A dark side of the moon
MARION McMULLEN recalls lunar monsters, aliens and feline invaders as Halloween looms
GET ready to howl at the Moon for Halloween.
People used to believe the satellite was responsible for strange behaviour and madness and in the Middle Ages it was even said a full Moon could trigger a werewolf or vampire transformation.
Speculation about possible monsters lurking on the lunar surface has fascinated film makers for decades
Early silent film A Voyage To The Moon has been described as the screen’s first sci-fi offering.
The French film was made by illusionist and director Georges Méliès in 1902. He used acrobats from the Folies Bergère to play the Moon’s inhabitants known as the Selenites. The 14-minute movie short also drafted in members of the Théâtre Châtelet ballet and ended with the iconic image of a rocket landing in the eye of the Man In The Moon.
Méliès, who makes an appearance in the film, made 520 movies during his career. His lunar adventure was inspired by the stories of Jules Verne and HG Wells. He later said: “The greatest difficulty in realising my own ideas forced me to sometimes play the leading role in my films. I was a star without knowing I was one, since the term did not yet exist.”
In 1953, black and white sci-fi movie Cat-Women Of The Moon did not let science get in the way of good fiction.
It saw astronauts discovering a city beneath the lunar surface inhabited by the last female survivors of a lost civilisation. Unfortunately the situation was far from purr-fect and the women plotted to steal the crew’s spaceship and head to Earth.
The movie’s publicity promised a “blood-thirsty battle of Moon monsters!”, and included an attack by a giant spider. It was originally released in cinemas in 3D.
Carol Brewster, who played the leotard-wearing leader Alpha, made clear the intentions of her fellow Moon dwellers saying “We will get their women under our power and soon we will rule the whole world.”
Bee-like insects were causing problems for British actor Lionel Jeffries, Edward Judd and Martha Hyer in 1963 movie The First Men In The Moon. The film was based on the HG Wells novel of the same name and Cockney youngsters played the Moon’s Selenite population. Future Oscar-winner Peter Finch appeared in the uncredited role of a bailiff.
The Cybermen have stalked Doctor Who through several of his incarnations, but back in 1967 they were being particularly fiendish with a plot to build a weapon on the Moon’s surface to launch an attack on Earth by altering its weather.
The BBC four-parter entitled
The Moonbase was broadcast in 1967 – two years before the real Moon landing – and saw Partick Troughton as the Doctor landing on the lunar surface in his Tardis in the year 2070.
Sinister aliens were hiding on the dark side of the Moon and popping down to Earth to pick up humans for body parts in ITV’s 1970 series UFO.
The sci-fi adventure was created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, of Thunderbirds fame, and saw a secret group called SHADO (Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organisation) tasked with keeping Earth and its inhabitants safe. Gerry and Sylvia returned to the Moon in 1975 for the ITV sci-fi series Space: 1999. It saw the Moon flung out of Earth’s orbit into deep space following an explosion. The staff and crew of research centre Moonbase Alpha had to deal with all manner of alien menaces during their travels – although one of the E.Ts joined the crew in the form of Catherine Schell as shapechanging science officer Maya. Guest stars who appeared on the show included Brian Blessed, Joan Collins, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Ian McShane.
Meanwhile, Bernard Cribbins was a reluctant astronaut in The Mouse On The Moon in 1963. The movie comedy was a follow-up to the Peter Sellers film
The Mouse That Roared and saw a fictional country called the Duchy Of Grand Fenwick inadvertently joining the space race.
Cribbins remembered in his memoir Bernard Who? how he played the son of Grand Fenwick’s Prime Minister and headed to the Moon in a second-hand Russian rocket.
“It’s not a bad little film,” he said, “and because of the space connection the American premiere was held at Cape Canaveral with lots of astronauts in the audience.”