Look out! Here they come!

Orson Welles’s radio version of the Martian-attack classic, The War of the Worlds (based on HG Wells’ book), which terrified listeners when it was broadcast in America in 1938, is now the stuff of legend. It was also turned into a film, in 1953.

But Mars stories were playing out long before that. Thomas Edison’s silent film A Trip to Mars (1910) features a scientist who uses anti-gravity dust to fly up to the red planet. It is widely considered the first American sci-fi film.

In Russia, Alexei Tolstoy’s 1923 novel Aelita was made into a film the following year. It’s a fitting script for its time: the hero, an engineer, lands on Mars to help the inhabitants overthrow the ruling elders, aided by a Martian aristocrat, Aelita, who has also fallen in love with the hero.

By the ’50s, Martians were in children’s movies too. Invaders from Mars (1953) has it all: flying saucers, grownups who act strangely, an astronomer sidekick and an all-american boy hero. It was the first film to show aliens in colour. Mars was such a popular location in the 1950s, it featured in the title of Abbot and Costello Go to Mars, without ever showing up in the movie. The comic heroes end up on Venus instead. America’s fear of communism spread to its Mars stories too. Who better to embody the violent and ugly than a green, gory oversized intruder? Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s stranded hero, got the Mars treatment. In Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) he ends up rescuing a slave (yes, Friday) from alien overlords. There’s also the 1964 comedy Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, in which Santa is kidnapped so he can give baby Martians some presents. It shows up often in worst-movies lists.