Visions of Apocalypse and Rebirth: ‘Things to Come’ (1936) and Its Shadow Over 1940s Science Fiction

In the gathering storm of the 1930s, a film peered into the abyss of tomorrow, prophesying war’s fury and humanity’s defiant climb from the ruins.

Released in 1936, ‘Things to Come’ stands as a monumental achievement in early science fiction cinema, adapting H.G. Wells’s ambitious speculative novel into a sweeping epic that spans decades of human strife and triumph. Directed by William Cameron Menzies and produced by Alexander Korda, this British production dared to envision global cataclysm followed by technological salvation, exerting a profound, pre-war influence on the science fiction genre that would explode in the 1940s amid real-world devastation.

• The film’s detailed chronicle of future war, plague, and reconstruction, blending horror with hope to critique humanity’s trajectory.
• Groundbreaking production design and special effects that set new standards for visualising the impossible, inspiring post-war filmmakers.
• Its prophetic themes of science versus superstition and authoritarian backlash, rippling through 1940s sci-fi narratives of atomic age anxieties.

The Gathering Storm: A Chronicle of Collapse and Renewal

In ‘Things to Come’, the narrative unfolds across forty years, beginning in a recognisably 1940s Everytown on Christmas Eve 1940, where air raid sirens wail amid poisoned gas attacks from an escalating global conflict. The film opens with domestic serenity shattered by the first bombs, families huddled in basements as the world descends into chaos. This sequence masterfully captures the terror of aerial bombardment, a prescient nightmare realised just three years later in the Blitz. John Cabal, portrayed by Raymond Massey, emerges as a pivotal figure, a pilot-turned-prophet who promises aerial dominance will end the war, only for the conflict to mutate into a protracted thirty-year stalemate.

By 1966, society has regressed to barbarism under the iron rule of The Boss, played with tyrannical gusto by Massey in a dual role. Everytown lies in tatters, its inhabitants clad in furs, scavenging amid ruins while bombs fashioned from winged aircraft rain down sporadically. The arrival of the Wings Over the World—a benevolent air force led by Cabal’s descendants—ushers in a turning point, distributing food and medicine but clashing with entrenched despotism. A brutal siege ensues, with catapults hurling explosives against sleek monoplanes, symbolising the clash between primitive regression and enlightened progressivism.

The plague known as the Wandering Sickness then sweeps through, decimating the population in hallucinatory fever dreams, its victims wandering aimlessly before collapse. This epidemic motif evokes the Spanish Flu’s lingering trauma, amplifying the film’s horror through montages of empty streets and mass graves. From these ashes rises a new order under the Freemen, technocrats who rebuild with streamlined architecture and vast foundries, forging a path to space. The climax centres on the moon rocket debate, pitting the rationalist Cabal lineage against reactionary artist Theotocopulos, whose fiery speech against progress rallies the fearful.

Raymond Massey’s commanding presence anchors these transformations, shifting from idealist aviator to dictatorial warlord and finally enlightened overseer. Supporting performances, such as Ralph Richardson’s bombastic Boss and Cedric Hardwicke’s conflicted doctor, add layers of human frailty. The screenplay, penned by Wells himself alongside Lancelot Pictures and Korda, meticulously charts this arc, drawing on Wells’s socialist utopianism while infusing dread at humanity’s self-inflicted wounds.

Prophetic Visions: Wells’s Blueprint for Modernity’s Perils

H.G. Wells, the father of modern science fiction, infused ‘Things to Come’ with his lifelong preoccupations: the inevitability of mechanised warfare, the perils of scientific hubris, and the redemptive power of rational governance. Filmed before the Second World War, its depiction of gas warfare and societal breakdown eerily mirrored events from 1939 onward, lending the picture an aura of foreboding prescience. Wells’s novel, serialised in 1933, extrapolated from the Great War’s lessons, warning of aerial annihilation that would render cities uninhabitable—a theme that resonated deeply in the pre-1940 imagination.

