On October 30th, 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater On The Air broadcast an adaptation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and, legend has it, they scared the ever-loving heck out of America.

Actually, there’s some debate as to just how panicked America got when they heard the Mercury Theater On The Air’s adaptation of War of the Worlds.  There was definitely some panic but there are differing reports on just how wide spread it was.  For our purposes, let’s assume that the entire country was terrified at the same time and that everyone was loading up a shotgun and planning to go out and look for aliens.  One thing is for sure.  With his adaptation of War of the Worlds, Orson Welles managed to invent the whole found footage genre that would later come to dominate horror cinema in the late 90s and the aughts.  Every found footage horror film owes a debt to what Orson Welles accomplished with War of the Worlds.  We won’t hold that against Orson.  Instead, it’s just another example of how far ahead of his time Orson Welles was.

H.G. Wells, the original author of War of the Worlds, and Orson Welles only met once, while they were both in San Antonio, Texas in 1940.  (Orson Welles and H.G. Wells hanging out in San Antonio?  To be honest, that sounds like it would make a good movie.)  They were interviewed for a local radio station.  H.G. Wells expressed some skepticism about the reports of Americans panicking while Welles compared the radio broadcast to someone dressing up like a ghost and shouting “Boo!” during Halloween.  Both Wells and Welles then encouraged Americans to worry less about Martians and more about the growing threat of Hitler and the war in Europe.

I’ve shared this before but this just seems like the time to share it again.  Here, for Halloween, is the 1938 Mercury Theater On The Air production of The War of the Worlds!