Bow down to It Came from Outer Space, the OG mother of all alien blockbusters. Since invading movie theaters nearly 70 years ago, the film (based on an original story by Ray Bradbury) has helped cement the genre’s place in the zeitgeist. It has left its influence on everything from Alien to Star Wars to Star Trek to your Uncle Bob’s conspiracy theories about the Bermuda Triangle and Area 51.
Streaming through June 20, We Are Out There features some of Chicago’s finest—Alex Goodrich, E. Faye Butler, and (the now LA-based) Cher Álvarez among them. There is also one brand-new song written just for the movie prologue and there are puppets, the latter a lifelong source of inspiration for Kinosian.
“The whole story is about these people trying to figure out ‘how do we get these creatures, these aliens out of our town?’ They’re all terrified, even though nobody even sees these aliens at first,” Blair says. “There’s just all this fear and hostility even though, as it turns out, the aliens aren’t that interested in killing anybody, they only want to get home themselves. So, summer, 2016, we’re hearing all this stuff—’Build a wall,’ ‘America First’—it made me think this movie was ahead of its time, so progressive for its era.”
“Technologically, it was a very ambitious project, especially with people in different time zones. I was skeptical going in. But I was pleasantly surprised about how effective it was,” Schloss says.
Through 6/20: available streaming on demand with purchase anytime, chicagoshakes.com, $25. Free through 5/31 with promo code ALIEN
