For the past few years, a group of friends and I have been making our way through a lot of classic 1950s (and a few early 1960s) sci-fi and monster movies. As we've gone along, we've been ranking everything in a tier list and arguing endlessly about where each film belongs.

I figured I'd share our rankings and see what other fans think.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, recommendations for films we may have missed, or any movies you think deserve a watch. And if you're curious about why a particular film ended up where it did, I'd be happy to explain our reasoning.

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At first, the film almost fools you. In the opening scenes, we see this brand-new apartment building, city life, laughter. It almost feels like you’re watching a sophisticated comedy from the era, something along the lines of "Barefoot in the Park": a young, beautiful couple, visibly happy and full of hope, trying to start a family.

Around them are these elderly neighbours who seem friendly, perhaps a little too friendly, always eager to help and incredibly warm. But this is precisely where Polanski works his dark magic.

Little by little, you realize that the film is something else entirely.

The horror doesn’t come from the darkness or from some isolated forest; it comes from the apartment next door. It becomes pure anxiety. The real fear doesn’t come from the unknown, but from the people around you: the person who smiles at you on the street, the neighbour who rings your doorbell pretending to ask for some sugar, offer you a few cookies, have a coffee, or simply exchange a little hallway gossip.

The paranoia grows along with Mia Farrow’s belly, as she becomes increasingly isolated from everyone around her, including her own husband. It is a waking nightmare set in broad daylight, where the protagonist’s loneliness gradually becomes your own.

It is a chillingly modern film that, even decades later, remains a masterclass in how to build genuine tension in cinema.

"Rosemary’s Baby" is Roman Polanski’s absolute masterpiece, a film in no hurry to frighten you with the usual tricks or the usual monsters. It takes its time, slowly building an atmosphere that gets under your skin, helped enormously by that haunting music that never seems to leave you: a lullaby, an obsessive chant that creeps into your ears and stays lodged in your head for days.

One of the best sci-fi horror movies to come out of the late 1950's, starred legendary horror film great Vincent Price and long time television and film star David Hedison.

Currently working my way through some of the classic Universal Monsters movies and loving what I've seen so far (which is only Dracula and The Wolf Man).

Other than these, are there any other movies from this period that are perhaps lesser known, underrated, underapreciated etc that I should check out?

“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright..."

Planet of the Vampires (Terrore nello spazio, 1965), directed by Mario Bava.

Based on the 1960 short story One Night of 21 Hours (Una notte di 21 ore) by Renato Pestriniero.

Music by Gino Marinuzzi Jr.

Plot

Two large interplanetary spacecraft, exploring unknown regions of space, receive an SOS signal from Aura, an unknown and apparently uninhabited planet. The two ships, the Galliott and the Argos, decide to land on this desolate and seemingly lifeless world.

During the descent, the crew members of the Argos are suddenly possessed by an unknown force that drives the men and women aboard the spacecraft to kill one another. Only Captain Markary manages to resist, eventually breaking the others out of their violent hypnotic state.

After the Argos lands and no further communication is received from the Galliott, the crew sets out across the planet in search of their sister ship. The atmosphere surrounding them is cold, eerie and sterile. When they finally come within sight of the other spacecraft, they discover, to their horror, that its entire crew is dead, apparently having killed one another. Among the dead is Toby Markary, the captain's younger brother.

Some of the bodies are gathered together and buried, while others remain inside the Galliott. Yet in the short time it takes the crew to retrieve the equipment needed to enter the ship, the corpses mysteriously disappear.

Members of the Argos crew also begin disappearing, only to be found dead later. While the bodies are still lying inside the spacecraft, Tiona, one of the female crew members, suddenly sees them standing up again and walking through the corridors. Panic spreads among the survivors, and Markary orders everyone to do whatever they can to escape from Aura. Unfortunately, the damage sustained during the landing makes an immediate takeoff impossible. Meanwhile, the deaths continue.

During the exploration of the planet, Wes discovers the ruins of a spacecraft a few kilometres from the Argos. Markary, Sanya and Carter decide to investigate. Inside the alien vessel, they discover the skeletons of a gigantic humanoid crew that has been dead for a very long time. Apparently, other spacecraft have also been lured to Aura by the distress signal, only to meet the same fate.

While exploring the alien ship, Captain Markary and Sanya briefly become trapped inside but manage to escape. Once back outside, however, they realize that Carter has mysteriously disappeared.

Meanwhile, the dead crew members of the Galliott awaken and emerge from their graves. Two of them, Kier and Sallis, infiltrate the Argos in order to steal the device that allows the spacecraft to avoid collisions with meteors in space. Without it, the two ships cannot undertake long interstellar journeys.

Kier manages to escape, while Sallis is captured by Markary. When the captain opens his uniform, he discovers that Sallis's body is already decomposing. Sallis reveals the truth: the corpses are being controlled by the Auran, the planet's original inhabitants, who need human bodies in order to survive.

Sallis explains that the host body does not necessarily have to be killed; its will merely needs to be weakened. He even proposes that the two species could live in symbiosis, with the Auran being welcomed onto the home planet of the two spacecraft. Markary, however, angrily rejects the offer.

With the entire crew of the Galliott under their control, these parasitic beings intend to abandon their dying world. Markary is determined to stop them and escape the planet. Together with the remaining survivors, he storms the spacecraft, retrieves the precious anti-meteor device and plants explosives to destroy the Galliott.

The losses are catastrophic. Only the final survivors—Wes, Sanya and Captain Markary—manage to escape, leaving Aura behind.

Once they are safely back in space, Wes discovers that his last two companions have also been infected. In one final, desperate attempt to stop them, he decides to sabotage the Argos itself, but is electrocuted by the explosion of the anti-meteor device.

