To coincide with the BFI’s sci-fi season and its digital re-release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, we thought this would be a good time to look at some of the British greats of the genre. Since the 1970s co-productions and foreign investment mean it’s hard to say exactly what a British film is, so for this gallery we have decided to look at films set in Britain
Sat 22 Nov 2014 19.05 EST Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 15.48 EST
1936’s ambitious Things to Come was Britain’s first great sci-fi film. Based on HG Wells’s novel The Shape of Things to Come, it covers the next century of mankind’s future, set in the fictional British city of Everytown.
Following America’s lead, British sci-fi took off in the 1950s. Ealing Studios’ 1951 film The Man in the White Suit was an anti-establishment satire about a scientist who invents an everlasting fabric, with disastrous results.
1954’s Devil Girl from Mars found a sexily dressed Martian looking for men to take home after crash-landing in Scotland and badgering the locals in the bar of the Bonnie Charlie pub.
Otherworldly children quietly terrorise the inhabitants of Midwich in 1960’s Village of the Damned, an adaptation of John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos. Letchmore Heath, north of London, provided the location.
The 1960s saw the rise of atomic-age paranoia. In 1961’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire, H-bomb testing throws the Earth out of orbit and as the planet heads closer to the sun, temperatures in London (here, Fleet Street) rocket.
Based on another Wyndham novel, 1962’s The Day of the Triffids finds most of population blinded and London, Sussex and the Isle of Wight menaced by walking plants.
Weymouth is the setting for Hammer Films’ 1963 radioactive shocker, The Damned. Children resistant to fallout are held in a secret facility, to be released after nuclear war breaks out, to ensure the survival of the race.
One of the last films made by Merton Park Studios, based near Wimbledon, 1966’s Invasion featured more crash-landed aliens in the home counties. Some say the casting of female Asian actors as the aliens was a way to explore British social attitudes. It turns out they are the good guys.
The second big screen Doctor Who spinoff, 1966’s Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD saw the malign metal children of Skaro trundle around Bedford, Watford and London, leaving death and destruction in their wake.
The third in Hammer’s Quatermass series, 1967’s Quatermass and the Pit has a buried Martian spacecraft discovered during works at a fictitious London underground station, Hobbs End – in reality Elstree Studios.
In a dystopian future London (what other sort is there?) juvenile delinquents run wild in Stanley Kubrick’s masterful 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange. The adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel was filmed mostly around south London and this particular location, Southmere lake in Thamesmead, was used for Channel 4’s hit sci-fi series Misfits.
The mother of all dystopian novels, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has been adapted for film and TV several times. This film version, released in 1984, was shot in Wiltshire, Kent and London and starred John Hurt as Winston Smith.
Threads was a powerful and harrowing 1984 TV movie, written by Barry Hines, that depicted the after-effects of nuclear war in Sheffield. Curbar Edge in the Peak District was used as the location for the nuclear winter.
Director Danny Boyle’s 2002 post-apocalyptic zombie holocaust movie 28 Days Later saw Cillian Murphy’s character chased around the UK by rage-filled virus victims.
In 2027 the only refuge from the chaos and war caused by worldwide human sterility is the UK. 2006’s Children of Men features a large refugee camp in Bexhill-on-Sea.
The film that spawned a trillion Guy Fawkes masks. 2006’s film adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel, V for Vendetta, portrayed the popular uprising in London against a fascistic Britain.
Alien invaders bite off more than they can chew when they invade the fictional Wyndham House in south London in 2011’s Attack the Block. The movie was shot at a number of London locations, including the Bemerton estate in Islington and Heygate in Elephant and Castle.
The last of Edgar Wright’s magnificent Cornetto trilogy, 2013’s The World’s End follows a group of middle-aged men who, while trying to recapture their youth via an epic pub crawl, chance upon an alien invasion. Letchworth in Hertfordshire was used for the fictional town of Newton Haven.
