sinister procedure designed to take over another person's body and consciousness. Meanwhile, Brandon Cronenberg's brutal cyberpunk thriller Possessor imagines a world where corporations use technology to possess people's minds and carry out assassinations.

We explore how both films tap into classic sci-fi ideas about identity, consciousness and control, while pushing the mad scientist trope into disturbing new territory.

Expect discussion on:

• The terrifying sci-fi twist behind Get Out

• The mind-transfer technology in Possessor

• How horror and science fiction overlap in the mad science genre

• Why stories about losing control of your own body remain so powerful in sci-fi

🎧 Listen now for our deep dive into mind control, body swapping and the dark side of scientific ambition.