The Magnetic Monster

As is often the case with 1950s American sci-fi, the film opens with the obligatory off-screen narrator warning us in alarming tones that unknown peril is on the horizon: “Today, new dangers face mankind… dangers which challenge life, threaten its very existence“.

At any rate, being a fine screenwriter and novelist known for his work in the horror and science fiction genres, Curt Siodmak doesn’t bother with the same old Cold War propaganda here, but rather opts to focus mainly on the potential side effects of scientific progress whose unbridled trajectory threatens to unleash events that could put the very future of our race in jeopardy. In that regard, the idea of a nemesis represented by a physical phenomenon taken to the extreme was certainly novel and ahead of its time – consider the “inorganic” menace a few years later in “The Monolith Monster” (1957).

With its semi-documentary narrative style and dialogue tending to the verbose side, “The Magnetic Monster” might be most appreciated by fans of “hard” science fiction, given its wealth of specialized terminology dealing with concepts near and dear to both relativistic and quantum physics. (Several scenes allude to the relationship between mass and energy, and the OSI scientists discuss “Newbold’s theory of unipole magnetism”. In particle physics, a magnetic monopole is a hypothetical elementary particle that is an isolated magnet with only one magnetic pole – something Nobel prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac spent a good deal of time contemplating, but to date, there is no direct evidence for its existence).

The final scenes featuring the fictional Deltatron generator “borrow” a good deal of footage from the 1934 German sci-fi film “Gold”, directed by Karl Hartl.