The film’s structure, episodic yet cohesive, reflects Wells’s narrative style, leaping forward in time to illustrate cycles of destruction and innovation. This temporal breadth influenced later anthology-style sci-fi, allowing exploration of philosophical quandaries like whether progress justifies sacrifice. The moon rocket launch, with its cradle-to-orbit mechanism, embodies Wells’s faith in engineering as salvation, a motif that would recur in 1940s visions of rocketry amid V-2 terrors.

Critics at the time praised the film’s intellectual ambition, though some decried its didacticism. Its release coincided with rising fascism, positioning science as a bulwark against demagoguery—a stance that prefigured 1940s films grappling with totalitarianism through speculative lenses.

Barbarism’s Grip: Horror in the Ruins

The heart of the film’s horror lies not in monsters but in humanity unmoored, regressing to tribal savagery amid post-apocalyptic desolation. The 1960s sequences, with their ragtag militias and mediaeval fortifications, conjure a visceral dread of civilisational backslide. The Boss’s regime, marked by bombastic rallies and ritualistic executions, evokes proto-fascist cults, their leather-clad enforcers patrolling rubble-strewn streets under perpetual twilight skies.

Menzies’s direction amplifies this through claustrophobic framing: narrow alleys choked with debris, flickering torchlight on scarred faces, and the thunderous roar of biplanes overhead. The siege of Everytown builds tension masterfully, intercutting ground-level desperation with aerial dogfights, where biplanes crumple under machine-gun fire. This blend of war horror and societal collapse prefigures 1940s serials like ‘Captain Marvel’ (1941), which pitted heroes against despotic overlords in ruined worlds.

The Wandering Sickness introduces body horror elements avant la lettre, victims convulsing in delirium, their eyes glassy with fever as they shuffle through fog-shrouded quarantines. Though practical effects were rudimentary, the psychological impact lingers, underscoring themes of contagion as metaphor for ideological rot.

Architects of Tomorrow: Design and Effects Mastery

William Cameron Menzies’s production design elevates ‘Things to Come’ to visual poetry, crafting a future both alien and aspirational. Early war scenes utilise matte paintings of flaming cities, seamlessly integrated with live-action miniatures. The 1970s utopia gleams with art deco spires and moving walkways, conveyor belts ferrying workers through cavernous halls—a vision of functionalist modernism that influenced 1940s streamline moderne aesthetics in films like ‘The Invisible Agent’ (1942).

Special effects pioneer Edward Cohen employed innovative miniatures for the air battles, scaling model aircraft to perfection and filming them against projected backdrops. The gas attack sequence, with swirling green clouds engulfing miniatures, achieves a nightmarish realism through forced perspective and wind machines. The moon rocket’s launch remains a highlight: a massive prop cradle hurls a silver projectile skyward, intercut with live actors in zero-gravity simulations via wires and cranes.

These techniques, blending practical models with optical printing, set benchmarks for the genre. Hollywood’s 1940s output, from ‘Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe’ (1940) serial chapters to ‘King of the Rockets’ (1943), borrowed heavily from such spectacle, adapting them to pulp adventures while echoing the film’s scale.

Menzies’s Oscar-winning work on ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939) stemmed from skills honed here, where he doubled as art director, ensuring every frame pulsed with futuristic verisimilitude.

Science Ascendant: Clashes of Faith and Reason

At its core, ‘Things to Come’ dramatises the eternal struggle between empirical progress and romantic reaction. Theotocopulos’s Luddite tirade—”Is it only beauty we make?”—crystallises this, his sabotage attempt on the rocket thwarted by collective will. This dialectic prefigures 1940s sci-fi’s atomic moralising, as in ‘The Beginning or the End’ (1947), which weighed technology’s dual edges post-Hiroshima.