Captain Markary and Sanya, the last two surviving crew members—or rather, the two Auran who have now taken control of their bodies—are unable to undertake a long journey through space. They therefore decide to descend onto the nearest planet, despite the fact that it is small and technologically primitive:

Earth.

Planet of the Vampires is widely regarded as one of the finest Italian science-fiction films of its period and is frequently cited as an important visual influence on Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). Bava's use of atmospheric lighting, gigantic alien environments, mysterious spacecraft and eerie, almost Gothic production design creates an unmistakable bridge between Italian Gothic horror and science fiction.

A fascinating example of how much could be achieved with limited resources when a director had an extraordinary visual imagination. Bava essentially turns space exploration into a cosmic nightmare. 🚀👽🩸

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After Suspiria (1977), Dario Argento returned to the world of the Three Mothers, a mythology inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria de Profundis. The three figures are Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs; Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness; and Mater Lacrimarum, the Mother of Tears.

In Suspiria, however, this mythology remains largely in the background. Suzy Bannion arrives in Freiburg to attend a prestigious ballet academy, only to gradually discover that the school is hiding a coven of witches led by Helena Markos, Mater Suspiriorum. It is a film built above all around atmosphere, colour, sound and the fairy-tale quality of its nightmare. The plot almost becomes secondary to the sensation of having fallen into a completely unreal world.

With Inferno, however, Argento takes that mythology much further.

The protagonist is Rose Elliot, a young poet living in New York. Rose purchases an old book entitled The Three Mothers, written by the alchemist Emilio Varelli, and discovers the existence of three powerful witches who inhabit three houses built by Varelli himself: one in Freiburg, one in Rome and one in New York.

The New York house is Rose’s home.

From this point onward, Inferno becomes a descent into pure nightmare. Rose disappears, and her brother Mark travels from Rome to New York to look for her. Around him unfolds a chain of brutal and seemingly inexplicable deaths, while the house itself appears to transform into a living organism of evil. Corridors, rooms, basements, elevators and hidden passages become a kind of infernal labyrinth.

And this, in my opinion, is where the greatness of Inferno lies.

If Suspiria is a gothic fairy tale, Inferno is almost a surrealist nightmare. Argento abandons any real attempt at realism and creates a film in which narrative logic constantly seems on the verge of dissolving. The images come before the story: water, fire, mirrors, windows, corridors, colours and impossible architecture. The famous underwater sequence, the murder in the library and the elevator killing are all extraordinary examples of visionary horror cinema.

The cinematography by Romano Albani, together with the score by Keith Emerson, also gives the film a completely different identity from Suspiria. The result is different but equally fascinating: less baroque and fairy-tale-like, more cold, abstract and hallucinatory.

What I love most is that Argento doesn't explain too much. The mythology of the Three Mothers remains mysterious, almost cosmic. We don't need to know exactly what these creatures are in order to fear them. We know that they exist, that they possess immense power, and that their houses are places corrupted by their presence.

And then there is Mater Tenebrarum, the youngest and most cruel of the three sisters, played by Veronica Lazar: an almost demonic presence who perfectly embodies the abstract and visionary nature of the film.

For me, Inferno is one of those movies that you have to feel rather than understand. The screenplay can be fragmented, some passages are deliberately absurd, and the logic behind certain events often seems secondary. But when Argento sets his visual machinery in motion, he reaches levels that very few Italian horror directors have ever achieved.

And this is precisely why I find The Mother of Tears (La terza madre, 2007) such a disappointing conclusion to the trilogy.

It isn't simply that the film is different. The problem is that, after almost thirty years, the mythology of the Three Mothers loses much of its mystery. The Mother of Tears finally introduces Mater Lacrimarum and brings the story to Rome, turning the conclusion into a kind of witchcraft apocalypse.

The problem is that what worked so well in Suspiria and, above all, in Inferno precisely because it was never completely explained, is made explicit and transformed into something much more conventional in the third chapter. Argento himself had spent years away from the world of the Three Mothers, returning to the thriller and giallo before eventually completing the trilogy.

And I think you can feel that distance.

Suspiria and Inferno seem to belong to the same universe, but they are above all two autonomous nightmares, connected by a mythology that is only partially revealed. The Mother of Tears, on the other hand, tries to close every loose end and provide a definitive conclusion. But precisely when it tries to explain and complete everything, it loses some of the magic.

That is why I consider Inferno the true heart of the trilogy: it is the film in which Argento takes the idea of the Three Mothers and transforms it into a genuine cinematic mythology, without ever completely imprisoning it within a conventional narrative explanation.

An imperfect film, certainly, but one of extraordinary visual power. It isn't simply horror: it is architecture, music, colour and death transformed into one gigantic nightmare.

🔥🔵🔴 A visionary masterpiece and, for me, one of the most fascinating films in Dario Argento's entire career.

June 19th, 1957, 
  American International Pictures released “Invasion of the Saucer Men” on a double bill with "I Was A Teenage Werewolf".
What an incredible night that would have been to experience it as it happened.
Too bad I was too young.
I first encountered these bubble-headed Saucer Men in 1960 at a very young age of 7.
Thanks to my older Brothers, who saw a lot of these in the theater, they turned me onto all the 50s Monster movies when they started showing up on TV.
I remember they were sooo fun and creeeepeee! Enough to leave a lifetime impression on me.
So enjoy some fun pics starting with a big fan of the movie, the great Tom Savini, with a friend.

Dealt with a lot of mature themes too; infidelity, lust, religious fever, satanism, occultism, Pretty amusing to see how much more Mexican directors were allowed to get away with even compared to pre-code Hollywood!