Science fiction had been a literary genre since the Nineteenth Century and the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and it was very popular in pulp fiction in the 1930s. There had been a few science fiction films dating back to the silent era (such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis from 1927), but it did not become a recurring genre across several studios until the 1950s. The starting point was in 1950, with a pair of competing films that dealt with manned rockets traveling through space, Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M. The following year two popular, big-budget science fiction films from major studios ensured that the genre would enjoy a long run at the box office. Those two films (Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still at Twentieth Century Fox and producer Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World at RKO Pictures) presented another theme that would become common in the 1950s: visitors from outer space.

By 1953 Universal Pictures was anxious to compete with a slate of science fiction movies, and they assigned one of their contract directors, Jack Arnold (1916 - 1992), to helm an elaborate film based on an original screen treatment by noted author Ray Bradbury. The resulting movie, It Came from Outer Space (1953), was also the first Universal Picture to be shot in the briefly-popular 3-D format. Arnold was next assigned Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), which remains probably his best-known movie. It was also a box office hit and resulted in another "classic monster" for Universal, the Gill-Man, who the studio exploits with toys and action figures to this day. Universal had Arnold direct the first of two follow-ups, Revenge of the Creature (1955) the following year. Jack Arnold took a bigger role in his next science fiction project, Tarantula (1955), for which he wrote the story. (This film ends with the destruction of the huge mutated tarantula by a bombing run from a plane piloted by young Universal contract player Clint Eastwood!) Following The Incredible Shrinking Man and a creature feature called Monster on the Campus (1958), Arnold moved to Paramount Pictures where he directed The Space Children (1959), a low-key and highly regarded film about a group of children who shield an alien intelligence from the adults of their community. Modern critics recognize that Jack Arnold was more a studio craftsman than a maverick director, but he nevertheless made striking and memorable films in the science fiction genre. A fan of science fiction writings himself, Arnold personally drew hundreds of storyboard panels prior to shooting to ensure that his storytelling was clear and concise. Arnold went on to direct in series television later in his career and helmed many episodes of such shows as Gilligan's Island, It Takes a Thief and The Brady Bunch.