The Magnetic Monster is listed as sci-fi and horror on industry websites. It falls into that period when horror had shifted to Hammer Studios in the UK and the US had entered that white-shirt, button-down period known as the fifties. There were still monsters out there but they generally had to do with radiation. In this case, it’s magnetism and its relationship to electricity. The movie came out in 1953 and introduces what may have been the forerunner of the X-Files, namely the Office of Scientific Investigation, the OSI. This team of A-men (yes, this was the fifties) study anomalies in order to keep America safe. There were a total of three OSI films, of which this is the first. The eponymous magnetic monster is alive only in a philosophical sense—it’s actually an irradiated element gone wild.
An unrestrained scientist had subjected a radioactive isotope to alpha particles for several days and this started a chain reaction. He takes the substance onto a commercial airline—in his carry-on, no less (it was the fifties)—but the plane is diverted so the A-men can intercept it. Every eleven hours this isotope divides and doubles, eating all the energy around itself to do so. This creates an immense magnetic field. So immense, in fact, that in a mere matter of days it will throw off the earth’s core and our planet will spin helplessly off into space! Don’t panic, dear reader, the A-men are on the job. They find a scientific means of overfeeding this monster and destroying it, which is why we’re all still here.
Interestingly, this is one of the more highly rated movies of the era, perhaps because of its scientific optimism. Scientists can solve all our problems. And yet you’ll find them without fail in church on Sunday morning. The fifties were developing a kind of split personality for this country that was trying to hold two conflicting impulses together in an attempted fusion. The problem is, overthinking either (or both) of them would demonstrate that they really have separate paths to take. They may well be compatible, but in ways that relegating religion to Sunday morning simply doesn’t work. Even today many scientists—generally not the outspoken kind—still hold religion and science in tension. There is something to this impulse we call religion, but it always seems to have to wait while we use science to destroy the monsters we create ourselves.
