5 War of the Worlds Movies Ranked

5 War of the Worlds Movies Ranked

(Photo by Amazon/Courtesy Everett Collection. WAR OF THE WORLDS.)

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds has been a steady source of inspiration and adaptation, a novel published in 1898 that we’ve carried through the centuries on the treads of its wide-scale alien terror, grueling counterattack chase against the skyscraper-tall invaders, and, bubbling just beneath its words, allegory for the destructive clawing shadow of colonial empires.

The book being public domain also helps.

Though written by the British Wells during the Victorian era, War of the Worlds has burrowed deeply into American culture, now a piece of the paranoid fabric. It all began on 1939, when Orson Welles became a broadcast legend with a realistic radio dramatization that genuinely