Menzies was the first person to ever receive the title of production designer on a film (the position was previously known as art director) and he got it on no less than Gone with the Wind (1939), one of many movies for which he served in that capacity. Invaders from Mars originated with a script by a writer named John Tucker Battle (who ended up taking his name off the film), but it’s really the vision of one man: director and production designer William Cameron Menzies, who worked in Hollywood and is credited as both on this film. So what exactly is this movie, and how and why did it have such an impact on some of the most important motion picture pioneers of their generation? More importantly, two of his most iconic movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, dealt with alien contact and featured little boys as major characters-perhaps a direct nod to the narrative of Invaders from Mars.

Spielberg saw Invaders from Mars five times in the theater, and it definitely seemed to have a profound effect on him: one of his early attempts at a full-length feature film, Firelight (made on 8mm when he was just 17), was all about an alien invasion. “It certainly touched a nerve in all the kids like myself who saw the film at a very young age.” “It really turned my world around,” says Steven Spielberg in the booklet accompanying the new 4K Blu-ray release of the movie from Ignite Films. But thanks to a dedicated cult following and some dogged technical detective work, a brand new 4K Ultra HD restoration of 1953’s Invaders from Mars has finally surfaced to re-introduce us to a surreal classic that had a profound effect on a generation of filmmakers who later gave us little films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Gremlins, and Star Wars, among many others.

It was, after all, a time when the genre was booming and both major studios and independent film producers started churning out shockers about alien invasions and giant insects at an alarming rate. Invaders from Mars may have appeared at first glance to be just another cheesy, cheap sci-fi B-movie made during the 1950s.

Invaders from mars slot machine