Cabal’s lineage represents Wellsian Open Conspiracy: a meritocratic elite steering humanity upward. Their gleaming laboratories and vast space gantries contrast the Boss’s fetid bunker, symbolising enlightenment over entropy. Performances underscore this—Massey’s steely resolve evolves from warrior to visionary, mirroring real scientists like Robert Goddard, whose rocketry captivated pre-war imaginations.

The film’s score by Arthur Bliss, with its bombastic brass for battles and ethereal strings for utopia, reinforces thematic heft, influencing John Williams’s later leitmotifs.

Ripples Across the Atlantic: Pre-War Seeds in 1940s Sci-Fi

Though British, ‘Things to Come’ permeated American cinema via Korda’s transatlantic ties, its prints circulating in Hollywood during the late 1930s. The 1940s sci-fi surge—sparked by war’s end and space race dawns—drew directly from its template. Republic Pictures’ serials like ‘Radar Men from the Moon’ (1945) echoed winged fleets and moon ambitions, while ‘Captain Video and His Video Rangers’ (1949 TV) serialised utopian rebuilds post-invasion.

More substantively, its war-to-utopia arc informed ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ (1951), with its peace-enforcing alien paralleling Wings Over the World. Even horror-inflected entries like ‘The Thing from Another World’ (1951) nod to isolated scientific outposts amid regression fears. Pre-1940, the film’s roadshow engagements impressed directors like Fritz Lang, whose ‘Woman in the Moon’ (1929) it reciprocated, fostering a trans-decade dialogue.

British cinema absorbed it too: ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ (1979) remade elements, but 1940s Ealing Studios ventures like ‘Dead of Night’ (1945) twisted its anthology dread. Its influence extended to pulp magazines, Astounding Science Fiction citing Wellsian sweeps in 1940s issues, bridging film to literary sci-fi booms.

Critic Peter Lev notes in his analysis how ‘Things to Come’ primed audiences for Buck Rogers reboots, its spectacle legitimising genre ambitions amid wartime escapism.

Enduring Echoes: A Legacy in Cosmic Dread

Beyond the 1940s, ‘Things to Come’ seeded broader sci-fi horror traditions. Its mechanised apocalypse anticipates ‘The War of the Worlds’ (1953) invasions, while utopian authoritarianism haunts ‘1984’ adaptations. In body horror veins, the plague’s corporeal decay prefigures ‘The Andromeda Strain’ (1971), and rocket-launch hubris informs ‘Event Horizon’ (1997) portal terrors.

Restorations in the 1980s revived its lustre, affirming Menzies’s visionary craft. Today, amid climate apocalypses, its warnings resonate anew, a testament to Wells’s foresight.

Ultimately, ‘Things to Come’ transcends its era, a clarion call blending horror’s abyss with science’s ladder, profoundly shaping the genre’s trajectory.

Director in the Spotlight

William Cameron Menzies was born on 29 July 1896 in New Haven, Connecticut, into a family of Scottish descent, displaying early artistic talent that led him to study at the University of Edinburgh before returning to America for architectural training. Entering Hollywood in the 1910s as a sketch artist for Triangle Pictures, he swiftly rose through art direction, crafting sets for D.W. Griffith’s epics like ‘Intolerance’ (1916), where his miniature cities and crowd scenes showcased meticulous detail.

By the 1920s, Menzies directed shorts and features, helming ‘The Spider and the Fly’ (1922) and ‘The Valley of the Giants’ (1927), blending visual flair with taut narratives. His production design peaked with ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939), earning a special Academy Award for colour art direction, his Atlanta fire sequence a logistical triumph using 20 blocks of sets incinerated under controlled conditions.

Menzies’s influences spanned German Expressionism—evident in angular shadows—and architectural modernism, informing ‘Things to Come”s streamlined utopias. He directed ‘Invaders from Mars’ (1953), a Cold War paranoia classic with iconic saucer landings, and contributed uncredited to ‘Arch of Triumph’ (1948). Health issues curtailed his later career, but his legacy endures in production design standards.

