After moving from radio to the movies, he was one of the first out of the blocks with 1951’s Five, about a group of unlikely survivors of an atomic war-presumably the last people on earth-who straggle their way to a coastal house in California, where they ponder the past, present and future. But as early as 1951, filmmakers were already pondering the very real possible effects of a nuclear exchange triggered by someone, somewhere, who had a hissy fit and pushed the button.Īrch Oboler was a writer, producer, and radio pioneer whose work on Lights Out in the 1940s showed he had a knack for taking on some dark material, especially when it concerned global threats. Giant monsters were easy, though, and by film’s end could always be contained and destroyed, leaving us all safe again to go about our daily business. In cinematic terms anyway, the unthinking dispersal of radiation and willy-nilly nuclear testing resulted in giant ants, giant spiders, giant grasshoppers and gila monsters, reanimated dinosaurs, and in at least one instance a massive and sentient deadly mud puddle. The threat of nuclear war and the dangers of radiation exposure took on assorted metaphorical forms throughout the 1950s (most of them very large), from Godzilla to The Amazing Colossal Man.

Movie about the world after nuke