We present a late night double bill of cult 1950’s science fiction cinema exploring the era’s paranoid obsession with invasion as part of this year’s Barbican SPILL Festival, an international programme of experimental theatre, live art and performance spreading throughout the whole of the Barbican Centre and beyond… maybe even to outer space!
The Plan
Meet for a drink in the Barbican at around 8:00pm
Watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Watch The Blob
Go home
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Saturday 23rd April 9:00pm
Barbican Booking Link (https://www.barbican.org.uk/eticketing/performancelist.asp?shoid=33333)
https://www.barbican.org.uk/images/events/medium/11980incasionofthebodysnatchers-event.jpgA small town Doctor returns to find a rash of patients suffering the paranoid delusion that some of the townsfolk have been replaced by imposters. Initially diagnosing “epidemic mass hysteria” he soon begins to think that they might be right.
A classic in the genre of films that play out cultural anxieties around the idea of becoming first tainted and then subsumed by an unseen force, in this case communism.
US 1956 Dir. Don Siegel 80 min.
The Blob
Saturday 23rd April 11:00pm
Barbican Booking Link (https://www.barbican.org.uk/eticketing/performancelist.asp?shoid=33334)
https://www.barbican.org.uk/images/events/medium/11979thebloblead-event.jpgAnother manifestation of cultural anxiety played out as body panic, with that body being both individual and collective here. In this film the threat is an external amorphous mass, a giant amoeba-like alien that terrorizes the small community of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.
Made outside the Hollywood system, The Blob launched the careers of superstud Steve McQueen and composer Burt Bacharach with the tongue-in-cheek theme song “Beware the Blob”.
US 1958 Dir. Irvin Yeaworth 86 min.