Comprehensive filmography highlights: ‘The Garden of Weeds’ (1924, dir., silent drama); ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ (1925, art dir.); ‘The Bat’ (1926, dir.); ‘The Iron Mask’ (1928, art dir.); ‘Alibi’ (1929, dir.); ‘Journey’s End’ (1930, dir.); ‘Chandu the Magician’ (1932, dir.); ‘Things to Come’ (1936, dir./prod. des.); ‘The Green Cockatoo’ (1937, dir.); ‘Knight Without Armour’ (1937, art dir.); ‘Pygmalion’ (1938, art dir.); ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939, prod. des.); ‘Address Unknown’ (1944, dir.); ‘Cabin in the Sky’ (1943, art dir.); ‘Command Decision’ (1948, art dir.); ‘Invaders from Mars’ (1953, dir.). Menzies died on 5 March 1957 in Los Angeles, leaving an indelible mark on cinema’s visual language.

Actor in the Spotlight

Raymond Massey, born Raymond Hart Massey on 30 August 1896 in Toronto, Canada, to a wealthy steel family, initially pursued law at the University of Toronto and Oxford before war service in the Canadian Corps during World War I, where shrapnel wounds ended his frontline duties. Theatrical ambitions beckoned post-armistice; he debuted on Broadway in 1922 with ‘The Sword of the Wicked’, honing a commanding stage presence in Shaw plays like ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’ (1927).

Massey’s film breakthrough came with ‘The Speckled Band’ (1931), segueing to Hollywood via ‘I Stole a Million’ (1939). Versatile in heroes and heavies, he excelled as Abraham Lincoln in ‘Abe Lincoln in Illinois’ (1940), earning an Oscar nod, and John Brown in ‘Santa Fe Trail’ (1940). His baritone voice and imposing 6’3″ frame suited authority figures, from ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ (1944) Jonathan Brewster to ‘East of Eden’ (1955) Reza Behroozi.

In ‘Things to Come’, Massey’s triple role showcased range: idealistic Cabal, brutish Boss, serene elder. Later, he voiced the Invisible Man in serials and starred in ‘1984’ (1956), embodying dystopian oppressors. Television cemented his later career, narrating ‘The Winds of War’ (1983). Awards included a Tony for ‘The Prescott Proposals’ (1953). Massey died on 29 July 1983 in Los Angeles.

Key filmography: ‘The Speckled Band’ (1931); ‘The Old Dark House’ (1932); ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ (1934); ‘Things to Come’ (1936); ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’ (1937); ‘The Drum’ (1938); ‘Abe Lincoln in Illinois’ (1940); ‘Santa Fe Trail’ (1940); ’49th Parallel’ (1941); ‘Reap the Wild Wind’ (1942); ‘Action in the North Atlantic’ (1943); ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ (1944); ‘Hotel Berlin’ (1945); ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ (1946); ‘Possessed’ (1947); ‘Chain Lightning’ (1950); ‘David and Bathsheba’ (1951); ‘Carnegie Hall’ (1947); ‘East of Bathsheba’ (1955); ‘1984’ (1956); ‘Omar Khayyam’ (1957); ‘The Naked and the Dead’ (1958); ‘A Man Alone’ (1985 doc.).

Bibliography

Huntington, J. (1982) The Logic of Fantasy: H.G. Wells and Science Fiction. Columbia University Press.

Lev, P. (2013) The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959. University of California Press. Available at: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520278581/the-fifties (Accessed: 15 October 2023).

Maddox, B. (1977) George’s Island: The Life of H.G. Wells. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Skal, D.J. (1993) The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. W.W. Norton & Company.

Taves, B. (1978) Hollywood Presents English Literature, 1930-1960: The Filmography. Scarecrow Press.

West, G. (2017) H.G. Wells and the World State. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://link.springer.com/book/9781137521534 (Accessed: 15 October 2023).

Williams, A.L. (2003) British Science Fiction Cinema. Routledge.