Personal Project

Godzilla

Dracula

Them! 1954

Personal Project

In my personal project I became interested in the reflection of social fears and phobias and how they were translated into abstracted forms within various narratives. This emerged from observing the 1954 film ‘Them!’, ostensibly concerning the threat of gigantic killer ants, yet rumoured to reflect the mounting fear of communism within the political climate it was made.

That the red scare contained such potent paranoia as to transform a real world political movement into an absurd, genre fiction tale was fascinating to me and I began to identify other examples of this bizarre transformation. Dracula embodied the xenophobia of Victorian society, a strange, foreign interloper seductively influencing its genteel upper-class, specifically threatening their women. Perhaps most famously, Godzilla menaced Japan as the embodiment of the more reasonable fear of nuclear weapons.

Initially focussing purely on fictional narratives, largely sci-fi and horror b movies and pulp fiction, I quickly found that political propaganda quite often demonstrated a similar tendency to exaggerate and demonise elements present in the social consciousness, whilst purporting to contain metaphorical truths.

After exploring these examples I attempted to identify fears of the modern age; identity theft, viruses, overpopulation, and then interpret them through the filter of 1950s weird fiction and forming new, bizarre allegories far removed from their actualities. To this effect, I began creating images that mimicked the film and political posters of the 1950s, before attempting to create extended narratives that explored sensationalistic and fanciful interpretations of some of these modern fears.