The flight didn't last for long. As the 1950s came to an end, saucer-mania waned, both in terms of reported sightings, and silver-screen appearances. "When it came to flying saucer movies, the horror ones did better than the serious ones," says Mark Jancovich, the author of Rational Fears: American Horror Genre in the 1950s. "And you could make the horror ones quite cheaply. What happened was that science-fiction horror moved into the cheap, low-budget end of the market. Studios also recognised that the really big sci-fi hit of the 1950s was not an alien invasion movie, it was Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. You then got this wave of period sci-fi films like The Time Machine, The Curse of Frankenstein and The Lost World [starring Klaatu himself, Michael Rennie]. The Victorian settings of gothic horror films made them seem respectable, whereas flying saucers moved downmarket as the 1950s went on."
