Ron Robin opens his study of how universities dealt with the Cold War by declaring: “throughout most of the Cold War rumors of an enemy plagued the United States […] The mutant enemy appeared everywhere – in foreign lands and at home. Exorcising his presence became a national obsession” (Robin 2001: 3). In a similar spirit, Peter Biskind has argued that in films of the 1950s “the idea of the alien was profoundly influenced by the Manichean Us/Them habit of thought that was an occupational hazard of the cold-war battle of ideas” (Biskind 2000: 111). But suppose that this polarity can exist within a single body? And suppose home became alien? Soon after the Korean War broke out in 1950, the term “brainwashing” entered the language and, in the same period, a series of films began to appear depicting the takeover of human subjects by alien forces. Though the nature of these forces was to vary, there was a broad congruence of subject in that, especially within the polarities of the Cold War, brainwashing was interpreted as a seizure of the mind by malign agencies. Whether these were identified as Communist or extraterrestrial, the outcome of the two processes was identical in that the subject to all outward appearances stayed the same and yet details of expression, posture and gait all suggested that an inner transformation had taken place. In short, the subject had become alien.

These films repeatedly focus on the brain as the center of vital selfhood and a number speculate on the possibility that the brain somehow survives beyond death. Thus, in Donovan's Brain (1953), the brain of a wealthy businessman is kept alive after a plane crash in the desert. This is narrated as a triumph of the will of the deceased who comes to possess the body of the scientist. The 1962 British film The Brain repeats the same subject, except that the scientist is now used as a medium for a dead person seeking his murderer. In cinematic terms, of course, the brain is not normally visible. Hence our attention in takeover films contrasts before and after, and induces what Vivian Sobchack has described as an “attentive paranoia,” because it is only through the small discrepancies and absences of behavior that the transformation can be perceived (Sobchack 2001: 124).