Given the association of misfortune with this day, Friday the 13th, I guess you could attribute it to the (bad) luck of the draw that, for the second month in a row, it’s my day up. And this time I don’t have he mitigating influence of Valentine’s Day to soften the blow.

When I was growing up in Columbus, Ohio, there was a Friday night TV show called Chiller Theater that featured horror and sci-fi flicks from just before midnight on. Friday the 13th was usually an occasion for especially spooky fare, and yet some of the scariest movies we watched in those years were the science fiction offerings from the 1950s, when both the threat of nuclear annihilation and the Red Menace were at their peak.

But the subtext to a lot of the better films at that time had little to do with monsters, even those conjured by nuclear disaster, such as Godzilla or Gorgo. Instead, the underlying dread emerged from the dual threats of coercion and conformity.

Given the era, with the international war against fascism a mere decade or so in the past, and the emergence of a totalitarian Soviet Union as an existential threat, the prospect of being forced to give up our freedom, our way of life, was palpable, if sometimes overblown.

Meanwhile, a stifling conformity was settling in domestically, epitomized by TV shows like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver.

Obviously, coercion and conformity share no small amount of common ground. Coercion, if only in the form of shaming and ostracization, provides the enforcement mechanism for conformity.

One of the best movies to capture that was Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The plot involved an alien invasion that took the form of seed pods which, when placed near a sleeping human, gradually assumed all the physical properties of the individual, replacing the human with an emotionless duplicate. The term ‘pod person” became shorthand for those who renounced their individuality to be one of the gang.

To give you a flavor of the movie:

Becky Driscoll: I don’t want to live in a world without love or grief or beauty, I’d rather die.

Dr. Dan ‘Danny’ Kauffman: You say it as if it were terrible. Believe me, it isn’t. You’ve been in love before. It didn’t last. It never does. Love, desire, ambition, faith… Without them, life is so simple. Believe me.

Charlie: Give up! You can’t get away from us!

Dr. Miles J. Bennell: We’re not the last human beings left. They’ll find out about you. They’ll destroy you, somehow.

Dr. Dan ‘Danny’ Kauffman: [smirks] By tomorrow you won’t want them to. By tomorrow you’ll be one of us.

Twenty years later a remake appeared, and where the ending of the original was hauntingly ambiguous, the second time around things got significantly darker. Blame Nixon.

Around the same time, a character named The Master, a renegade alien Time Lord in the Doctor Who series, created a line that echoed, “You can’t get away from us,” with the much simpler, pithier, and far more menacing, “Resistance is futile.”

The TV series Star Trek: […]