Well, not everyone in the 1950’s was paranoid, but the media and some events did have people on edge. I think that movie companies took advantage of that paranoia by making movies about invaders from other planets as well as nature and science experiments going wild while creating giant and/or radioactive beasts to terrorize Washington DC, London, Tokyo or wherever. The 50’s saw an explosion of sci-fi films varying from space exploration to giant monsters and everything in between. Like with anything once filmmakers and anyone with a few bucks and a camera thought they should get their piece of the pie so you get a huge variation in quality of films when you look at the product of the decade as a whole. The far out and negative type films far outweighed the thoughtful ones. There were plenty of thrills in sci-fi of this decade, but for real sci-fi concepts in the 50’s there was much more of that going in books than there was at your local drive-in. However that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great decade for the movie genre. Just the opposite, it was very good. It also showed that there was interest in space and monsters created by science which was promising in the long run. Even though you may think of the 50’s when you hear “B movie” there was still plenty of creativity going into a number of these films. Quantity didn’t always mean quality, but there sure were a ton of sci-fi flicks. So many that I am still trying to see them all.
*What do you think of 50’s sci-fi films?
**What are some of your favorite sci-fi films of that decade?
Lasers, monsters and barbarians oh, my! 
I haven’t watched to many films from that era, but I watched documentaries about them. When you take a better look they were at the same time exploitation films. The studios were making money on peoples biggest fears. I mean you were bombarded with “Duck and cover” films in schools, the Cuban missile crisis, cold war, Sputnik was flying around the globe. If you were a kid back then and watched these movies it was all really scary i suppose. I hope you have another post with list of movies to watch from that era in preparation 😉