ABSTRACT
In the 1950s film It, the Terror from Beyond Space, everything conspires to assert the Otherness of the monster — its complete and irrevocable difference from everything that the film upholds as the decent everyday world, the world of ostensibly average men and women. Sneaking aboard a spacecraft returning to Earth, the monster stands as a force of pure and complete menace, an irrationality that attacks without motivation and even without goal (other than simply to realize the sheer desire to attack). The film draws a moral bar between two ways oflife — its images of a normal way of life versus a destructive, malevolent one — and suggests that this bar is of necessity inevitable, eternal, and unbreakable.
